The Informant Interviews Part III: Fast food with a side order of death and betrayal

Heriberto Santillan Tabares, a narco-trafficker connected to the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes (VCF) drug organization, was arrested in El Paso, Texas, in mid-January 2004 after being lured into the trap by a U.S. government informant.

The informant, Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, as part of the plan, is pulled over by an El Paso squad car while driving in his car on a pre-designated street. Santillan is a passenger in the vehicle, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrest Santillan.

The same day, DEA sources indicate, another of Santillan’s associates, a Mexican state police commander named Miguel Loya Gallegos (Santillan’s nephew), executes a man in a pick-up truck in Juarez, Mexico, and seriously wounds the passenger — shot in the mouth and neck. Loya also allegedly shows up at the scene of the murder to investigate the crime. Over the prior five months, at least a dozen other people had been tortured and murdered by Santillan’s VCF cell and buried in the backyard of a house in Juarez.

David Castro killed, buried at Juarez home after bungled kidnapping

In the spring of 2005, then U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton announced that he had cut a plea deal with Heriberto Santillan Tabares, the narco-trafficker who orchestrated the carnage at the now infamous House of Death in Juarez.

Informant claims his U.S. handlers ignored carnage because it occurred “on Mexican soil”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in El Paso, Texas, were made aware of multiple torture and death houses used by narco-trafficking cells in Juarez but failed to follow-up on the information or report it to the Mexican government, according to an informant who was employed by the federal law enforcement agency between 2000 and 2004.

“[ICE] was aware these people [in the Juarez drug organization] were ruthless and powerful,” the informant told Narco News during a recent telephone interview. “If they say kill someone, you do it, or you get killed. I explained that to Customs [ICE], that those are the conditions I would have to work under, and they [the informant’s ICE handlers] said ‘Yes,’ and I began to infiltrate the cartel.”

Recently retired prosecutor will work once again for former boss: John Ashcroft

What happens to your career in America when you oversee a federal investigation in which an informant, paid by the government and with the knowledge of federal agents and prosecutors, is allowed to assist in the torture and murder of a dozen people?

You later land a high-paying job defending well-heeled corporate clients against the government, right?

Experts suggest Mexican weapons-bust press conference may have been staged event

Mexican federal police commander Gen. Rodolfo Cruz Lopez described a weapon seized last month from one of the nation’s deadly “drug cartels” as a .50 caliber anti-aircraft gun that fires 6-inch armor-piercing bullets at the rate of 800 rounds per minute.

Narco-corruption has infected both sides of the border

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has deployed some 40,000 military troops to battle the drug “cartels” in order to stem the flow of drugs north into the United States.

It’s not working; the drugs keep coming.

Leaked memo reveals Customs and Border Protection less than keen on proposal

Despite all the White House-generated diplomacy pushing the cooperation mantra between the U.S. and Mexican governments in the war on drugs, it seems federal law enforcers in the field aren’t embracing the rhetoric across the board.

And a major reason for that hesitation is the concern over the level of corruption within Mexican law enforcement, according to a number of law enforcers who spoke with Narco News.

A recent memo leaked to Narco News also reveals that the narrative being sold to the public by the political pushers of the bi-national drug-war effort isn’t hooking some U.S. law enforcers —who seem to recognize when reality has been cut with denial.

Federal prosecutor resigning, hopes to become new voice for conservatives

Johnny Sutton, the lead U.S. prosecutor for the Western District of Texas, will be stepping down from his U.S. Attorney post effective Sunday, at midnight, on April 19.

His resignation garnered a bit of press in Texas, but has gone largely unnoticed by the national media — which helped to hype Sutton’s career in the wake of the sentences meted out to two Border Patrol agents, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean.

The duo was prosecuted by Sutton’s office and each sentenced to more than a decade in prison for attempting to cover up their roles in shooting a dope smuggler in the posterior in 2005. President Bush, just prior to leaving office this year, commuted the sentences of Ramos and Compean, though did not pardon them for the crime.

Only Three Inquiries Targeting Firearms Exports Conducted Since 2007

The Department of State has weighed in officially on whether the sale of military weapons to Mexico through U.S. private-sector arms exporters might be a source of the high-caliber firearms now being employed by drug trafficking organizations in the bloody drug war south of the border.

More Than $1 billion In Private-Sector Weapons Exports Approved For Mexico Since 2004

Mainstream media and Beltway pundits and politicians in recent months have unleashed a wave of panic in the nation linking the escalading violence in Mexico, and its projected spread into the U.S., to illegal weapons smuggling.

The smokescreen being spread by these official mouthpieces of manufactured consensus is that a host of criminal operators are engaging in straw (or fraudulent) gun purchases, making clandestine purchases at U.S. gun shows or otherwise assembling small caches of weapons here in the states in order to smuggle them south of the border to the “drug cartels.”