A Sinaloa Cartel operator with a multi-million dollar reward on his head for trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine into the U.S was captured last week. The size of the reward indicates he was big, but no one seems ready to say how big.
News network Al Jazeera has published a series of articles on organized crime and drug violence in Central America, with reporting from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
The U.S. government has unveiled a "new" strategy against transnational organized crime which is vintage Obama: long on politically correct rhetoric, short on actual policy changes.
As Mexican authorities raise the body count for a mass grave discovered last week in the northern state of Tamaulipas, InSight takes a look at the phenomenon of these "narcofosas," where victims of drug violence are disposed of.
As it becomes more and more likely that Colombia will extradite drug kingpin Walid Makled to Venezuela instead of the U.S., Makled has stepped up his accusations of corruption within the Venezuelan government.
As both Venezuela's government and the opposition battle over the significance of the country's rising murder rate, neither side seems to be focusing on the street-level factors of the violence. A report from the British daily the Guardian, however, sheds light on the gritty underworld of Venezuela's street gangs.
Two of the most important annual reports about drug production have been released, and with them comes the inevitable diplomatic tiffs over who has the right numbers. In the case of Mexico, one of the focuses is on heroin production.
The two reports, issued by the United States State Department and the United Nations, say heroin production has nearly tripled in Mexico since 2007. But Mexican officials question the math, and a closer look at the numbers reveals that they have a solid case.
In the most curious story of the weekend, authorities in Mexico, acting on a tip, seized a catapult and 45 pounds of marijuana that smugglers wanted to launch over the Arizona border. InSight brings you, via the Tuscon Sentinel, the video of the catapult.
Perhaps the oddest thing about the video (shown below), which is dated 21 January, are the unexplained pictures at the tail end of it that show a group of Mexican soldiers launching a package (presumably on their side of the border) from what the news headlines termed a 'pot'apult.
An upcoming documentary by a U.S. filmmaker pledges to look at the human side of the record violence hitting Ciudad Juarez, a border city which has become the epicenter of Mexico’s drug war. “8 Murders a Day,” directed and produced by independent filmmaker Charles Minn, is opening in select theaters in Texas and Arizona in February.
According to the film’s website, Minn interviews college professors, local journalists and authors to put the Juarez violence in context, most likely for a U.S. audience with limited knowledge of the conflict.
One of the most closely watched battles of 2010 was between the Zetas criminal syndicate and their former masters, the Gulf Cartel. The Zetas and the Gulf Cartel had held a tenous alliance since 2007, when the Zetas declared themselves independent, but the two split completely earlier this year when Gulf members assassinated a top Zeta operative and refused to hand over the assassins.
The split has helped make this the most violent year since President Felipe Calderon took power, with over 12,000 dying in criminal related activities. It has also created a chaotic situation in the country's most important industrial corridor between Monterrey and Reynosa, and made for some of the most intense battles in the country.
These battles, as a U.S. cable from Mexico released by the whistleblower site WikiLeaks and published in the New York Times shows, are more troubling on a security level than even some of the things happening in the rest of this embattled country.
