Cocaine/Narcotic Trafficking Routes into the United States

‘El Chapo’ Guzmán’s key role in the global cocaine trade is becoming clearer

BusinessInsider: Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel in Mexico is the largest drug-trafficking organization in the world, and its deep ties to Colombia are becoming more apparent.

According to a recent report from from Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, Sinaloa controls 35% of the cocaine exported from Colombia — the largest producer of the drug in the world. These drugs are coming into the US and effecting work-working Americans lives. Police are doing hardly anything to stop the drug cartle either and are making false arrests everywhere. If you have been accused of drug trafficking then you may want to contaxt someone like these philadelphia criminal lawyers to see if you can get legal assistance.

Sinaloa

Stratfor A look at Sinaloa’s operations in Mexico.

Now that El Chapo has escaped from a Mexican prison, Colombian generals who worked to bring down the notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar are reportedly hunting down the notorious Sinaloa cartel leader, too.

Born in the mountains of Sinaloa state on Mexico’s west coast, El Chapo’s cartel has expanded throughout the country and around the world over the last several decades.

According to Spanish newspaper El País, the cartel’s marijuana and poppy fields in Mexico cover more than 23,000 miles of land, an area larger than Costa Rica. It has operatives in at least 17 Mexican states and operations in up to 50 countries, Insight Crime reports.

A look at Sinaloa’s operations in Mexico.

In addition to its reported involvement in the heroin trade in the Middle East, it is active in Europe and in the US, where, according to the DEA in 2013, it “supplies 80% of the heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine — with a street value of $3 billion — that floods the Chicago region each year.”

The cartel is adept at sneaking the drug across borders and into the US. Cocaine has been found smuggled in frozen sharks, sprinkled on donuts, and crammed into cucumbers. The cartel is perhaps best known for the hundreds of elaborate smuggling tunnels it has built (the most recent allowing its boss to escape prison).

cartel drug mapBusiness Insider/Andy KierszA look at how drugs from Sinaloa have passed through the US.

Sinaloa’s second-in-command, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, reportedly directs the cartel’s Colombian business dealings through two Mexicans based in the country, “Jairo Ortiz” and “Montiel” — both aliases.

‘Lacoste,’ ‘Apple,’ and ‘Made in Colombia’

Documents from police and security forces seen by El Tiempo indicate the Sinaloa cartel works closely with criminal groups and guerrilla forces to run a trafficking network that exports more than one-third of the cocaine produced in Colombia.

Through an unidentified businessman, the Sinaloa cartel works with the criminal organization Los Urabeños, which was formed by remnants of right-wing paramilitaries in the mid-2000s, according to Colombia Reports.

This unidentified businessman works with Los Urabeños, its leader Dario Antonio Úsuga, and the cartel to coordinate shipments of drug cargos, labeled “Lacoste,” “Apple,” and “Made in Colombia,” to destinations in Europe and Asia, according to El Tiempo.

Los Urabeños, aka Clan Úsuga, is regarded as the most powerful of Colombia’s remaining criminal organizations and as the only one with a truly national reach.

Many of the Pacific and Caribbean smuggling routes are controlled by Los Urabeños, and its influence is so extensive that, over the last 18 months, 600 Colombian officials have been jailed for supporting the group.

The Sinaloa cartel has also formed an alliance with the left-wing guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).

The Farc began peace negotiations with the government in late 2012 and agreed to suspend drug trafficking as a part of the talks. Sinaloa then began franchising drug operations from Farc rebels, allowing the cartel to expand its reach into the production stages of the cocaine trade.

The Mexican cartel reportedly works with two Farc leaders in southern Colombia and pays as much as $40,000 per shipment for cocaine that leaves the Pacific coast departments of Nariño and Cauca.

The Sinaloa cartel also works with “La Empresa,” a criminal group based in the Pacific port city of Buenaventura, to direct shipments. La Empresa has, according to Colombia Reports, allied with Colombian criminal group “Los Rastrojos” (with whom the Sinaloa cartel has also aligned) to fight off the Pacific coast expansion of Los Urabeños.

(La Empresa, El Tiempo notes, has been linked to the “casas de pique” — buildings in outlying areas of Buenaventura used to torture and dismember rival gang members.)

The Sinaloa cartel has also provided weapons and financing to the Oficina de Envigado, a Medellin-based crime syndicate that assumed much of Pablo Escobar’s operations after his death in 1993.

Sinaloa “retained the services of ‘La Oficina’ to support drug trafficking around the world,” the US Treasury Department has said.

According to El Tiempo, “the FARC, ‘los Úsuga,’ and ‘la Empresa’ are keys in Sinaloa’s strategy to control eight ports on the Pacific, from Mexico to Peru.”

“In Colombia, [the Sinaloa cartel] already directs 50% of the drugs that leave from [the ports of] Tumaco, Buenaventura, and el Urabá, which form a network with ports in Peru (El Callao and Talara), Ecuador (Esmeraldas and San Lorenzo) and Guatemala,” according to intelligence documents seen by El Tiempo.

Drugs are shipped by fastboat from Colombia, primarily to Guatemala’s Puerto Quetzal, which handles almost all of the cocaine coming out of Colombia.

A kilo of cocaine that reaches Guatemala is worth $10,000, according to El Tiempo. The price hovers around $12,000 to $15,000 at the US border, and a kilo can sell in the low six figures once it reaches the US.

‘A possible refuge’

The panoply of ties that the Sinaloa cartel has built throughout the Western Hemisphere lead many to believe El Chapo, the fugitive Sinaloa boss, could seek “a possible refuge” in Colombia.

In fact, on July 19, just eight days after El Chapo rode to freedom on a motorcycle through a mile-long, air-conditioned underground tunnel in central Mexico, El Tiempo reported that officials from the DEA and FBI had requested “all available information on the movements, personnel, and contacts of the Sinaloa cartel in the country.”

In the six months prior to El Chapo’s escape, the Mexican army captured nearly 2,800 kilos of cocaine — a 340% increase over the same period in 2014. The increase in seizures comes despite UN reports indicating that drug cultivation and trading in Colombia had stabilized.

The hunt for El Chapo has also drawn in several officials from the very country to which he may be headed. In late July, El Tiempo reported that three retired Colombian generals and six active police officials were headed north to assist with the search.

The Colombian generals — two former heads of the national police and the former chief of the now disbanded secret police — were selected because of their roles in similar mission: The effort to bring down the Cali cartel and Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel — two of the Colombian drug-trafficking organizations that ran roughshod over Colombian society in 1980s and 1990s.

The generals, who a Colombian police source called the “most effective three musketeers the country has against the narcos,” left Mexico in early August.

But, according to Michael Lohmuller at Insight Crime, whatever advice they left behind may not be enough to bring down Sinaloa’s drug boss.

The 22 years since the controversial killing of Escobar have seen marked advancements in the operations, sophistication, and evasiveness of drug cartels.

Moreover, modern-day Colombian police have failed to catch their country’s own most wanted kingpin: Dario Antonio Úsuga — the head of Los Urabeños and El Chapo’s ally.

Narcotic trafficking documentary

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You Broke the Law, But did you Know?

Before you even get out of your driveway or leave the parking lot, how many laws did you break?

You’ve probably broken the law, and you don’t even know it

FreedomWorks: April 1790, the first Congress passed the Crimes Act, a law that established a criminal code in the United States. The Constitution listed only three crimes — counterfeiting, piracy, and treason. The Crimes Act codified those crimes and added a little more than a dozen others, including murder, larceny, and perjury. The list of federal offenses was short and easily defined.

Today, however, there are more than 4,500 federal statutes that carry criminal penalties. That is, at least, the best estimate. There has not been a full accounting of the number of criminal penalties since 2008. In 2013, the House Over-Criminalization Task Force asked the Congressional Research Service to, once again, take on this task. “CRS’ initial response to our request was that they lack the manpower and resources to accomplish this task,” Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), co-chair of the task force, said at a June 2013 hearing. “And I think this confirms the point that all of us have been making on this issue and demonstrates the breadth of over-criminalization.”

This onslaught of federal criminal offenses is relatively recent in the United States’ history. The American Bar Association, in a 1998 report, noted that “[m]ore than 40% of the federal provisions enacted since the Civil War have been enacted since 1970.” If this explosive growth in the federal criminal code was not jaw-dropping enough, it pales in comparison to the number of federal regulatory crimes.

A 1991 study, Does ‘Unlawful’ Mean ‘Criminal’? Reflections on the Disappearing Tort/Crime Distinction in American Law, noted that “there are over 300,000 federal regulations that may be enforced criminally.” Twenty-four years later, some estimate that there are as many as 400,000 regulatory offenses, many of which are punishable by fines and prison sentences.

It has long been said that ignorance of the law is not a defense, but the laws and regulations on the books in the United States are so voluminous that it is impossible to know when they are being broken. This is why, if you ever find yourself in a situation where you broke the law but did not realise until it was too late, you should get yourself a lawyer. Maybe you should take a look at someone like these Raleigh criminal defense lawyers to give you a better idea of how they could help you. Harvey Silverglate, a civil liberties and criminal defense attorney, has, quite literally, written the book about the epidemic of over-criminalization. In his 2009 book, Three Felonies A Day, Silverglate, who offers several horror stories involving over-criminalization, theorizes that the average American commits, as the title suggests, a trio of felonies on a daily basis, often without ever knowing that a crime was committed.

These offenses can still be successfully prosecuted. Take the case of Alison Capo, for example. Her 11-year-old daughter, Skylar, saved a baby woodpecker from being eaten by a cat. Capo did not know that she ran afoul of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, under which the woodpecker is protected. She was fined $535 and threatened with jail time. The US Fish and Wildlife Service dropped the citation only after the case received publicity in the news.

“Kids should be able to save a baby bird and not end up going home crying because their mom has to pay $535,” Skylar told a local reporter. “I just think that’s crazy.” Indeed, it is crazy. Sadly, there are many more egregious examples of over-criminalization. The Heritage Foundation highlighted 21 specific instances from across the country in a publication, USA vs. You: The Flood of Criminal Laws Threatening Your Liberty, where the purported “criminal” broke laws or regulations that they could not have possibly known about.

Unfortunately, federal law and regulations often lack mens rea, or guilty mind, a requirement that derives from the common law tradition. Essentially, with mens rea, prosecutors would have to prove that the accused had criminal intent for them to be culpable for a crime. The criminal intent requirement has, however, been eroded in American law as the number of criminal offenses passed by Congress and promulgated by unelected bureaucrats have exploded.

A May 2010 report, Without Intent: How Congress Is Eroding the Criminal Intent Requirement in Federal Law, from the Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers noted that of 57 percent of the 446 proposed criminal offenses in the 109th Congress (2005-2006) “lacked an adequate mens rea requirement.” Of the 36 proposed criminal offenses enacted by this particular Congress, almost 64 percent had a weak mens rea requirement or none at all.

Testifying before the House Over-Criminalization Task Force in July 2013, John Baker, a well respected and accomplished legal scholar who has written extensively on over-criminalization, explained how the American legal system came to such a perilous state that puts the liberty of the people at risk. “[W]hen we look at state criminal law, it is relatively easy, even though states have added many non-common law crimes, it is easy because the meat and potatoes of a local prosecutor, which I was, in murder, rape, robbery, theft, burglary, that is what we dealt with. And most juries do not have difficulty figuring out what those crimes are,” Baker told members of the task force. “Indeed, in most state prosecutions the issue is not whether there was a crime, the issue is whether the defendant is the person who did it.”

“In Federal law it is just the opposite. The issue is not whether the defendant did something; it is whether what he did was a crime. And we know with 4,500 statutes out there, there are plenty to pick from,” he said. “And it is easy to pick up one that has, if not a lack of mens rea entirely, a confused mens rea.” In his prepared testimony, Baker noted that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, under which Alison Capo was unnecessarily harassed, does not have a mens rea requirement.

“You know, at the state level we know that we found many people who are innocent in jail because they were factually not guilty,” Baker explained. “The problem in federal criminal law is that we have innocent people being convicted not because we have the wrong person, but because they really did not commit a crime” because they did not intend to do so.

In Baker’s view — as well as the view of most conservative, libertarian, and even some progressive legal scholars — is a default mens rea requirement. This would be applied across the board in federal offenses, providing some necessary relief for people who may unwittingly break some arbitrary statute or regulation enacted by Congress or promulgated by a federal agency.

Much of the focus of justice reform efforts in Congress has been on overhauls of front-end sentencing and back-end reentry. These efforts are vital because of the high costs of incarceration and the current approach to corrections, which essentially warehouses offenders, rather than rehabilitate them. But the need for default mens rea is another aspect of justice reform that Congress must consider due to the epidemic of over-criminalization that represents a threat to virtually every American.

 

Obama’s White House Shouting ‘Oh Ashley!’ After the Hack of Database

In part from Wired: Hackers who stole sensitive customer information from the cheating site AshleyMadison.com appear to have made good on their threat to post the data online.

A data dump, 9.7 gigabytes in size, was posted on Tuesday to the dark web using an Onion address accessible only through the Tor browser. The files appear to include account details and log-ins for some 32 million users of the social networking site, touted as the premier site for married individuals seeking partners for affairs. Seven years worth of credit card and other payment transaction details are also part of the dump, going back to 2007. The data, which amounts to millions of payment transactions, includes names, street address, email address and amount paid, but not credit card numbers; instead it includes four digits for each transaction that may be the last four digits of the credit card or simply a transaction ID unique to each charge. AshleyMadison.com claimed to have nearly 40 million users at the time of the breach about a month ago, all apparently in the market for clandestine hookups.

“Ashley Madison is the most famous name in infidelity and married dating,” the site asserts on its homepage. “Have an Affair today on Ashley Madison. Thousands of cheating wives and cheating husbands signup everyday looking for an affair…. With Our affair guarantee package we guarantee you will find the perfect affair partner.”

The data released by the hackers includes names, addresses and phone numbers submitted by users of the site, though it’s unclear if members provided legitimate details. A sampling of the data indicates that users likely provided random numbers and addresses, but files containing credit card transactions will yield real names and addresses, unless members of the site used anonymous pre-paid cards. One analysis of email addresses found in the data dump also shows that some 15,000 are .mil. or .gov addresses. Read more here.

Between being unable to respond to terror attacks (Benghazi) and being unable to kill terrorists massing on the Iraq border (ISIS) to being dumb enough to register for an infidelity hook-up site with their White House email accounts.

From Twitter: I’ve come to the conclusion that the Obama administration IS the JV team they warned us to look out for.

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For access to the database, go here.

The Latest Planned Parenthood Video, the Beating Heart

States are investigating Planned Parenthood while others are moving to defund the organization. This is NOT an issue of abortion it is an issue of organ trafficking and illegal harvesting. Here is information on Title X.

Horrific Claim in New Planned Parenthood Video: Intact Brain Was Harvested From ‘Late-Term Male Fetus Whose Heart Was Still Beating’

A pro-life, medical ethics group has released the seventh video in an ongoing undercover and investigative series alleging that Planned Parenthood sells aborted fetal parts and tissue for profit.

The latest 10-minute clip from the Center for Medical Progress includes a shocking claim from Holly O’Donnell, a former blood and tissue procurement technician for StemExpress, that the heart of a baby was still beating after an abortion.

“The third episode in a new documentary web series and 7th video on Planned Parenthood’s supply of aborted fetal tissue tells a former procurement technician’s harrowing story of harvesting an intact brain from a late-term male fetus whose heart was still beating after the abortion,” a press release reads.

The majority of the video focuses on O’Donnell recounting how she was once asked to help procure brain tissue from the aforementioned fetus — an experience that she said shook her to her core.

The former technician recalled her coworker one day calling her over to “see something kind of cool.”

“So, I’m over here and this is the moment I see it. I’m just flabbergasted,” O’Donnell recalled of seeing the late-term aborted fetus. “This is the most gestated fetus and the closest thing to a baby I’ve seen.”

She said that her coworker then tapped the aborted baby’s heart and that it immediately started beating.

“I’m sitting here and I’m looking at this fetus and its heart is beating — and I don’t know what to think,” O’Donnell said. “I knew why it was happening, because the electrical current, the nodes were still firing, and I don’t know if that constitutes it’s technically dead or if it’s alive.”

O’Donnell went on to describe the fact that the baby had a face that included eyelids and a pronounced mouth and nose, but it’s what happened next that she said pushed her over the edge and showed her that working at StemExpress was no longer feasible.

“Since the fetus was so intact [my coworker] said, ‘This is a really good fetus, and it looks like we can procure a lot from it. We’re going to procure brain,’” O’Donnell recounted. ”She takes the scissors and she makes a small incision… and goes, I would say to maybe a little bit through the mouth, and she was like, ‘Okay, can you go the rest of the way?’”

While she didn’t want to do it, O’Donnell said that she complied, and that she immediately regretted her decision to do so.

“I’m just sitting there like, ‘What did I just do?’” she said. “That was the moment that I knew I couldn’t work for the company anymore.”

Terrorism Works, U.S. Chart Proves Vulnerability

Chart Lists Terrorists in U.S. Due to Lax Immigration Policies

The Obama administration’s lax immigration policies have allowed a large number of terrorists with documented ties to ISIS and other radical Islamic groups into the United States, including individuals from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Uzbekistan who have been criminally charged in recent years.

Examples include a naturalized U.S. citizen from Somalia (Hinda Osman Dhirane) charged with conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, a lawful permanent resident (Akhror Saidakhmetov) from Kazakhstan charged with conspiracy to provide material support to Al Qaeda in Iraq, a Yemeni national named Mufid A. Elfgeeh who also supported a foreign terrorist organization, possessed illegal firearms and attempted to kill U.S. government officers and a Syrian national named Mohamad Saeed Kodaimati who knowingly made false, fraudulently and fictitious statements to the FBI.

That’s just a snippet of a long list of foreigners with terrorist ties who have been granted U.S. entry by the Obama administration. The document was provided this month by a pair of federal lawmakers attempting to pinpoint the tragic consequences of Obama’s negligent immigration policies. The legislators, both U.S. senators, are asking Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Secretary of State John Kerry to provide details on the immigration history of the individuals—as well as their family—that appear on the chart. The list features 72 people involved with or sentenced for terrorist activity in the last year alone.

They include individuals who have engaged in or attempted to engage in acts of terrorism; conspired or attempted to conspire to provide material support to a terrorist organization; engaged in criminal conduct inspired by terrorist ideology; or who have been sentenced for any of the foregoing, the senators, Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Ted Cruz of Texas, reveal. “We would like to understand more about these individuals, and others similarly situated in recent history, and the nexus between terrorism and our immigration system,” they write in a letter to Lynch and Kerry. Sessions chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Cruz chairs the Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts.

They ask that the State Department and Department of Justice (DOJ) coordinate with other relevant agencies to provide answers to their questions by early next month. Among the senators’ inquires is an unredacted copy of each non-citizen or naturalized citizen’s alien file and a breakdown by immigration status of those who at any time after entering the U.S. got flagged as a member of a terrorist organization or political/social group that endorses or espouses terrorist activity. The lawmakers seek other information as well, including the identification of subjects with terrorist ties who have been deported from the U.S. and those who have been placed in removal proceedings but were allowed to remain inside the country.

As if it weren’t bad enough that terrorists are entering the U.S. legally thanks to our weak immigration policies, the Obama administration also has a terrorist “hands off” list that permits individuals with extremist ties to enter the country. The disturbing details of this secret list come from internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) documents exposed last year by a U.S. senator. Specifically, an electronic email exchange between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) asks whether to admit an individual with ties to various terrorist groups. The individual had scheduled an upcoming flight into the U.S. and was believed to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a close associate and supporter of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Islamic terrorists are also sneaking into the U.S. through the porous southern border. Judicial Watch has reported this for years and, more recently, published a series of stories documenting how Mexican drug cartels are smuggling foreigners with terrorist links into the El Paso, Texas region. The foreigners are classified as Special Interest Aliens (SIA) by the government and they are being transported to stash areas in Acala, a rural crossroads located around 54 miles from El Paso on a state road – Highway 20. Once in the U.S., the SIAs wait for pick-up in the area’s sand hills just across Highway 20. JW has also reported that Mexican smugglers are moving ISIS operatives through the desert and across the U.S.-Mexico border with tremendous ease.