Latest news with #MexicanNationalGuard
21-05-2025
Tigers, jaguars and elephants are the latest to flee cartel violence in Mexico's Sinaloa
CULIACAN, Mexico -- A pack of veterinarians clambered over hefty metal crates on Tuesday morning, loading them one by one onto a fleet of semi-trucks. Among the cargo: tigers, monkeys, jaguars, elephants and lions – all fleeing the latest wave of cartel violence eclipsing the northern Mexican city of Culiacan. For years, exotic pets of cartel members and circus animals have been living in a small animal refuge on the outskirts of Sinaloa's capital. However, a bloody power struggle erupted last year between rival Sinaloa cartel factions, plunging the region into unprecedented violence and leaving the leaders of the Ostok Sanctuary reeling from armed attacks, constant death threats and a cutoff from essential supplies needed to keep their 700 animals alive. The aid organization is now leaving Culiacan and transporting the animals hours across the state in hopes that they'll escape the brunt of the violence. But fighting has grown so widespread in the region that many fear it will inevitably catch up. 'We've never seen violence this extreme," said Ernesto Zazueta, president of the Ostok Sanctuary. 'We're worried for the animals that come here to have a better future.' Violence in the city exploded eight months ago when two rival Sinaloa Cartel factions began warring for territory after the dramatic kidnapping of the leader of one of the groups by a son of notorious capo Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán who then delivered him to U.S. authorities via a private plane. Since then, intense fighting between the heavily armed factions has become the new normal for civilians in Culiacan, a city which for years avoided the worst of Mexico's violence in large part because the Sinaloa Cartel maintained such complete control. 'With the escalating war between the two factions of the Sinaloa Cartel, they have begun to extort, kidnap and rob cars because they need funds to finance their war,' said security analyst David Saucedo. 'And the civilians in Culiacan are the ones that suffer.' Zazueta, the sanctuary director, said their flight from the city is another sign of just how far the warfare has seeped into daily life. This week, refuge staff loaded up roaring animals onto a convoy as some trainers attempted to sooth the animals. One murmured in a soft voice as he fed a bag of carrots to an elephant in a shipping container, 'I'm going to be right here, no one will do anything to you.' Veterinarians and animals, accompanied by the Mexican National Guard, began traveling along the freeway to seaside Mazatlan, where they planned to release the animals into another wildlife reserve. The relocation came after months of planning and training the animals, a move made by the organization in an act of desperation. They said the sanctuary was caught in the crossfire of the warfare because of its proximity to the town of Jesús María, a stronghold of Los Chapitos, one of the warring factions. During intense periods of violence, staff at the sanctuary can hear gunshots echoing nearby, the roar of cars and helicopters overhead, something they say scares the animals. Cartel fighting regularly blocks staff off from reaching the sanctuary, and some animals have gone days without eating. Many have started to lose fur and at least two animals have died due to the situation, Zazueta said. Complicating matters is the fact that an increasing number of the animals they rescue are former narco pets left abandoned in rural swathes of the state. In one case, a Bengal tiger was discovered chained in a plaza, caught in the center of shootouts. Urban legends circulate in Sinaloa that capos feed their enemies to pet lions. Diego García, a refuge staff member, is among those who travel out to rescue those animals. He said he regularly receives anonymous threats, with callers claiming to know his address and how to find him. He worries he'll be targeted for taking away the former pets of capos. Zazueta said the refuge also receives calls threatening to burn the sanctuary to the ground and kill the animals if payment isn't made. 'There's no safe place left in this city these days,' said García. That's the feeling for many in the city of 1 million. When the sun rises, parents check for news of shootouts as if it were the weather, to determine if it's safe to send their kids to school. Burned houses sit riddled with bullets and occasionally bodies appear hanging from bridges outside the city. By night, Culiacan turns into a ghost town, leaving bars and clubs shuttered and many without work. 'My son, my son, I'm here. I'm not going to leave you alone,' screamed one mother, sobbing on the side of the road and cursing officials as they inspected her son's dead body, splayed out and surrounded by bullet casings late Monday night. 'Why do the police do nothing?' she cried out. In February, while driving a refuge vehicle used for animal transport, García said he was forced from the car by an armed, masked man in an SUV. At gunpoint, they stole the truck, animal medicine and tools used by the group for rescues and left him trembling on the side of the road. The breaking point for the Ostok Sanctuary came in March, when one of the two elephants in their care, Bireki, injured her foot. Veterinarians scrambled to find a specialist to treat her in Mexico, the United States and beyond. No one would brave the trip to Culiacan. 'We asked ourselves, 'what are we doing here?'' Zazueta said. 'We can't risk this happening again. If we don't leave, who will treat them?' The concern by many is that Mexico's crackdown on the cartels will be met with even more violent power moves by criminal organizations, as has happened in the past, said Saucedo, the security analyst. Zazueta blames local government and security forces for not doing more, and said their pleas for help in the past eight months have gone unanswered. Sinaloa's governor's office did not immediately respond to a request comment. The sanctuary made the move without any public announcement, worried that they might face repercussions from local officials or the same cartels forcing them to flee, but they hope the animals will find some relief in Mazatlan after years of conflict. García, the sanctuary staff member, is not so sure. While he hopes for the best, he said he's also watched cartel violence spread like a cancer across the Latin American country. Mazatlan, too, is also facing bursts of violence, though nothing compared to the Sinaloan capital. 'It's at least more stable,' he said. 'Because here, today, it's just suffocating.'
South China Morning Post
03-05-2025
- Politics
- South China Morning Post
Sheinbaum says she rejected Trump offer to send US troops to Mexico
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Saturday that she had rejected an offer from US President Donald Trump to send American troops to her country to help combat drug trafficking. Advertisement 'I told him, 'No, President Trump, our territory is inviolable, our sovereignty is inviolable, our sovereignty is not for sale,'' she said at a public event, referring to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal. The report, she said, was 'true … but not as described'. During a call, Sheinbaum said, Trump had asked how he could help fight organised crime and suggested sending US troops. She said she declined, telling him that 'we will never accept the presence of the United States Army in our territory'. Members of the Mexican National Guard patrol next to the US-Mexico border wall in Tijuana in January. Photo: AP Sheinbaum said she did offer to collaborate, including through greater information-sharing.
New York Post
28-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
Trump exposed Biden's biggest lie: That the border crisis was ‘unsolvable'
Last year around this time, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the Democratic Party and liberal commentators insisted the only thing that would fix the greatest border crisis in American history was a special Senate bill, or 'comprehensive immigration reform,' or fixing the 'root causes.' There was nothing else that could stop the 10 million illegal immigrants that Biden allowed into the country. It took President Trump approximately one hour to prove them wrong. Advertisement The signature achievement of Trump's first 100 days in office — fixing the border — was achieved by dusting off a few old tools that were always in the back shed. Trump first ended Biden's legally dubious temporary 'parole' admissions programs that let aspiring illegal immigrants 'legally' fly or walk over the border and stay with work authorization for two-year periods. He replaced Biden's policies of mass releases of illegal border crossers with 100% detention, expedited deportations, sizable interior deportations and a lot of federal illegal-entry prosecutions. Advertisement He staffed the new hunt-and-capture mission with thousands of military personnel deputized to make immigration arrests. 'Going to be too hard' Word that detention, deportation and federal prosecution, put in place on Inauguration Day — plus a Trump tariff-induced Mexican military operation to hunt and deport migrants on its side — spread like wildfire across the world. 6 Mexican National Guard soldiers patrolling the area near the Rio Grande near Ciudad Juarez on Feb. 6, 2025. Getty Images And lo-and-behold, aspiring border-crossers didn't want to pay the smuggling money on a lost cause. Advertisement 'I'm just going to give up and go back to Venezuela,' one woman in a squalid Mexico City encampment told me in December. 'I have children to take care of. I'll just go back because, with Donald Trump, it's going to be too hard.' Many others told me the same during another reporting trip to Juarez in April, where I found a vast empty silence hanging over a border region that, in my previous visits over the past four years, had the look and feel of a kicked ant hill. 6 A US Army Stryker armored vehicle and Border Patrol vehicles seen near the US-Mexico border in Texas on April 20, 2025. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez One million foreign nationals crossed into the United States through Juarez from 2021-2024. Advertisement 'The Americans would just grab us and deport us,' a Venezuelan father told me in Juarez when I asked why he would not attempt an illegal crossing with his wife and young twin daughters, whom I found eating a free lunch inside a Catholic Church in Juarez. 'Now, your president is very tough.' The numbers and my direct observations on both sides of the border since inauguration bear out that Trump's layered deterrence policies immediately dropped the number of illegal crossings over the southern border land ports to the lowest in a generation — a 95% drop. 6 Migrants boarding a repatriation flight from El Paso to Ecuador on Jan. 28, 2025. CBP Party propaganda Everything the Democrats told America about the expensive, time-consuming complexity necessary to fix a 'broken immigration system' stands exposed as propaganda devoid of even the smallest nugget of truth. At its December 2023 peak during Biden's term, 10,000-14,000 illegal migrants per day were crossing the southern border. 6 Migrants breaking through a border fence and pushing back against Texas National Guard members near El Paso on March 21, 2024. James Breeden for NY Post That figure did not decline significantly until Biden's campaign managers cut a deal with Mexico to help reduce the flow — the first hint that the crisis was political, not inevitable. Consider this: In December 2024, the number of aliens allowed to stay after crossing the border or registering on Biden's illegal CBP One app was 96,037. That's 3,201 a day, almost all allowed to stay in the US. Advertisement In January, a month split between the Biden and Trump administrations, that number dropped to 61,448 — 2,048 a day. 6 Migrants waiting to be proccessed by Border Patrol after crossing the border near Jacumba Hot Springs, Calif. on June 6, 2024. James Breeden for the New York Post But in Trump's first full month, the number plummeted to 8,326 border apprehensions, or about 300 a day. And they were almost all deported. Advertisement The figures just keep dropping. The nation is on track for the lowest recorded year of illegal border-crossing apprehensions since the United States began keeping records in 1960. What Trump did is expose the only dynamic that has ever mattered, which is: If you let illegal immigrants into your country to stay long enough to earn back their smuggling-fee investments many times over, they'll gladly lay down their money and come. If you block and repel illegal immigrants, they'll stay home. Rippled deterrence How do immigrants know what their odds are? Easy: selfies. Everyone down-trail or still at home has cellphones fully connected to social media and can see, in live time, what those at our border are experiencing. Advertisement That's why Trump's policies in action have rippled deterrence across the world, not just in Mexico. We know this by looking at the Colombia-Panama Darien Gap passage, through which non-Mexican and non-Central American immigrants from 170 nations began surging in record-breaking numbers after Biden took office. 6 An empty migrant reception center near the Darien Gap migrant route in Lajas Blanca, Panama seen on April 6, 2025. AP Photo/Matias Delacroix Whereas rarely more than 7,000 or 8,000 ever came through the gap in any given year, 250,000 surged through in 2022 to follow the selfies of those upstream, then 500,000 in 2023 and another 300,000 in 2024, when I visited both the Colombia and Panama sides of the gap. Today? Traffic through the Darien Gap is down by 99%. Why, I recently asked Director General Jorge Gobea, head of Panama's National Border Service? Advertisement 'Trump,' he answered simply. The moral of this story is that closing the border was always that doable and simple. It was never the complex, years-long ordeal of repairing a border security system that is perfectly fine as is, although always in need of a couple of tweaks. It was a lie that Democrats told the American people for four years. Todd Bensman is a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion - America is not prepared for drone warfare in the homeland — yet
Earlier this month, the White House announced it would consider drone strikes against Mexican drug cartels. Although it is important to keep options open when dealing with viable threats, we must also remember that in military planning, the enemy gets a vote. Stated plainly: We must consider how the enemy will respond to our actions. In the case of potential drone strikes against the cartels, a predictable response would be that the cartels retaliate with their own version of drone warfare. Cartels are already using drones daily to track the movements of American law enforcement agents at the border and to transport contraband into our country. We also know that cartels have shown a willingness to weaponize drones and have used them to attack law enforcement, the Mexican National Guard and criminal rivals within Mexico. Given this, it seems likely the cartels would retaliate with drone strikes of their own, which invites the question: Are we ready for such a scenario? A similar question was recently raised in a March inter-agency letter penned by Reps. John McGuire (R-Va.) and Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.) to the Federal Aviation Administration, Department of Justice, Federal Communications Commission and Department of Defense. The authors noted that, in a recent congressional delegation to the southern border, personnel on the ground shared their concerns regarding their ability to defend themselves should the cartels attempt a drone attack. Unfortunately, the ability to defend against drone attacks from any enemy, foreign or domestic, is severely hampered by a legal framework that has lagged behind this emerging threat. It turns out there is a complex web of federal laws that criminalize efforts to damage, disable or even detect or track drones. While Congress has carved out some ability to conduct drone detection and mitigation activities, this limited authority has only been extended to a select few federal government departments. State and local governments, not to mention private businesses and individuals, are almost completely stifled in their ability to protect against drone threats. Federal criminal laws that apply to protect traditional aircraft are also interpreted to apply to protect drones. Therefore, someone who damages or disables a drone would theoretically be guilty of violating the Aircraft Sabotage Act, just as if a 737 were attacked. Interfering with a drone may also violate the Aircraft Piracy Act, the Pen Trap statute, Wiretap Act, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and prohibitions on GPS interference. Currently, the only entities statutorily allowed to conduct counter-drone activities, notwithstanding other potentially applicable laws (such as those mentioned above), are the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Defense and Energy. However, even these agencies are mostly only allowed to engage in limited mitigation activities to counter drones presenting a credible threat to designated facilities or assets. State, local, tribal and territorial leadership and law enforcement have not been granted authority to conduct such counter-drone operations. Even if federal departments had broader authority to conduct counter-drone activities on American soil, such agencies would not have the resources to protect the expansive area of the country's 55 states and inhabited territories. A good first step to fix this problem would be a legislative update to clarify that statutes like the Aircraft Sabotage Act do not apply to unmanned aircraft. It is also imperative to empower non-federal entities to partner with law enforcement and federal agencies in a mutually supportive effort to address drone threats. Until such legislation can be enacted, it would be helpful to have an executive order guiding agencies on how to interpret applicable laws and exercise enforcement discretion. The goal of such a directive would be that law enforcement, at the federal level and below, could feel secure in their ability to engage drones presenting a credible threat without fear of being prosecuted. In the end, the potential for nefarious drone activities by cartels or other bad actors necessitates a robust counter-drone framework. Alongside legislative and policy changes allowing both federal and non-federal entities to contribute to counter-drone efforts effectively, it is essential to educate potential stakeholders in conducting counter-drone operations in collaboration with the appropriate governmental entities. Such education should cover legal considerations, operational procedures, technology utilization, communication protocols, counter-drone devices and activities' potentially adverse secondary effects. These steps could go a long way in addressing the drone threat in a responsible manner, and thus enhancing domestic security and response capabilities. C. Carter Lee is a Virginia attorney. He is also a colonel in the Virginia National Guard, serving as the state judge advocate. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
26-04-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
America is not prepared for drone warfare in the homeland — yet
Earlier this month, the White House announced it would consider drone strikes against Mexican drug cartels. Although it is important to keep options open when dealing with viable threats, we must also remember that in military planning, the enemy gets a vote. Stated plainly: We must consider how the enemy will respond to our actions. In the case of potential drone strikes against the cartels, a predictable response would be that the cartels retaliate with their own version of drone warfare. Cartels are already using drones daily to track the movements of American law enforcement agents at the border and to transport contraband into our country. We also know that cartels have shown a willingness to weaponize drones and have used them to attack law enforcement, the Mexican National Guard and criminal rivals within Mexico. Given this, it seems likely the cartels would retaliate with drone strikes of their own, which invites the question: Are we ready for such a scenario? A similar question was recently raised in a March inter-agency letter penned by Reps. John McGuire (R-Va.) and Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.) to the Federal Aviation Administration, Department of Justice, Federal Communications Commission and Department of Defense. The authors noted that, in a recent congressional delegation to the southern border, personnel on the ground shared their concerns regarding their ability to defend themselves should the cartels attempt a drone attack. Unfortunately, the ability to defend against drone attacks from any enemy, foreign or domestic, is severely hampered by a legal framework that has lagged behind this emerging threat. It turns out there is a complex web of federal laws that criminalize efforts to damage, disable or even detect or track drones. While Congress has carved out some ability to conduct drone detection and mitigation activities, this limited authority has only been extended to a select few federal government departments. State and local governments, not to mention private businesses and individuals, are almost completely stifled in their ability to protect against drone threats. Federal criminal laws that apply to protect traditional aircraft are also interpreted to apply to protect drones. Therefore, someone who damages or disables a drone would theoretically be guilty of violating the Aircraft Sabotage Act, just as if a 737 were attacked. Interfering with a drone may also violate the Aircraft Piracy Act, the Pen Trap statute, Wiretap Act, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and prohibitions on GPS interference. Currently, the only entities statutorily allowed to conduct counter-drone activities, notwithstanding other potentially applicable laws (such as those mentioned above), are the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Defense and Energy. However, even these agencies are mostly only allowed to engage in limited mitigation activities to counter drones presenting a credible threat to designated facilities or assets. State, local, tribal and territorial leadership and law enforcement have not been granted authority to conduct such counter-drone operations. Even if federal departments had broader authority to conduct counter-drone activities on American soil, such agencies would not have the resources to protect the expansive area of the country's 55 states and inhabited territories. A good first step to fix this problem would be a legislative update to clarify that statutes like the Aircraft Sabotage Act do not apply to unmanned aircraft. It is also imperative to empower non-federal entities to partner with law enforcement and federal agencies in a mutually supportive effort to address drone threats. Until such legislation can be enacted, it would be helpful to have an executive order guiding agencies on how to interpret applicable laws and exercise enforcement discretion. The goal of such a directive would be that law enforcement, at the federal level and below, could feel secure in their ability to engage drones presenting a credible threat without fear of being prosecuted. In the end, the potential for nefarious drone activities by cartels or other bad actors necessitates a robust counter-drone framework. Alongside legislative and policy changes allowing both federal and non-federal entities to contribute to counter-drone efforts effectively, it is essential to educate potential stakeholders in conducting counter-drone operations in collaboration with the appropriate governmental entities. Such education should cover legal considerations, operational procedures, technology utilization, communication protocols, counter-drone devices and activities' potentially adverse secondary effects. These steps could go a long way in addressing the drone threat in a responsible manner, and thus enhancing domestic security and response capabilities.
