MORE Problems with MEXICO

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AMERICAN MAN SHOT BY MEXICAN PIRATES

Days after an American man was fatally shot by pirates on a lake that straddles the U.S.-Mexico border, his body still has not been found, a sheriff told CNN on Saturday.

Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr. of Zapata County, Texas, said U.S. authorities have not made much progress because the incident happened on the Mexican side of Lake Falcon.

“The body was not recovered” by U.S. authorities and is presumably still in the lake, Gonzalez said.

“We’ve been in touch with Mexico authorities but they say they don’t know anything about a body,” Gonzalez said.

Texas Rangers and Texas Parks and Wildlife reconnaissance teams have joined local and state authorities in searching for the body, according to CNN affiliate KSAT in San Antonio, Texas.

The man believed to be fatally shot is David Hartley, 30, according to KSAT. His wife, Tiffany, tried to rescue him but had to flee under fire, KSAT reported.

Tiffany Hartley told law enforcement authorities that the couple were riding personal watercraft in the lake Thursday afternoon when four boats of gunmen approached them and started shooting, according to CNN affiliate KGNS in Laredo, Texas.

"This couple ventured into these waters deep into Mexico," Gonzalez said. "This gentleman was hit in the back of the head with a bullet.

"The woman was able to escape them," Gonzalez said, by "accelerating as fast as she could." He said the lake is safe on the American side, “just don’t cross into Mexico."

The part of the lake where the incident occurred is technically in the municipality of Guerrero, a city in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, Gonzalez said. The state has made headlines recently as a hotbed for drug cartel violence.

Gonzalez said that while nothing about the suspects is known, he strongly believes they are pirates linked to drug cartels across the border.

“We have no suspects. None. But the descriptions [of the suspects] would be drug cartel members or the gofers of the drug cartels,” he said.

Gonzalez said this is not the first time there has been trouble on the lake.

“We had some problems in April and May,” he said. “It’s a very, very popular lake for bass-fishing, and what was happening was some people were being robbed.” But this is the first time the incidents have been fatal, he said.

Zapatas County, Texas, is about 50 miles from the Mexican border.

Gonzalez, who was born and raised in Texas, said, "People in this country who don’t live around the border don’t know what’s really going on here."

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Armed gang 'kidnaps 22 Mexican tourists in Acapulco'

An armed gang has kidnapped 22 Mexican tourists in the resort city of Acapulco, the prosecutor's office in the southern state of Guerrero said.

They said the tourists, who were from the neighbouring state of Michoacan, were abducted on Thursday.

Local media reported the group was looking for a hotel when they were seized by gunmen.

Acapulco is popular with visitors but it is also the scene of a violent turf war between rival drug cartels.

The prosecutor's office said it did not know the motive for the kidnapping, or who was behind it.

But some eyewitnesses said the kidnappers were driving cars with Michoacan number plates.

Michoacan is the power base for La Familia Michoacana, a violent drug cartel active on Mexico's Pacific coast.

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'Family values' of Mexico drug gang



They decapitate, torture, and extort. Then they pray, and donate to charity.

The "Familia" cartel is perhaps the most extreme example of the paradoxical enemy which Mexico faces as it tries to defeat organised crime.

It is a fight which would be much easier if the cartels were simply maverick gangs on the fringe of society.

But they are, in many areas, part of society.

"La Familia was originally a social structure. And in many ways it still is," says a former Mexico deputy attorney general and organised crime expert, Prof Samuel Gonzalez Ruiz.

The group is believed to have originated in the 1980s as a loose self-protecting coalition between marijuana and opium farmers in the state of Michoacan.

By the 1990s the farmers, who had formed an alliance with the neighbouring Gulf cartel, were running a profitable smuggling business.

Like other Mexican drug cartels, they were benefitting from the massive, successful, clampdown on drug trafficking led by the US authorities across the Caribbean. The strategy pushed the flow of drugs west, into Mexican territory.

Quasi-religious

La Familia found itself in control of key entry points for cocaine on Mexico's Pacific coast.

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The leaders of the organisation did not waste the opportunity. They embarked on a major expansion and diversification programme.

They invested in the production of the synthetic drug methamphetamine in the state. They took over the local pirate DVD business, and set up a brutal debt collection service.

Research by Prof Gonzalez's team suggests that 85% of the legitimate businesses in Michoacan now have some link with La Familia, or with its money.

Income from the group is understood to have funded schools, drainage projects, even churches.

One curious feature of the organisation is that, according to Mexican intelligence documents, it strongly discourages its members from consuming alcohol or drugs, and has a quasi-religious ideology.

The group's alleged spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, also known as "El Mas Loco", or "the maddest one" is understood to have published and distributed his own bible, based on the macho Christian writing of contemporary American author John Eldredge.

"It is clearly an organisational tool," says anthropologist and analyst Dr Elio Masferrer, of the group's religious faith.

"It does not matter whether or not the leaders believe in it".

Notes, signed by La Familia, are often left on the mutilated bodies of their rivals, indicating that they are victims of "divine justice".

[bdjackass318]

you're on a roll today pink. great post!

[URBANXENTITY]

freakin freak!!

[somerandomguy]

Thanks! Great info!

Sounds like there'll be cheap flights to Mexico this winter...

[somerandomguy]

fuck

[bobthefplguy]

Interesting tidbit from Wikipedia these are some hardcore mother fuckers
In one incident in Uruapan in 2006, the cartel members tossed five decapitated heads onto the dance floor of the Sol y Sombra night club along with a message that read: "The Family doesn’t kill for money. It doesn’t kill women. It doesn’t kill innocent people, only those who deserve to die. Know that this is divine justice."[23]