drug cartels

Mexican security forces on Tuesday arrested accused drug kingpin Damaso Lopez, believed to be locked in a bloody struggle for control of the Sinaloa Cartel against the sons of its captured leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. The attorney general’s office announced that its agents with the help of the army had captured Lopez, 51, one […]

A mass grave was recently discovered in the Mexican state of Veracruz containing more than 250 human skulls that all appear to have been the victims of cartel violence in recent years. “For many years, the drug cartels disappeared people and the authorities were complacent,” Jorge Winckler, the state attorney general, said in a television […]

Mexico’s plague of drug-gang related violence showed no sign of let-up on Christmas Day – in the western state of Michoacan six severed human heads were found. According to authorities, they were discovered in Jiquilpan, a municipality near the state of Jalisco – a region that has become a battleground for competing drug gangs in recent years. The […]

Every November 2, Mexicans mark the Day of the Dead by honouring deceased loved ones. Given the disproportionate number of deaths produced by Mexico’s US-backed drug war, officially launched in 2006, it is starting to seem like an ever-more tragically appropriate tradition. In a recent investigative piece for The Nation, Dawn Paley details the “spectacular […]

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) describes them, as perhaps, “the most technologically advanced, sophisticated, and violent of these paramilitary enforcement groups.”

The cartel faction announces a new alliance calling themselves Carteles Unidos (United Cartels). The new alliance was allegedly formed between the Vieja Escuela, Grupo Bravo, the Gulf Cartel and two new groups calling themselves Talibans and Wero 74.

Elena met Rafita a few years ago on the malecón, the breakwater along the port of Acapulco. His shyness and his eyes like the eyes of an injured puppy stole her heart, she remembers.  Tourists were throwing coins off their boats and yachts and they were amazed to see him prance along the dock, then nail a […]

We head back and the ‘leaders’ get us lost until some fat ass wannabe with a GPS retraces his logged path; Ski and I are fed up.

2016 looks set to be a bumper year for narco-sub incidents. Just last month, Colombian security forces discovered a 15-metre narco-sub in the jungle near the Pacific coast. A few weeks earlier, the U.S. Coast Guard published footage of a narco-sub intercepted off the Panamanian coast with 5.5 tonnes of cocaine on board, valued at […]

More than two dozen police commanders in Honduras have been fired as part of an effort to clean up a force that has long been infiltrated by organized crime. The civilian commission in charge of reforming the police force announced the firings on Friday, 10 days after five top police generals, including two former police chiefs, were […]

Organized crime networks in Latin America have long made their money off of drugs. But over the past decade, as gold prices have soared, cartels have increasingly turned to illegally mining the metal to earn cash. In Peru and Colombia, they’re now making more money exporting illegal gold than cocaine. Eighty percent of the gold […]

Fears of a third prison escape for Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman are being legitimized by ongoing construction near the prison that is holding him. The tunnel previously used for his escape still exists, and is merely guarded by Mexican state and federal officers. El Chapo and his son have taken to social media hinting at […]