Face of Mexico's drug war dies in chopper crash APAP – 3 hrs ago
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican Secretary of the Interior Francisco Blake Mora, a leading figure in the country's deadly war with drug traffickers, died Friday in a helicopter crash on his way to a meeting of judicial officials. He was 45.
Blake Mora was President Felipe Calderon's point man in the all-out military and law-enforcement push against traffickers, frequently traveling to violence-torn cities for meetings with besieged state and local security officials.
For many Mexicans, he embodied the government's get-tough attitude on the narcotics business, publicly pledging on many occasions to keep bringing the fight to the traffickers instead of backing down.
He often promised to step up the presence of troops and federal police in violent areas, and not leave until and drug gang members there were caught.
"Organized crime, in its desperation, resorts to committing atrocities that we can't and shouldn't tolerate as a government and as a society," Blake Mora said after investigators found more than 100 bodies in pits near the U.S. border.
He later announced a five-point initiative to investigate the crimes and to increase security, including the federal monitoring of buses such as those used by the migrant victims.
Blake Mora oversaw the government's response to natural disasters like the massive oil pipeline disaster that laid waste to parts of the central city of San Martin Texmelucan last year, killing at least 28 people.
He led the creation of a new national identity card for youths under 18, with modern features including digitalized fingerprints and iris images, to prevent criminals from using false IDs.
Trained as a lawyer, Blake Mora started his political career in the mid-1990s as an official in his native Tijuana. He served as a federal congressman for Calderon's National Action Party from 2000 to 2003, and as a local legislator in the northern state of Baja California from 2004 to 2007.
In November 2007, he was named interior secretary for Baja California, rising in July 2010 to the national position he held until his death. Calderon lost another interior secretary, Juan Camilo Mourino, in a plane crash in Mexico City in November 2008. http://news.yahoo.com/face-mexicos-drug-war-dies-chopper-crash-190513979.html
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Mexico's top Cabinet secretary dies in crash .. [videos/photos inside]
APBy E. EDUARDO CASTILLO - Associated Press | AP – 13 mins ago
MEXICO CITY (AP) — The country's top Cabinet secretary, Francisco Blake Mora, a key figure in Mexico's battle with drug cartels, died Friday in a helicopter crash that President Felipe Calderon said was probably an accident.
Blake Mora, 45, was the second interior minister Calderon has lost in an air crash during his administration.
Despite some tendencies to suspect a hit on the top officials leading Calderon's offensive against organized crime, the crash that killed Blake Mora and seven others may have had to do with bad weather. A Learjet that slammed into a Mexico City street in 2008, killing former interior secretary Juan Camilo Mourino and 15 others, was blamed on pilot error.
One of Blake Mora's last postings on his Twitter account commemorated the loss of Mourino. "Today we remember Juan Camilo Mourino three years after his death, a person who was working to build a better Mexico," he tweeted on Nov. 4.
Blake Mora's death, while a blow to the government, is not likely to change policy or day-to-day operations.
Calderon, visibly emotional over the loss, said the Super Puma helicopter was flying in fog when it went down in a remote area southeast of Mexico City. Still, he said all possible causes were under investigation. He said the pilot had sufficient expertise.
"Mexico has lost a great patriot ... and I lost a dear friend," said Calderon, who struggled to maintain composure at one point during an address to the country. "He was not only an exemplary minister, he was an exemplary Mexican."
President Barack Obama called Calderon to offer his condolences.
Calderon appeared to try to quell any suggestions of sabotage, saying Blake Mora's helicopter "was always under guard" in the hangar of Mexico's equivalent of the Secret Service and that it had recently undergone maintenance.
Authorities said the undersecretary for human rights, Felipe Zamora, was among the seven others killed, including the pilot.
Calderon appointed Blake Mora as interior secretary in July 2010. That put him in charge of coordinating domestic policies including security, human rights, migration and the president's relation with the legislature and opposition parties.
Blake Mora was traveling to a prosecutors' meeting in the neighboring state of Morelos when the helicopter went down in a mountainous area of Chalco in the state of Mexico on the border with Mexico City.
"In the morning, there was a whole lot of fog," said homemaker Marisol Palacios, who lives on the lower slopes of the hill where the crash occurred.
She said she didn't hear the crash and wasn't aware anything had happened until helicopters carrying rescue teams arrived. Video of the wreckage suggested the helicopter plowed into the hillside and broke in half, but did not explode or burn.
Blake Mora started his political career in the mid-1990s as an official in his native Tijuana and served as a federal congressman through the 2000s, as well as interior secretary of Baja California.
As Calderon's point man in the government's war against organized crime, he frequently traveled to the country's most dangerous places for meetings with besieged state and local security officials.
He was an embodiment of the Mexican government's get-tough attitude, publicly pledging to bring the fight to the traffickers instead of backing down.
"Organized crime, in its desperation, resorts to committing atrocities that we can't and shouldn't tolerate as a government and as a society," he said.
He also oversaw response to disasters, such as flooding and the massive oil pipeline explosion that laid waste to parts of the central city of San Martin Texmelucan last year, killing at least 28 people.
He led the creation of a new national identity card for youths under 18, with modern features including digitalized fingerprints and iris images, to prevent criminals from using false IDs.
Blake Mora's funeral was scheduled for Saturday.
Calderon canceled many of his appearances, including a trip to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting of world leaders in Hawaii next week.
"Polls have been showing that insecurity now tops poverty as the No. 1 concern among Mexicans, and my sense is an accident like this or an event like this ... is going to increase the senses of uncertainty and insecurity," said George W. Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Suspicions commonly swirl around the deaths of prominent people in Mexico. It was hard for many to believe that two interior secretaries could die in air accidents in the same administration.
"This is very unfortunate," said Sinaloa Congressman Manuel Clouthier, whose own father, a popular politician in Calderon's National Action Party, died in a still-unexplained highway accident in 1989. "There are many coincidences because now we have two interior ministers (lost) in one presidential term ... who knows if we'll ever really know what happened."
In the crash that killed Mourino, the jet smashed into rush-hour traffic in a posh Mexico City business district, killing all nine on board and seven on the ground. Mexican investigators blamed the Learjet 45 crash on the turbulence from a larger plane flying ahead.
The investigation found that the pilots were slow to follow the control tower's instructions to reduce speed and appeared to be nearly one nautical mile too close behind a Boeing 767-300 on the same flight path to Mexico City's international airport.
Also killed in the crash was former anti-drug prosecutor Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, who had been the target of at least one previous assassination plot.
The Mexican government provided a detailed account of the crash aimed at quelling widespread rumors that the plane was brought down by powerful and increasingly violent drug cartels.
In 2005, a helicopter crash blamed on poor weather conditions killed Mexico's top police official, public safety secretary Ramon Martin Huerta, who was head of federal police, and seven other people.
U.S. Agents Launder Mexican Profits of Drug Cartels
A crime scene in Monterrey, Mexico, last week. Drug-related violence has claimed the lives of more than 40,000 people since late 2006, Mexican officials say. Josue Gonzalez/Reuters
Interactive Graphic The Reach of Mexico's Drug Cartels Mexican drug trafficking cartels “represent the greatest organized crime threat to the United States,” according to a recent Justice Department report. The cartels have waged increasingly violent battles with one another, as well as with the Mexican government, which began an aggressive crackdown in 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/03/22/us/BORDER.html
They said agents had deposited the drug proceeds in accounts designated by traffickers, or in shell accounts set up by agents.
The officials said that while the D.E.A. conducted such operations in other countries, it began doing so in Mexico only in the past few years. The high-risk activities raise delicate questions about the agency’s effectiveness in bringing down drug kingpins, underscore diplomatic concerns about Mexican sovereignty, and blur the line between surveillance and facilitating crime. As it launders drug money, the agency often allows cartels to continue their operations over months or even years before making seizures or arrests.
Agency officials declined to publicly discuss details of their work, citing concerns about compromising their investigations. But Michael S. Vigil, a former senior agency official who is currently working for a private contracting company called Mission Essential Personnel, said, “We tried to make sure there was always close supervision of these operations so that we were accomplishing our objectives, and agents weren’t laundering money for the sake of laundering money.”
Another former agency official, who asked not to be identified speaking publicly about delicate operations, said, “My rule was that if we are going to launder money, we better show results. Otherwise, the D.E.A. could wind up being the largest money launderer in the business, and that money results in violence and deaths.”
Those are precisely the kinds of concerns members of Congress have raised about a gun-smuggling operation known as Fast and Furious, in which agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed people suspected of being low-level smugglers to buy and transport guns across the border in the hope that they would lead to higher-level operatives working for Mexican cartels. After the agency lost track of hundreds of weapons, some later turned up in Mexico; two were found on the United States side of the border where an American Border Patrol agent had been shot to death.
Former D.E.A. officials rejected comparisons between letting guns and money walk away. Money, they said, poses far less of a threat to public safety. And unlike guns, it can lead more directly to the top ranks of criminal organizations.
“These are not the people whose faces are known on the street,” said Robert Mazur, a former D.E.A. agent and the author of a book about his years as an undercover agent inside the Medellín cartel in Colombia. “They are super-insulated. And the only way to get to them is to follow their money.”
Another former drug agency official offered this explanation for the laundering operations: “Building up the evidence to connect the cash to drugs, and connect the first cash pickup to a cartel’s command and control, is a very time consuming process. These people aren’t running a drugstore in downtown L.A. that we can go and lock the doors and place a seizure sticker on the window. These are sophisticated, international operations that practice very tight security. And as far as the Mexican cartels go, they operate in a corrupt country, from cities that the cops can’t even go into.”
The laundering operations that the United States conducts elsewhere — about 50 so-called Attorney General Exempt Operations are under way around the world — had been forbidden in Mexico after American customs agents conducted a cross-border sting without notifying Mexican authorities in 1998, which was how most American undercover work was conducted there up to that point.
But that changed in recent years after President Felipe Calderón [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/felipe_calderon/index.html ] declared war against the country’s drug cartels and enlisted the United States to play a leading role in fighting them because of concerns that his security forces had little experience and long histories of corruption.
Today, in operations supervised by the Justice Department and orchestrated to get around sovereignty restrictions, the United States is running numerous undercover laundering investigations against Mexico’s most powerful cartels. One D.E.A. official said it was not unusual for American agents to pick up two or three loads of Mexican drug money each week. A second official said that as Mexican cartels extended their operations from Latin America to Africa, Europe and the Middle East, the reach of the operations had grown as well. When asked how much money had been laundered as a part of the operations, the official would only say, “A lot.”
“If you’re going to get into the business of laundering money,” the official added, “then you have to be able to launder money.”
Former counternarcotics officials, who also would speak only on the condition of anonymity about clandestine operations, offered a clearer glimpse of their scale and how they worked. In some cases, the officials said, Mexican agents, posing as smugglers and accompanied by American authorities, pick up traffickers’ cash in Mexico. American agents transport the cash on government flights to the United States, where it is deposited into traffickers’ accounts, and then wired to companies that provide goods and services to the cartel.
In other cases, D.E.A. agents, posing as launderers, pick up drug proceeds in the United States, deposit them in banks in this country and then wire them to the traffickers in Mexico.
The former officials said that the drug agency tried to seize as much money as it laundered — partly in the fees the operatives charged traffickers for their services and another part in carefully choreographed arrests at pickup points identified by their undercover operatives.
And the former officials said that federal law enforcement agencies had to seek Justice Department approval to launder amounts greater than $10 million in any single operation. But they said that the cap was treated more as a guideline than a rule, and that it had been waived on many occasions to attract the interest of high-value targets.
“They tell you they’re bringing you $250,000, and they bring you a million,” one former agent said of the traffickers. “What’s the agent supposed to do then, tell them no, he can’t do it? They’ll kill him.”
It is not clear whether such operations are worth the risks. So far there are few signs that following the money has disrupted the cartels’ operations, and little evidence that Mexican drug traffickers are feeling any serious financial pain. Last year, the D.E.A. seized about $1 billion in cash and drug assets, while Mexico seized an estimated $26 million in money laundering investigations, a tiny fraction of the estimated $18 billion to $39 billion in drug money that flows between the countries each year.
Mexico has tightened restrictions on large cash purchases and on bank deposits in dollars in the past five years. But a proposed overhaul of the Mexican attorney general’s office has stalled, its architects said, as have proposed laws that would crack down on money laundered through big corporations and retail chains.
“Mexico still thinks the best way to seize dirty money is to arrest a trafficker, then turn him upside down to see how much change falls out of his pockets,” said Sergio Ferragut, a professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico and the author of a book on money laundering, which he said was “still a sensitive subject for Mexican authorities.”
Mr. Calderón boasts that his government’s efforts — deploying the military across the country — have fractured many of the country’s powerful cartels and led to the arrests of about two dozen high-level and midlevel traffickers.
But there has been no significant dip in the volume of drugs moving across the country. Reports of human rights violations by police officers and soldiers have soared. And drug-related violence has left more than 40,000 people dead since Mr. Calderón took office in December 2006.
The death toll is greater than in any period since Mexico’s revolution a century ago, and the policy of close cooperation with Washington may not survive.
“We need to concentrate all our efforts on combating violence and crime that affects people, instead of concentrating on the drug issue,” said a former foreign minister, Jorge G. Castañeda, at a conference [ https://www.cato.org/drugconference/ ] hosted last month by the Cato Institute in Washington. “It makes absolutely no sense for us to put up 50,000 body bags to stop drugs from entering the United States.”
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