Tag: Cartel

Authorities in Mexico said they’re investigating a video that appears to show gunmen from a drug cartel forcing female bar hostesses to kneel on the floor in a mock execution and extorting money from them.

The video, posted on social media last week, shows one of the gunmen holding a pistol to the head of one woman as she is forced to lie flat on the floor. His foot is on her shoulder as she pleads with him not to shoot.

“Yes, yes, yes. Please don’t shoot. Please,” says the woman in the video.

“This is so you know, the owner of the escort business is the CJNG,” the masked gunman says, referring to the initials of the Jalisco New Generation cartel. Those initials also appear on the tactical vests the gunmen are wearing.

“You have to report to us every week,” the gunman says, though he did not say how much the women will be forced to pay.

The Jalisco cartel — which the Department of Justice calls “one of the five most dangerous transnational criminal organizations in the world” — is one of the groups that have waged a bloody years-long turf war in the north-central state of Guanajuato, which has Mexico’s highest number of homicides. Authorities there said Friday they are studying the video to determine if its authentic, or where it was taped, noting they did not yet have any evidence it was taped in their state.

The gunman says all bar hostesses or waitresses will be forced to pay protection money, and that the cartel will distribute bracelets to show who has paid and who hasn’t. Those who don’t pay will be killed, he threatened in colloquial terms.

Drug cartels in Mexico are increasingly branching out into extortion, kidnapping and demanding protection money from all sorts of businesses, including immigrant smugglers.

During last year’s upsurge in people crossing the U.S. border from Mexico, some migrants were given bracelets to wear, showing which gang had smuggled them and, in some cases, where they were headed.

Guanajuato-based security analyst David Saucedo said that drug cartels have reached new heights in controlling who has paid up and who hasn’t, including inspection-style stickers on some frequently-extorted vehicles, like buses.

“Some organized crime groups are distributing stickers to show who has paid, and who hasn’t,” Saucedo said.

He noted that, while some businesses have still not been targeted by the extortion racket, the shake-downs are growing ever wider.

“As time goes on, more businesses are added to the list of extortions,” he noted.

They need not even be very lucrative businesses. For example, in Guanajuato and the southern Mexico state of Guerrero, drug cartels have shot up or burned tortilla shops for failing to pay protection money — or paying it to a rival gang. Tortillas in Mexico sell for about 65 cents per pound, with relatively small profit margins.

In April, the U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions against members or associates of the Jalisco cartel who apparently went into a side business of timeshare fraud that allegedly targeted elderly Americans.

The Jalisco cartel is better known for producing millions of doses of deadly fentanyl and smuggling them into the United States disguised to look like Xanax, Percocet or oxycodone. Such pills cause about 70,000 overdose deaths per year in the United States.

The cartel’s leader, Nemesio Oseguera, “El Mencho,” is among the most sought by Mexican and U.S. authorities.

Nine people are dead, including four women, after gunmen burst into a bar and opened fire in the violence-wracked Mexican state of Guanajuato, authorities said Thursday.

It was at least the third such bar massacre in as many months in Guanajuato, where a local gang is fighting a turf war with Jalisco cartel. The common denominator in the attacks is that the assailants have simply tried to kill everyone in the bars, including waitresses.

In the attack Wednesday night in the town of Apaseo el Alto, the attackers left hand-written posters on the blood-covered floor of the bar. The messages were signed by the Santa Rosa de Lima gang, whose now-imprisoned leader is known as the “Marro,” or Sledgehammer.

The messages appeared to accuse the bars’ owners of supporting the rival Jalisco cartel.

Photos from the scene showed the bodies of several mini-skirted waitresses slumped in pools of blood at the bar.

The municipal government of Apaseo el Alto said that two other women were wounded in the attack but are in stable condition.

In the hours before the attack, 18 vehicles were torched in the areas around Apaseo el Alto.

More than 2,100 murders were registered in Guanajuato, a state of six million, between January and August, according to government figures.

In October, a dozen people, six of them women, were killed in an attack on a bar in another Guanajuato city. A similar attack on a bar in another town left 10 dead in September.

Guanajuato-based security analyst David Saucedo said the attacks were targeted against specific bars – whose owners may have refused to pay protection money or sold drugs from rival gangs – but were indiscriminate once the targets were selected.

“Some of the attacks have been carried out to kill drug dealers, lookouts or cartel members who were having a night out at the bars,” said Saucedo. “But they become massacres because they kill waitresses and customers, as well.”

There are signs that the conflict in Guanajuato, Mexico’s most violent state, has become a proxy battle between Mexico’s two most powerful drug cartels.

The Sinaloa cartel now appears to be backing the Santa Rosa de Lima gang in its fight against Jalisco.

The Department of Justice considers the Jalisco cartel to be “one of the five most dangerous transnational criminal organizations in the world.” The cartel’s leader, Nemesio Oseguera, “El Mencho,” is among the most sought by Mexican and U.S. authorities.

The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration told CBS News that the Jalisco cartel is one of the Mexican cartels that are behind the influx of fentanyl in the U.S. that’s killing tens of thousands of Americans.

“Those cartels are acting with calculated, deliberate treachery to get fentanyl to the United States and to get people to buy it through fake pills, by hiding it in other drugs, any means that they can take in order to drive addiction and to make money,”  DEA Administrator Anne Milgram told “CBS Mornings.”

AFP contributed to this report.

Mexico’s Roman Catholic Church has suspended a controversial priest who has advised parishioners to carry guns to fight off drug cartels. Better known as “Father Pistolas,” Rev. Alfredo Gallegos is a priest in the violence-plagued western state of Michoacan who has himself sometimes carried a weapon.

A circular from the Archdiocese of Morelia, the state capital, instructed other priests not to allow the Rev. Gallegos to celebrate Mass.

While the archdiocese did not answer phone calls seeking to confirm the order, a priest in a neighboring diocese who was not authorized to be quoted by name confirmed the authenticity of the order Wednesday.

The order, dated Sept. 21, did not specify a reason for the indefinite suspension imposed earlier that month, saying only that Gallegos “had been admonished on several occasions” for something.

Even for Michoacan, it was surprising when the Rev. Gallegos called from the pulpit in 2021 for parishioners to arm themselves against warring drug gangs.

“The cartel gunmen come, they take the livestock, they screw your wife and daughter, and you do nothing,” the Rev. Alfredo Gallegos said in a sermon. “Well, get yourself a gun, the government can go to hell.”

“We have to defend our lives,” Gallegos continued.

Mexican law forbids most civilians from owning almost all firearms, except for extremely low caliber hunting rifles or shotguns.

But Michoacan has a history of armed civilian “self defense” vigilante militia movements dating from 2013 and 2014. Back then vigilantes managed to chase the dominant Knights Templar cartel out, but rival cartels like the Viagras and the Jalisco cartel have moved in. Kidnappings, killings and shootings have prompted thousands to flee their homes.

At the time, Gallegos was backed by some fellow Roman Catholic clergy.

The Rev. Gregorio López, a priest known for once wearing a flak vest while celebrating Mass, has spent the last few years running shelters for people who have fled their homes due to violence. He has also tried to help get asylum or refugee status for Michoacan residents in the United States.

López called Gallegos’ sermon “the cry of the people.”

“He is trying to be the voice of the people, and that is the feeling of the community, that they should be armed,” said López, who served as a sort of spiritual adviser for some of the self-defense groups in 2014.

Mexico is a notoriously dangerous country for priests’ own personal safety.

In June, two priests and a tour guide were gunned down in a church in Mexico. Priests Javier Campos, 79, and Joaquin Mora, 81, were shot dead in the town of Cerocahui “while trying to defend a man who was seeking refuge,” according to the order, also known as the Society of Jesus.

The church’s Catholic Multimedia Center said seven priests have been murdered under the current administration, which took office in December 2018, and at least two dozen under the former president, who took office in 2012. In 2016, three priests were killed in just one week in Mexico.