Colombian Cartels 101

By Lisa Riordan Seville

What did the DEA learn from its battle with the Medellin and Cali cartels?

The Rise of Femicide and Women in Drug Trafficking

Women's involvement in drug trafficking has deepened through active participation as drug runners and mules, found a new study, leading to a rise in femicide.

Part 2: The Crown Topples: The Swift Rise and Brutal Fall of Maryland's Latin Kings

By Andy Marso

This is the last of a two-part series about what happened when a national gang infiltrated several suburban counties.

Can DNA Tests Stop Child Trafficking?

UNICEF estimates that 1.2 million children a year are trafficked worldwide.  Until recently, international investigators had few useful tools to address the theft of children, but a new science-based initiative could help put some of the worst child traffickers out of business.

In May 2010, Bolivian authorities detained a group of 25 Haitian children accompanied by several adults who were trying to enter on suspicious visas.  The adults claimed they were taking the kids on a “South American vacation” that included visits to Argentina and Brazil.  Instead, the authorities discovered, the children, were being smuggled by human traffickers.

But how to get them back to their families? The Bolivia Forensic Research Institute, alerted by the Bolivian Attorney General’s office, called in DNA-Prokids, an international nonprofit that uses DNA sampling to reunite child victims of human trafficking with their families.

DNA-Prokids tested the children in the Haitian group, and to date 13 of them have been reunited with their families. (Information on what happened to the adults is unavailable.)

The nonprofit was not as successful in its efforts to help at-risk children living in Haiti. When last year’s earthquake crumpled buildings and tore apart thousands of Haitian families, DNA-Prokids  prepared and shipped several thousand DNA sample-collection kits, along with computers and other technical equipment, to the Spanish embassy in the Dominican Republic.

In an effort coordinated through the American Red Cross and other relief organizations, the kits were intended for taking DNA samples from unclaimed children. Those samples would help reunite the kids with their biological relatives—or at the very least forestall the traffickers who prey on the impoverished island’s youngest victims,

But Haitian officials stonewalled. Although the DNA kits relied on minimally invasive buccal samples, obtained by taking swabs of the inside of the cheek, the authorities claimed that DNA collection is unsafe.

To this date, DNA-Prokids remains unable to bring the program to Haiti.

Nevertheless, the organization has been crucial to helping hundreds of youngsters caught in the shadows around the world. Since traffickers may claim that the children are related to them, DNA tests can quickly establish whether this is true.  Children, particularly very young ones, often can’t tell their rescuers  who their family is or even where they are from. Until DNA testing was made available, there were no infallible tools available to concerned governments who wanted to help.

The initiative began in 2004, when Dr. Jose Lorente of the University of Granada’s (Spain) Genetic Identification Laboratory proposed using DNA technology to connect recovered trafficked children with their families.

Originally funded by the Spanish government and private corporate donations, the effort expanded in 2009 when the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification (UNTCHI) joined the effort. DNA Pro-Kids received another boost when a $500,000 donation from a private company, Life Technologies, allowed it to expand.

Currently, DNA-Prokids staff consists of several translators, a secretary and three world-renowned scientists: Lorente, U.S. molecular geneticist Dr. Art Eisenberg, and former senior FBI scientist Dr. Bruce Budowle, now a professor of genetics.

Trafficking Worldwide

Can such science-based initiatives effectively slow the steady stream of individuals trafficked from mostly poor, undeveloped countries?

The majority of those trafficked are young women, many of whom are forced into slave labor or the sex trades.  But kids are among the most poignant victims, often compelled into servitude and sexually abused, and DNA tests could save them from even more horrible fates.

According to Eisenberg, chairman of the Department of Forensic and Investigative Genetics at UNTCHI and chairman of the US DNA Advisory Board, some children are trafficked in order to harvest their organs for transplants for wealthy people  who “don’t want to go on the transplant list.” Stolen children, or kids deliberately sold to traffickers by their families, are also used to fill adoption lists, he added.

Noting that at one time 25 percent of all (foreign-born) children adopted in the U.S. came from Guatemala, In an interview with The Crime Report, he said there were widespread suspicions that a significant number of these adoptions involved children who were kidnapped and sold for adoption purposes.

“A pilot study done in Guatemala showed that in the cases of 220 children put up for adoption, over 90 of the individuals putting those kids up for adoption were not biologically related to them,” he said..

The U.S. Department of State’s annual Trafficking in Persons report in 2010 for the first time included the United States in its tiered breakdown of countries, which outlines the level of human trafficking within its borders. The U.S. is viewed primarily as a recipient country, or consumer of trafficked humans, including adoptive children.

Eisenberg says DNA-Prokids decided to pursue illegal adoptions because countries like Guatemala had so few regulations in place. Guatemala seemed like a good starting point.

“Anyone could show up at an orphanage and claim a child,” said Eisenberg.

Proving – or disproving – a biological connection in these cases was relatively simple. All that was required was the ability to collect and test DNA, something for which Guatemalan authorities were not equipped. Since DNA Pro-Kids began assisting with DNA testing, authorities there have tightened the rules surrounding adoptions with the result that fewer illegal placements are slipping through.

Lack of Communication

Eisenberg says that his  organization can be especially useful in overcoming hurdles to the global effort to curtail the trafficking of minors. Those hurdles include the lack of a uniform international protocol for handling such cases, civil unrest which disrupts communication across borders, and a general lack of scientific facilities.

Some “Level 3” countries (defined by the State Department as a country whose government does not fully comply with the minimum standards for protecting children from traffickers and is not making a significant effort to do so), are both source and destination countries. One example is the Congo, where foreign militias abduct Congolese children and impress them as soldiers. Others are Iran, North Korea, Sudan,  and Somalia.

DNA Pro-Kids has begun to address this problem through signing separate protocols with  individual nations.  Eight protocols now exist, with Brazil, Guatemala, Indonesia, Mexico, Nepal, the Philippines, Sir Lanka and Thailand; and an additional 10 are currently being negotiated.

The organization also works actively with the United Nations GIFT program, a collaborative effort with criminal justice agencies in 117 countries to stop military abductions and other types of human trafficking.

The DNA detective work could make a real difference.  “For all these years, these traffickers have had little fear they would be caught or their victims traced back to them,” said Eisenberg.

Now, DNA testing can not only be used to reunite families, but  enable investigative agencies throughout the world to share information that can help return children, he added.

“We’re never going to stop (the trade in children),” Eisenberg said. “But if these traffickers realize there are ways to trace things back to them, maybe it will act as a deterrent.”

Carole Moore, a former police officer, is a columnist and contributing editor at a major law enforcement trade publication. Her book, The Last Place You’d Look: True Stories of Missing Persons and The People Who Search for Them, will be released this spring by Rowman & Littlefield.

Photo by Venetia Joubert Sarah Oosterveld via Flickr.

Drug Violence Affects Rich And Poor In Cities Across Mexico

The 1 million residents of Tampico, Mexico, 300 miles south of the Rio Grande at Brownsville, have been slammed time and again by Mexico's criminal tempest, says the Houston Chronicle. Scores of people from the city's tightly-knit business community - including two former mayors - have been kidnapped. Extortion has reached even the most threadbare shops. Gun battles have erupted on the city's main drag, raged in crowded neighborhoods and nearby ranchlands alike.

Many families who can afford to do so have moved to Texas for safety. Some 30 percent of small businesses have closed.  Streets, restaurants and stores empty quickly just past nightfall. In an untold number of villages, towns and cities across Mexico, there are communities like Tampico where the threat is just as tangible, the terror as real. They present this fatal reminder: No matter how prosperous or poor, no one can expect to be spared. "Everyone is so scared," said one prominent rancher "Every day there is shooting and every day there is killing. I've never been a coward, but these guys are vicious." "The guys" are thugs from the Gulf Cartel, the narcotics smuggling organization based along the south Texas border. Or the Zetas, that cartel's former assassins and enforcers, now its worst enemies.

Mexican College Student Takes Job No One Wants: Police Chief

Marisol Valles Garcia, a 20-year-old college criminology student, has taken a job no one else wants: police chief in the troubled northern Mexico town of Praxedis G. Guerrero, in the state of Chihuahua. Some see her as fearless, some as foolish, reports the Christian Science Monitor. In towns like hers, police chiefs and officers have been routinely killed by drug traffickers. But Valles Garcia, who is finishing her degree in criminology, says that the community must overcome fear and bring morals and values back to ravaged Mexico. "Yes, there is fear," she told CNN. "There will always be fear, but what we want to achieve in our municipality is tranquility and security."

Praxedis G. Guerrero is located in the once peaceful Juarez Valley, 35 miles south of Ciudad Juarez, the most dangerous city in Mexico, where more than 28,000 have been killed in drug violence since 2006. It is now seeing a mass exodus of residents amid violence between the Sinaloa and Juarez groups. Valles Garcia says she will use a mostly female, unarmed force to patrol the streets and focus on social programs and community-building. "The weapons we have are principles and values, which are the best weapons for prevention," she said. "Our work will be pure prevention."

Police Units Dedicated to Gangs

A new  U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics report details the operations of gang units, including intelligence gathering approaches, investigational tactics, gang suppression techniques, law enforcement agency support work, and gang prevention activities. The report analyzed information from 2007 and found that 365 of the nation's police officers had gang units.

Read the Report here.

Use the Crime Report for more information on Gangs.

Border Smugglers Don Disguises As Bus Drivers, Law Enforcers

With growing boldness, drug gangs and smuggling organizations on both sides of the Mexican border are disguising their couriers and assassins in phony uniforms and vehicles, passing them off as mail handlers and oil field workers, or even Mexican soldiers and Texas sheriffs, reports the Washington Post. The traffickers have been caught hauling marijuana along the Texas border in fake versions of a Wal-Mart truck or FedEx van. They've employed sham school buses, dummy dump trucks and bogus ambulances.

Law enforcement officials call them "cloners," and they are increasingly the vehicles of choice in conflict zones where the lines between the bad guys and the law are blurred by corruption. "Trust me, whatever you can think of, the smugglers have already thought of, and with the Internet and a decent body shop, it's not too hard to make a clone," said Jose E. Gonzalez, assistant patrol agent in charge of the Zapata, Texas, sector of the U.S. Border Patrol.

Mexicans Arrest 'La Barbie,' A Texas-Born Narcotics Kingpin

Mexican authorities on Monday captured a legendary Texan who is accused of a bloody climb to the top echelon of one of the hemisphere's most powerful drug cartels, reports the Houston Chronicle. Edgar Valdez Villarreal, known as "La Barbie" for his looks, faces a slew of charges in Mexico, but also is wanted in the United States, where he has been indicted for smuggling thousands of pounds of cocaine into this country. The U.S. government has offered a reward of up to $2 million for his capture. Most recently, Valdez was indicted in Atlanta on federal charges he imported and distributed thousands of kilograms of cocaine from 2004 to 2006.

U.S. prosecutors contend the drugs were often smuggled north through Texas and then on to Atlanta, which is a hub for cartel activity in the Southeastern United States. Valdez is said to have been a standout high-school football player in the Texas-Mexico border city of Laredo, where a coach nicknamed him Barbie for his hair and eye color. A Mexican official said Valdez was captured by federal police outside Mexico City and he was being held in the capital city.

Former Mexican President Joins Advocates Of Drug Legalization

Former Mexican president Vicente Fox has joined the growing chorus of influential voices who think drugs should be legalized and regulated. "Legalization does not mean that drugs are good," he wrote in an Internet posting this week, "but we have to see (legalization) as a strategy to weaken and break the economic system that allows cartels to earn huge profits." Newsweek notes that Mexico's drug war has claimed 28,000 lives in the past four years.

Fox was president between 2000 and 2006 and was a staunch U.S. ally in the war against drugs. Last year three former Latin American leaders—Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, César Gaviria of Colombia, and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico—wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that declared the war on drugs a failure. The Economist put it this way: "By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless."

Extortion Racket Of Mexican Drug Gangs Reaches Into Chicago

Mexican nationals in the Chicago area are being subjected to a wave of extortion and kidnapping  linked to drug cartels in their home region, reports the New York Times. The threats, typically delivered by cell phone, are simple and direct: We are holding your loved one, and you must pay us or he will die. Nearly 1 million Mexicans live in Chicago, and many come from Michoacán, home state of the infamous La Familia cartel. Mexicans in Chicago maintain close contact with families in Mexico, which makes it easier for La Familia’s extended network to single out immigrants who own businesses, and to make extortion threats against their operations and relatives in Mexico.

Xóchitl Bada, a professor of Latin American studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said families in Chicago “know they are at the mercy of a very corrupt justice system” in Mexico. “And if you are thousands of miles away,” she said, “of course your fear gets magnified.”

At Long Last, Mexican Authorities Take Out Key Narcotics Figure

2010 Trafficking in Persons report

The U.S. Department of  State released its 2010 Trafficking in Persons report including for the first time ever the rank of the United States.  In her remarks upon the release of the report, Secretary Hillary Clinton said, "The United States takes its first-ever ranking not as a reprieve but as a responsibility to strengthen global efforts against modern slavery, including those within America."

Read the full report here.

Use the Crime Report for more information on human trafficking.

Feds Arrest 2,200, Seize $154 Million In Narcotics Dragnet

In what was billed as the largest U.S. dragnet in the war on drugs from the Southwest Border, federal officials say they have arrested more than 2,200 people, including a top Mexican cartel leader, seized nearly 75 million tons of drugs and confiscated $154 million in cash, reports the Los Angeles Times. The crackdown, "Project Deliverance," was hailed as part of a nearly two-year, multi-agency operation in the Obama administration's effort to fight the escalating and murderous Mexican drug trafficking operations.

It remains to be seen, however, what effect the dragnet truly will have on violence along the border, where Mexicans are being killed in record numbers and the White House recently announced the deployment of National Guard troops to bolster the U.S. response there. But federal law enforcers called it a major attempt at striking back at the transportation networks of the cartels moving drugs, guns and money. The operator included 3,000 agents arresting 429 people in 16 states on Wednesday alone.

Good Fences Make Safe Neighbors

The controversial fence on the southwest border has some unexpected consequences

El Paso, Texas-- The ambitious high-tech fence built nearly four years ago by the federal government along the southwest border to curb the flood of undocumented immigrants is proving to be an unexpected gateway for Mexicans fleeing drug violence in their country.

A recent visit to the 81-mile stretch of dusty desert country which makes up U.S. Border Patrol’s “El Paso” sector turned up evidence that the fence is doing the job it was designed for.  According to Border Patrol figures,  the number of apprehensions of undocumented aliens in that sector has plummeted from 122, 260 in 2006 (just before the fence was completed)  to 14,999 in 2009―suggesting that the new fence is acting as a powerful deterrent to the human traffickers who once treated the border here as a sieve.

“There is no doubt the fence is working,” says Special Border Patrol Agent Valeria Morales, a seven-year veteran of the agency, adding the number of apprehensions is continuing to drop this year, with an average 700 monthly interdictions since the beginning of 2010.

But since the 18-foot-high rust-colored fence went up, there has also been an uptick in Mexican requests for political asylum in the U.S.  in that sector, which includes the busy El Paso-Juarez crossing point.

Murder Capital

Driving the increase is Mexico’s spreading epidemic of drug violence.  Mexicans living along this part of the border are threatened by the powerful drug cartels that have turned the border city of Juarez into what observers dub “the murder capital of the world.” There have been at least 5,000 recorded homicides over the past three years.

Officially, border patrol agents are reluctant to draw a direct link between the fence and the increase in asylum requests at the El Paso crossing.  But the newly secure border  represents an inviting symbol of sanctuary.

Although statistics show that the vast majority of undocumented border-crossers do not get involved in criminal activity once they make it to the U.S., the fence has effectively also served as a barrier to the small proportion of criminals who joined them.  It may be no coincidence that the city of El Paso itself has reported that the decline in crime rates that began in 1993 with a federal strategy to deploy more agents at the border has accelerated since the fence went up.

The Washington, DC-based CQ Press has awarded El Paso the title of second safest city in the US., in 2008-2009 based on data compiled from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report on murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, and auto theft.

Safe El Paso is now a magnet for Mexicans seeking respite from the violence that now plagues their communities.

"I see this trend increasing because of the violence,” declares Morales. “These people are like war refugees in some circumstances."

The statistics track these developments.  According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, 1,366 Mexicans sought asylum in the U.S. in 2006. In 2008 the number jumped to 2,231, reflecting the escalation of drug-related violence over that period.

Anecdotes as well illustrate how deeply the violence has impacted this part of the border. In March, 30 people from El Porvenir, a violence-riddled village just across the line from Fort Hancock, Texas (in the El Paso sector), crossed en masse into the U.S. side. They all filed requests for asylum, claiming threats against their lives by drug cartels.

The threat is credible.  The once-booming city of Juarez has turned into a virtual ghost town, with streets virtually empty during the day.  Assaults, kidnappings and extortions are daily occurrences, and law enforcement and security forces are either unable or too corrupt to provide respite.

Asylum Denied

U.S. immigration authorities, however, do not generally consider threats from the drug cartels  sufficient cause to grant asylum.  Only 123 of the 2,000-plus asylum seekers in 2008 were allowed to stay. According to immigration statutes, asylum is granted when a direct threat is established and there is no other safe place to go in the petitioner’s homeland.

Anyone who doubts the effectiveness of the fence would lose their skepticism after a ride along the border.  I recently joined Special Agent Morales for a first-hand look.

The fence was covered with metal mesh so narrow it was nearly impossible to squeeze a finger through.  That’s a major problem for drug traffickers who once found it easy to break through the rusty barbed wire that once separated downtown El Paso from Juarez.

Its deterrent value is assisted in no small part by the increase in Border Patrol numbers in this sector. With the end of a hiring freeze, some 2,500 new agents have been assigned here —doubling the force in less than three years. .

Opponents of the fence continue to claim its overall effectiveness is questionable.

"People still try to climb (the new fence)," admits Morales, who adds that illegal crossings have increased in border areas that are not covered by the fence.

But its role in reducing crime on the U.S. side of the border has apparently given some endangered Mexican citizens new reason for hope.

Joe Kolb is editor and publisher of the Gallup (New Mexico) Herald

Photo by jonathan macintosh via Flickr.