DOJ SEEKS DISMISSAL OF ‘FAST AND FURIOUS’ LAWSUIT THAT COULD FORCE HOLDER TO COUGH UP WITHHELD DOCUMENTS

The Blaze
Jason Howerton

The Justice Department on Monday night sought dismissal of a lawsuit by a Republican-led House committee demanding that Attorney General Eric Holder produce records about the botched law enforcement probe of gun-trafficking called Operation Fast and Furious.

President Barack Obama has invoked executive privilege and the attorney general has been found to be in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents that might explain what led the Justice Department to reverse course after initially denying that federal agents had used a controversial tactic called gun-walking in the failed law enforcement operation. The tactic resulted in hundreds of illegally acquired weapons purchased at Arizona gun shops winding up in Mexico, where many of them were recovered from crime scenes. Two guns in Operation Fast and Furious were found on the U.S. side of the border at the scene of a shooting in which U.S. border agent Brian Terry was killed. In a Feb. 4, 2011 letter to Congress, the Justice Department said that agents made every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation to Mexico, which turned out to be incorrect. Ten months later, the department withdrew the letter.

In its court papers, the Justice Department says the Constitution does not permit the courts to resolve the political dispute between the executive branch and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that is seeking the records. The political branches have a long history of resolving disputes over congressional requests without judicial intervention, the court filing said.

If the lawsuit is allowed to go forward, “countless other suits by Congress are sure to follow, given the volume of document requests issued by the dozens of congressional committees that perform oversight functions,” the Justice Department’s court filing stated. “This case thus illustrates vividly why the judiciary must defer to the time-tested political process for resolution of such disputes.”

The Justice Department cited a Supreme Court ruling which said the court lacked jurisdiction to decide a challenge brought by several members of Congress to the constitutionality of the line item veto law.

In the current dispute over records from Operation Fast and Furious, the House asked the court to reject a claim by the president asserting executive privilege, a legal position designed to protect certain internal administration communications from disclosure.

The failure of Holder and House Republicans to work out a deal on the documents led to votes in June that held the attorney general in civil and criminal contempt of Congress.

In Fast and Furious, ATF agents abandoned the agency’s usual practice of intercepting all weapons they believed to be illicitly purchased, often as soon as they were taken out of gun shops. Instead, the goal of the tactic known as “gun-walking” was to track such weapons to high-level arms traffickers, who had long eluded prosecution, and to dismantle their networks. Federal agents lost track of many of the guns. The operation identified more than 2,000 illicitly purchased weapons, and some 1,400 of them have yet to be recovered.

Mexican Diplomat Says America Pretty Much Invited The Sinaloa Drug Cartel Across The Border

Business Insider
Michael Kelley

Leaked emails from the private U.S. security firm Stratfor cite a Mexican diplomat who says the U.S. government works with Mexican cartels to traffic drugs into the United States and has sided with the Sinaloa cartel in an attempt to limit the violence in Mexico.

Many people have doubted the quality of Stratfor's intelligence, but the information from MX1—a Mexican foreign service officer who doubled as a confidential source for Stratfor—seems to corroborate recent claims about U.S. involvement in the drug war in Mexico.

Most notably, the reports from MX1 line up with assertions by a Sinaloa cartel insider that cartel boss Joaquin Guzman is a U.S. informant, the Sinaloa cartel was "given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tons of illicit drugs into Chicago," and Operation Fast and Furious was part of an agreement to finance and arm the Sinaloa cartel in exchange for information used to take down rival cartels.

An email with the subject "Re: From MX1 -- 2" sent Monday, April 19, 2010, to Stratfor vice president of intelligence Fred Burton says:

I think the US sent a signal that could be construed as follows:

"To the [Juárez] and Sinaloa cartels: Thank you for providing our market with drugs over the years. We are now concerned about your perpetration of violence, and would like to see you stop that. In this regard, please know that Sinaloa is bigger and better than [the Juárez cartel]. Also note that [Ciudad Juárez] is very important to us, as is the whole border. In this light, please talk amongst yourselves and lets all get back to business. Again, we recognize that Sinaloa is bigger and better, so either [the Juárez cartel] gets in line or we will mess you up."

In sum, I have a gut feeling that the US agencies tried to send a signal telling the cartels to negotiate themselves. They unilaterally declared a winner, and this is unprecedented, and deserves analysis.

Bill Conroy of Narco News reports that MX1's description matches the publicly available information on Fernando de la Mora Salcedo — a Mexican foreign service officer who studied law at the University of New Mexico and served at the Mexican Consulates in El Paso, Texas, and Phoenix.

In a June 13, 2010, email with the subject "Re: Get follow up from mx1? Thx," MX1 states that U.S. and Mexican law enforcement sent their "signal" by discretely brokering a deal with cartels in Tijuana, just south of San Diego, Calif., which reduced the violence in the area considerably. 

It is not so much a message for the Mexican government as it is for the Sinaloa cartel and [the Juárez cartel] themselves. Basically, the message they want to send out is that Sinaloa is winning and that the violence is unacceptable. They want the CARTELS to negotiate with EACH OTHER. The idea is that if they can do this, violence will drop and the governments will allow controlled drug trades.

The email went on to say that "the major routes and methods for bulk shipping into the US" from Ciudad Juárez, right across the border from El Paso, Texas, "have already been negotiated with US authorities" and that large shipments of drugs from the Sinaloa cartel "are OK with the Americans."

In July a Mexican state government spokesman told Al Jazeera that the CIA and other international security forces "don't fight drug traffickers" as much as "try to manage the drug trade." A mid-level Mexican official told Al Jazeera that based on discussions he's had with U.S. officials working in Ciudad Juárez, the allegations were true.

WikiLeaks has published 2,878 out of what it says is a cache of 5 million internal Stratfor emails (dated between July 2004 and December 2011) obtained by the hacker collective Anonymous around Christmas.

Reports Of Mexican Special Forces Serving As 'Death Squads' In The Drug War

Business Insider
Michael Kelley

Mexican Army Special Forces

Ciudad Juárez, right across the border from El Paso, Texas, was perhaps the most dangerous place in the world between 2008 and 2011 as a “cartel turf war" led to more than 10,000 murders.

But U.S. and Mexican officials told Stratfor that the surge of killings can be partly attributed to Mexican special forces and hitmen who were acting as U.S. informants.

One email from a Mexican diplomat—identified by Narco News as Fernando de la Mora Salcedo—to Stratfor describes special-operations and intelligence units, embedded within the larger Mexican military force being sent to Ciudad Juárez in 2008 and 2009, that would carry out “surgical strikes” against low-level criminals.

The major groups of killers have left the city, scared shitless, to take refuge elsewhere for an indeterminate amount of time... The military will surgically remove cells that had been previously identified, but for whatever reason were not taken down yet. Periods of adjustment will ensue, but the military will fill any void left in terms of territorial control, ultimately causing the competing [drug trafficking organizations] to wait/give up.

The aim of the special forces, according to the Mexican diplomat, was to "give some breathing room to the [cartel] bosses so that they can issue orders to calm things down" and continue to traffic massive amounts of drugs across the border into the U.S. with less social violence..

Narco News' Bill Conroy notes, in the definitive piece about the units he calls "death squads," that the "military cartel" was present in 2008 based on an analysis of murder cases in Ciudad Juárez.

Conroy noticed that "the murders in Juárez are, in almost all cases, not the result of random violence or shootouts between rival drug gangs. In most cases, they are cold-blooded assassinations, often involving coordinated teams of armed, sometimes masked, men who are making use of intelligence, surveillance and paramilitary-like tactics to take out their victims."

Hitmen from Ciudad Juárez were also given the ability to cross borders and kill due to their relationship with U.S. officials, according an email with the subject "Re: INSIGHT-MEXICO/US-Mishandling of ICE informants-US714."

The email cites a "U.S. Law enforcement Officer with direct oversight of border investigations" who says that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was "handling big hitmen from Juárez and letting them kill in the U.S."

An analyst then notes that Stratfor previously covered the subject of cartel hitmen who were also ICE informants.

Recent Fast & Furious Developments Since Univision Broadcast

Daily Bail

Take a step back in time with Big Sis.

If it's this easy to find evidence (20-second search on Youtube), why doesn't the MSM publish the truth and expose Holder and Obama?  This is blatant.  They are even bragging about it.  Where is the outrage?  Where is the accountability?  Why isn't this a huge story?

Here's the answer from a Democratic pollster.

The White House wants you to believe that Holder and Obama knew nothing about Fast & Furious even though you are watching video of the Deputy Attorney General holding a press conference to announce the bold, new program that was 'directed by the President.'

And the worst part is - they are getting away with it.

ABC: Report connects Fast & Furious to murders of 16 teenagers

On January 30, 2010, a commando of at least 20 hit men parked themselves outside a birthday party of high school and college students in Ciudad Juarez.  Near midnight, the assassins, later identified as hired guns for the Mexican cartel La Linea, broke into a one-story house and opened fire on a gathering of nearly 60 teenagers.  Outside, lookouts gunned down a screaming neighbor and several students who had managed to escape.  Fourteen young men and women were killed, and 12 more were wounded.

The U.S. government played a role in the massacre by supplying some of the firearms used by the cartel murderers.  One source called Univision’s findings the 'holy grail' that Congressional investigators have been seeking.  The guns didn’t stop in Mexico, either:

Additional guns, previously unreported by congressional investigators, found their way into the hands of drug traffickers across Latin America in countries such as, Honduras and Colombia, as well as the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

CBS News reminds us that the Obama administration is still hiding Kevin O’Reilly, a key figure in Operation Fast and Furious:

O’Reilly, then a White House National Security staffer, had phone and email exchanges about Fast and Furious from July 2010 to Feb. 2011 with the lead ATF official on the case: ATF Special Agent in Charge Bill Newell. Just days after Newell testified to Congress on July 26, 2011 that he’d shared information with O’Reilly, whom he described as a long time friend, O’Reilly was transferred to Iraq and not available for questioning. Thereafter, he declined interviews with congressional investigators and the IG.

In a letter sent to O’Reilly’s attorney Thursday, Issa and Grassley state that O’Reilly’s “sudden transfer” to Iraq took him out of pocket in their investigation, and placed him in a position that had already been given to somebody else, raising “serious questions about O’Reilly’s assignment in Baghdad (and) the motivation for his transfer there.” …

“Given that O’Reilly was the link connecting the White House to the scandal, and that the President subsequently asserted executive privilege over the documents pertaining to Fast and Furious, it is imperative that the American people get to the bottom of O’Reilly’s involvement with Fast and Furious,” says the letter to O’Reilly’s attorney.

It goes on to say that if O’Reilly does not agree to an interview within 30 days, congressional Republicans will have no choice but to “use compulsory process” or subpoena power to require his testimony.

Watch More News Videos at ABC | 2012 Presidential Election | Entertainment & Celebrity News

Here's the ABC story that goes with the video.

Univision has aggressively covered Fast and Furious, and its most recent major run-in with the scandal came when network anchor Jorge Ramos grilled Obama in an interview on the scandal, asking him why he hasn’t “fired” Holder. During the interview, Obama made at least one false statement relating to Fast and Furious.

Drug war ensnares big banks for letting Mexico cartels stash cash

Prosecutors in the US and Mexico have banks in their crosshairs for helping drug smugglers and money launderers transfer and hold their illegal earnings.

GlobalPost
Nathaniel Parish Flannery

Fake notes were hung out to dry during a protest in
front of HSBC in Mexico City on July 30. The bank was fined for
failing to apply anti-money laundering rules.

On the facade of the tall HSBC bank headquarters here, there’s a dark reflection of the Angel of Independence monument, one of the most iconic landmarks in this capital city.

The towering bank’s central location at the Plaza of Independence is a metaphor for its importance to Mexico’s financial system.

“It’s in the heart of the capital, in the most emblematic part of [the city],” said Myrna de los Santos, a finance professional who works in one of the neighboring glass office buildings. Looking up at HSBC Tower, she said, “This is the bank that’s been accused of laundering money.”

HSBC and other major banks have been accused of helping launder money for the narco criminals seen waging a brutal war in Mexico largely to win drug markets in the United States.

HSBC officials say they are cooperating with investigators. “What happened in Mexico and the US is shameful, it’s embarrassing, it’s very painful for all of us in the firm,” HSBC’s CEO Stuart Gulliver said in a July 30 conference call.

The accusations come as Mexican and US authorities have ramped up crackdowns on transnational crime rings’ vast earnings. Government prosecutors say they are chasing down drug profits and more aggressively targeting the financial institutions that let those profits amass in their vaults.

A US Senate investigation has accused HSBC of laundering $7 billion, transferring funds for Mexican clients through accounts in the Cayman Islands to accounts in the US.

Bank of America allegedly opened and operated accounts for a US-based money laundering racket run by Los Zetas, Mexico’s most violent criminal organization. The Zetas allegedly used Bank of America accounts to buy $4 million worth of horses, and enter and win races, sometimes collecting nearly $1 million per victory, according to a New York Times report. (Bank of America has not been accused of wrongdoing and is reportedly cooperating with a US Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry into the Zetas activities.)

HSBC, Citi, and Spain’s Banco Santander have all been accused of engaging in business transactions with Mexican money exchange houses that are suspected of money laundering.

HSBC is likely to be the first of these to reach a settlement with US authorities this year. On July 30, the bank announced it had set aside $700 million to cover the possible costs of a settlement of the money laundering investigation.

researches and teaches about organized crime at Mexico City’s ITAM university, told GlobalPost the fact that a respected global bank such as HSBC has been pulled into a money laundering scandal in Mexico “shows that it’s not just a Mexico problem [but rather] an international problem.”

Duncan Wood, who 

The recent investigations build on more than a decade of probes into the global flows of illicit cartel capital. One find, in 2006, was particularly emblematic of how drug trafficking routes and illicit money trails overlap.

In April of that year, Mexican soldiers searched a jet that had landed in a small airport 500 miles east of Mexico City. They found 128 black suitcases stuffed with nearly six tons of cocaine, a quantity with a street value of $100 million, Bloomberg reported. Later, investigators discovered the smugglers had used accounts at Bank of America and Wachovia to buy the plane.

Prosecutors in the US began digging deeper into Wachovia’s other dealings in Mexico. In 2007 securities regulators raided the bank’s headquarters in St. Louis. In 2010, the bank, now a subsidiary of Wells Fargo, agreed to a $160 million settlement with the US Justice Department.

The Wachovia investigation and fine — the largest money laundering settlement ever levied against a US bank — apparently did not serve as a deterrent. As drugs continued to cross into the US, criminal organizations continued to use major banks to transfer and launder their money.

Alejandro Hope, a security analyst and former researcher for Mexico's national intelligence agency, told GlobalPost that out of the estimated $65 billion US drug users pay annually for illegal drugs, “6 to 10 billion dollars per year” cross back into Mexico. Other researchers, such as President Bill Clinton’s former anti-drug czar Barry McCaffrey, claim that the annual figure for illicit funds moved back to Mexico could be much higher.

“There are a lot of diverse findings about the quantity of cash from contraband drug sales that annually crosses from the United States to Mexico, some of these estimates go as high as $40 billion,” Ramon Garcia Gibson, an anti-money laundering consultant in Mexico City, told GlobalPost.

Some of this money is stored in cash. For instance, when police raided alleged Chinese methamphetamine producer Zhenli Ye Gon’s Mexican mansion they found $208 million in paper bills.

Apart from copious cash piles, cartels reinvest profits in building up advanced arsenals and sophisticated trafficking methods, from cross-border smuggling tunnels to submarines. But they also send billions of their earnings back north to bank accounts in the US for safekeeping.

Mexico loses an estimated $50 billion per year — almost 5 percent of its gross domestic product — in illicit money outflows of different types, including money laundering, corruption and tax evasion, according to Global Financial Integrity, a nonprofit research and advocacy group in Washington, DC.

In 2007 and 2008, Mexicans used HSBC to process transactions which helped transfer a total of $7 billion to accounts in the United States, according to a report by nonprofit investigative journalism group ProPublica that analyzed a 355-page US Senate document on HSBC’s activities. The Senate’s investigation revealed that, between 2006 and 2009, the bank’s US arm did not engage in any money laundering monitoring regarding transactions with HSBC banks in other countries around the globe.

Now prosecutors on both sides of the border are cracking down on institutions that have served as conduits for massive cash flow with apparently little or no oversight.

On Jan. 22, 2010 a Mexican judge accused the owners of six money changers in Sinaloa and Tijuana, two cartel hotspots, of laundering drug funds through their accounts at the Mexican units of Banco Santander, Citigroup and HSBC. Then, on June 7, 2012, the US Treasury seized assets belonging to relatives of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s most powerful drug trafficker, a man Forbes estimates to be worth $1 billion.

Duncan Wood, of ITAM, explained that the anti-cartel strategy is simple. “Don’t go for the product, there’s always more product. Go for the money,” he said.

In June, the Mexican Finance Department announced it would cap the amount of cash dollar deposits banks can allow. Mexico’s congress is working to pass a new anti-money laundering bill that would place limits on trades in real estate, jewelry, and automobiles, transactions often used by criminals to hide illicit profits.

Hope, the security analyst, told GlobalPost that “the bill in congress could prove significant” by limiting criminals’ ability to make cash purchases.

In July, HSBC agreed to pay Mexico’s financial market regulator a fine of 379 million pesos ($28 million) for failures in detecting and reporting unusual transactions. The bank could now face hundreds of millions of dollars in money laundering fines and settlements in the US.

In the near future, drugs will continue to cross north into the US and money will be sent south into Mexico. The big banks, though, are likely to try harder to detect and prevent money laundering. HSBC in particular will need to burnish its reputation.

Looking up at the massive logo on Mexico City’s HSBC Tower, de los Santos, the finance professional, said, “they’re going to clean up their name and change their policies, but I wouldn’t put my money there.” 

America’s Secret Deal with Mexican Drug Cartels

Global Research
Tom Burghardt

In a story which should have made front page headlines, Narco News investigative journalist Bill Conroy revealed that “A high-ranking Sinaloa narco-trafficking organization member’s claim that US officials have struck a deal with the leadership of the Mexican ‘cartel’ appears to be corroborated in large part by the statements of a Mexican diplomat in email correspondence made public recently by the nonprofit media group WikiLeaks.”

A series of some five million emails, The Global Intelligence Files, were obtained by the secret-spilling organization as a result of last year’s hack by Anonymous of the Texas-based “global intelligence” firm Stratfor.

Bad tradecraft aside, the Stratfor dump offer readers insight into a shadowy world where information is sold to the highest bidder through a “a global network of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards. Stratfor has a mix of covert and overt informants, which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world.”

One of those informants was a Mexican intelligence officer with the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional, or CISEN, Mexico’s equivalent to the CIA. Dubbed “MX1? by Stratfor, he operates under diplomatic cover at the Mexican consulate in Phoenix, Arizona after a similar posting at the consulate in El Paso, Texas.

His cover was blown by the intelligence grifters when they identified him in their correspondence as Fernando de la Mora, described by Stratfor as “being molded to be the Mexican ‘tip of the spear’ in the U.S.”

In an earlier Narco News story, Conroy revealed that “US soldiers are operating inside Mexico as part of the drug war and the Mexican government provided critical intelligence to US agents in the now-discredited Fast and Furious gun-running operation,” the Mexican diplomat claimed in email correspondence.

Those emails disclosed “details of a secret meeting between US and Mexican officials held in 2010 at Fort Bliss, a US Army installation located near El Paso, Texas. The meeting was part of an effort to create better communications between US undercover operatives in Mexico and the Mexican federal police, the Mexican diplomat reveals.”

“However,” Conroy wrote, “the diplomat expresses concern that the Fort Bliss meeting was infiltrated by the ‘cartels,’ whom he contends have ‘penetrated both US and Mexican law enforcement’.”

Such misgivings are thoroughly justified given the fact, as Antifascist Calling reported last spring, that the Mexican government had arrested three high-ranking Army generals over their links to narcotrafficking organizations.

In Conroy’s latest piece the journalist disclosed that the “Mexican diplomat’s assessment of the US and Mexican strategy in the war on drugs, as revealed by the email trail, paints a picture of a ‘simulated war’ in which the Mexican and US governments are willing to show favor to a dominant narco-trafficking organization in order to minimize the violence and business disruption in the major drug plazas, or markets.”

A “simulated war”? Where have we heard that before? Like the bogus “War on Terror” which arms and unleashes throat-slitting terrorists from the CIA’s favorite all-purpose zombie army of “Islamist extremists,” Al Qaeda, similarly, America’s fraudulent “War on Drugs” has been a splendid means of managing the global drug trade in the interest of securing geopolitical advantage over their rivals.

Big cash seizure puts light on Nicaragua drug role

The Guardian
Adriana Gomez Licon

Most days the only vehicles on Highway 15 are battered trucks shuttling grain, coffee beans and cooking oil through the lush, mountainous highlands on the Honduras-Nicaragua border.

Then one recent morning, a convoy of six vans cruised down the two-lane road. All were emblazoned with the logo of the world's largest Spanish-language television network, Televisa, and inside were 18 Mexicans with press badges, high-definition video cameras, microphones and a satellite dish.

Nicaraguan police were waiting. Acting on an anonymous tip from Honduras, officers pulled over the vans and after two days of investigation determined the occupants were falsely posing as employees of Televisa's news division. Hidden beneath the sound boards and screens in three of the vans, officers found black gym bags stuffed with $9.2 million in cash.

The Aug. 20 seizure has pulled back the curtain on Nicaragua's role as a conduit between South American cocaine producers and the Mexican drug cartels that move their product into the United States. It also shows how the gangs are resorting to ever-more inventive ways to move their profits out of the U.S. as authorities crack down harder on suspicious bank transfers and other relatively easy ways of moving money.

"It's been a case that has drawn our attention. We are studying the way organized crime is operating," said Nicaragua's National Police spokesman, Commander Fernando Borge. "Organized crime is powerful and has many resources and it will try in every different way to get across our country."

Nicaraguan police say the cash was destined for Costa Rica, where the fake journalists planned to pay for a load of drugs that had been smuggled into the United States.

Authorities here aren't saying which cartel employed the woman and 17 men arrested — most of them in their 20s or 30s and most with addresses in Mexico City or its suburbs. Testimony in a high-profile trial in progress in Nicaragua has alleged, however, that Nicaragua and Costa Rica are being used as transfer points in the trade between Colombian drug traffickers and the Sinaloa drug cartel, which is one of Mexico's two most powerful criminal organizations.

Costa Rican authorities say the woman arrested, 30-year-old Raquel Alatorre, who is believed to be the leader of the group, had crossed from Nicaragua into their country at least 15 times since 2006, though it was unclear if she had traveled in similar convoys previously.

"We were not investigating them," said Costa Rica's vice minister of security, Celso Gamboa. "We were not very shrewd."

Nicaragua's Institute of Strategic Studies and Public Policy, which tracks how much money is seized from suspected criminals in the country, says a total of $40 million in cash has been confiscated by police over the past seven years, including $7 million last year alone.

"Normally drug dealers don't function like this. This isn't the usual way they operate," said Roberto Orozco, a researcher with the group. "However, it is possible that we're seeing new techniques emerge, with drug dealers disguising themselves as journalists."

The seized 2011 Chevy Express vans, five white and one yellow-and-blue, bore custom-made stickers with Televisa's orange sun logo. The logo was also embroidered in the neck lanyards of the suspects' supposed press badges and stamped on their microphones.

Nicaraguan prosecutors say police had received an anonymous call the previous day from a man in Honduras who said he had overheard the group talking suspiciously about crossing into Nicaragua.

So 13 officers waited south of the border checkpoint and stopped the convoy inside Nicaragua.

The people in the vans gave inconsistent accounts about what stories they were planned to cover in Nicaragua, with some saying they going to produce a piece on tourism, and others saying the topic was crime.

Local media have cited unidentified Nicaraguan authorities as saying the fake journalists claimed they were going to cover the current trial of a Nicaraguan who allegedly helped the Sinaloa cartel smuggle drugs and money through his country to Costa Rica and Colombia. The defendant, Henry Farinas, was charged after a 2011 attack apparently aimed at him killed Argentine folk singer Facundo Cabral, who was being driven by Farinas to a Guatemala airport.

The indictment against the 18 people, obtained by The Associated Press, says they had no way to show authorities that Televisa sent the large contingent on assignment. So police escorted the suspects to the capital city of Managua and kept them at the Holiday Inn for two days while investigators contacted the Mexican Embassy to find out more information about them.

Embassy officials reported that the 18 people were not employees of Televisa, and that justified a thorough search of the vans, the indictment says.

Nicaragua's courts and treasury are now fighting over who gets to keep the money. The archbishop of Managua has also put in a bid, saying the Roman Catholic Church could use the money to help the poor of Nicaragua, the second-poorest nation in the hemisphere. In previous cash seizures, the money was held by the courts until trials were finished and then distributed among law enforcement agencies.

Last Friday, police showed off 16 of the 18 suspects to the news media.

Sirens blaring, ski-masked police officers dressed in black drove the five white vans with the orange Televisa logo onto the parking lot of Nicaragua's National Police headquarters in Managua. Some officers took wads of cash from gym bags for the cameras. Prosecutor Javier Antonio Morazan said in court documents that at least one wad of cash underwent a narcotic trace detector and tested positive for cocaine.

Alatorre and the 17 men will have their first hearing next week on charges of organized crime and money laundering.

Televisa has said since the arrests that the detainees were not its reporters and the vehicles were never in its car fleet. A statement this week said the company may sue the group for pretending to be its reporters.

---

Associated Press writer Cesar Barrentes in San Jose, Costa Rica, contributed to this report.

Supreme Court Clerk Accused of Selling Info to Sinaloa Cartel

In Sight
Elyssa Pachico

The arrest of a former employee of Mexico's Supreme Court and Attorney General’s Office suspected of working with the Sinaloa Cartel raises the question of how much -- and what kind -- of intelligence he may have fed to the criminal group.

Supreme Court clerk Juan Carlos de la Barrera Vite was arrested in June and transferred to a maximum security prison in Jalisco state on August 14.

He is accused of selling the testimony of former Sinaloa Cartel and Beltran Leyva Organization operatives, who became protected witnesses for the government, for up to $60,000. De la Barrera reportedly sold the information to Felipe Cabrera Sarabia, alias “El Inge,” considered one of the top operatives for Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. El Inge was arrested in December and is currently in custody.

De la Barrera primarily worked in the office of Supreme Court Justice Sergio Valls Hernandez, reports Reforma. Between June and November 2010 he worked briefly for the PGR’s organized crime division, and then returned to the division's anti-narcotics unit between June and November 2011. He also worked for the Attorney General’s Office (known by its Spanish initials the PGR) at one point in his nearly 10-year career.

Both the PGR and the Supreme Court have denied that any information from their offices was “compromised” by de la Barrera’s alleged actions. The Supreme Court has emphasized that de la Barrera primarily carried out “administrative” work for the body.

InSight Crime Analysis

De la Barrera is accused of passing along the testimony of Sergio Enrique Villarreal, alias “El Grande,” a former police officer who became a lieutenant for the Beltran Leyva Organization. He was arrested in Mexico in September 2010, and extradited to the US in May 2012. If he became a witness during that time, it would have coincided with de la Barrera working at the PGR’s organized crime division.

De la Barrera was also working at the PRG when authorities arrested another Sinaloa Cartel operative, Hector Adan Ruvalcaba Rivera, alias “La Calentura," in September 2011. De la Barrera is charged of selling La Calentura’s testimony to the Sinaloa Cartel.

It makes sense that the Sinaloa Cartel would be willing to pay significant money for the testimony of protected witnesses, as this would allow them to better gauge what kind of intelligence was accessible to the government. This helps to explain why different judicial functionaries -- from clerks like de la Barrera to magistrates and judges -- come under pressure from organized crime.

Documents: Feds allegedly allowed Sinaloa cartel to move cocaine into U.S. for information

El Paso Times
Diana Washington Valdez

U.S. federal agents allegedly allowed the Sinaloa drug cartel to traffic several tons of cocaine into the United States in exchange for information about rival cartels, according to court documents filed in a U.S. federal court.

The allegations are part of the defense of Vicente Zambada-Niebla, who was extradited to the United States to face drug-trafficking charges in Chicago. He is also a top lieutenant of drug kingpin Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman and the son of Ismael "Mayo" Zambada-Garcia, believed to be the brains behind the Sinaloa cartel.

The case could prove to be a bombshell on par with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' "Operation Fast and Furious," except that instead of U.S. guns being allowed to walk across the border, the Sinaloa cartel was allowed to bring drugs into the United States. Zambada-Niebla claims he was permitted to smuggle drugs from 2004 until his arrest in 2009.

Randall Samborn, assistant U.S. attorney and spokesman for the Justice Department in Chicago, declined comment.

The court in Chicago had a status hearing on Wednesday and ordered the government to respond to allegations in Zambada-Niebla's motion by Sept. 11.

According to the court documents, Mexican lawyer Humberto Loya-Castro, another high-level Sinaloa cartel leader, had his 1995 U.S. drug-trafficking case dismissed in 2008 after serving as an informant for 10 years for the U.S. government.

Guzman and the Zambadas allegedly provided agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration, FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement with information about other Mexican drug traffickers through Loya-Castro.

"Loya himself continued his drug trafficking activities with the knowledge of the United States government without being arrested or prosecuted," the court documents state.

Zambada-Niebla met voluntarily with U.S. federal agents on March 17, 2009, at the Sheraton Hotel in Mexico City, which is near the U.S. Embassy, "for the purpose of his continuing to provide information to the DEA and the U.S. government personally, rather than through Loya," court records allege.

"DEA agents (then) told Loya-Castro to tell Mr. Zambada-Niebla that they wanted to continue the same arrangements with him as they had with Mr. Loya-Castro."

Five hours after the meeting, Mexican authorities arrested Zambada-Niebla and extradited him later to the United States. His father and Guzman are fugitives.

The court documents also allege that the U.S. government is using a "divide and conquer" strategy, "using one drug organization to help against others."

Zambada-Niebla's motion seeks U.S. government records about the 2003 Juárez case involving an informant who participated in several homicides for the Carrillo-Fuentes drug cartel, while under ICE's supervision.

He also requested records about the ATF's "Operation Fast and Furious," which permitted weapons purchased illegally in the United States to be smuggled into Mexico, sometimes by paid U.S. informants and cartel leaders.