The Longest Romance (17 page)

That was one Colombian bust involving seven tons of cocaine bound for Cuba, by the way. One ton of cocaine has a wholesale price of about $10 million. Recall that the (generously) estimated combined gross for all Cuban casinos in 1958 was about $13 million per year in the dollars of the time. And you're telling us, Mr. T.J. English, that organized crime “lost” Cuba to the Castro revolution?

On Mother's Day 2012 police near Monterrey, Mexico found the bodies of 43 men and six women along a highway. The bodies were headless and so badly hacked up that for most of them identification proved impossible. Two weeks earlier, 23 bodies had been displayed just across the U.S. border. Fourteen were decapitated and nine others—all badly battered and disfigured—hanged by the necks from an overpass. Fifty thousand people have been killed in Mexico's drug wars in the past six years.
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No director could credibly create a
Godfather, Scarface
or
Goodfellas
from the Mexican cartels. No brutal-but-likeable Tony Montanas or Mikey Corleones here. Steven Soderbergh's
Traffic
best captured the blanket sleaze, treachery and horror of the (mostly for now) Mexican drug wars.

“To a great extent,” Los Zetas “are the ones who have caused this spiral of violence in recent years,” according to Jorge Chabat, a Mexican expert on organized crime. The Zetas are dedicated to “kidnapping, extortion, people-trafhcking, collecting protection money, and murdering people,” while the Sinaloa cartel “is more traditional. They kill their rivals, but there is no evidence that they are involved in other types of crimes,” added Chabat.
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“These Zetas want to be known as the meanest, most sadistic criminal organization in at least the Americas if not the world,”
explains Professor George Grayson of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. In December 2009, just across the Rio Grande from McCallen, Texas in Reynosa, Mexican cops found not human bodies but portions of bodies: severed heads, torsos and limbs, all badly mutilated and lying on a tarmac in splashes of drying blood. “See. Hear. Shut up, if you want to stay alive,” read a note written in blood on a crude billboard nearly.
¹²

In 2010 near Tamaulipas, just across the border from Texas' Zapata County, Mexican police unearthed a mass grave containing the bodies of 58 men and 14 women. Most of the victims were not Mexicans but Central American migrants with no apparent links to the drug trade. They either refused to join the Zetas as couriers or refused to pay ransom for passage through their
plaza
(turf).
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You'd never guess it from the media, much less the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, much less Mexican officials, but Central Americans caught sneaking into Mexico greatly envy the treatment of Mexicans caught sneaking into the U.S. The shelters that house these hapless Central Americans in southern Mexico, according to the Rev. Alejandro Solalinde who ministers in one, have been infiltrated by Zetas, who mingle with the detainees to determine which are headed to the U.S. More importantly, the Zetas want to know which of these detainees have relatives in the U.S. These migrants then became valuable for kidnapping. Practice shows that their U.S.-based relatives are most cooperative with ransom for their kidnapped and tortured family-members.
¹⁴

More alarming to their mobster rivals, in 2010 the Zetas broke the “golden rule.” While driving from their temporary office at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Mexico City to a meeting in Monterrey, two U.S. ICE agents were ambushed and shot. One died and the other was badly wounded. “This always brings down too much heat,” lamented a Zeta rival.

Unlike the mobsters who helped build a very few casinos in Havana, the Zetas recognize no “Untouchables.” The severed heads of Mexico's Eliot Nesses often rot on pikes in the sun while
their disemboweled bodies hang from bridges alongside those of the cartel's snitches, rivals, and recalcitrant ransom-payers.
“Plata o plomo”
(“silver or lead”), Los Zetas cheekily call their “offers you can't refuse” in extortion.

Felipe Calderon hadn't been sworn in as Mexican president for a week before he sent 40,000 federal troops to the Mexico-U.S. border. To give him credit, he didn't promise a rose garden; “the conflict will intensify before it is brought under control,” he admitted at the time. Perhaps partly to blame for the intensification is the fact that most of Los Zetas' officer corps are deserters from elite units of the Mexican armed forces.

But this is no lateral career-move. The pay is much better on the Zetas' side, as even some Mexican doctors have noticed. The Gulf cartel now employs doctors to supervise their torture and amputation sessions. An overzealous interrogation often leads to a victim dying too soon, and thus rendered useless. But under a doctor's supervision the questioning can be expertly prolonged and the desired answers patiently extracted.

“Many of Mexico's existing drug cartels will kill their enemies and snitches, but not go out of their way to do it. The Zetas look forward to inflicting fear on their targets.” So says Professor George Grayson.
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In 2009 retired Mexican general Enrique Tello Quinones was appointed to crack down on the rampant drug-trafficking by Los Zetas in the Cancun area of the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, which is also home to about seven thousand Cubans. These aren't exiles, however. They enjoy a form of dual nationality and can travel back and forth perfectly legally. Quinones had been on the job for all of a week when he and three associates were kidnapped, tortured and murdered. Some say he was closing in on the cartel's political protection.
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Among those arrested for the murder was a Cuban named Boris Del Valle, nephew of Cuba's former and long-time minister of the interior Sergio del Valle. Boris is also a relative of Fidel
Castro's common-law wife, Dalia Del Valle. “El Boris,” as he was also known, had worked for decades as a Cuban G-2 (military intelligence) officer. No doubt his KGB-trained dad had helped his son's impressive career-trajectory. At the time of his arrest Boris was serving officially as the security-assessor for Cancun's mayor, Gregorio Sanchez, who himself was arrested the following year and charged with a string of crimes including money-laundering and trafficking in drugs and illegal immigrants—all in cahoots with Los Zetas.
¹⁷

Sanchez was running for governor of Mexico's state of Quintana Roo (which includes Cancun and the Caribbean “Mexican Riviera”) at the time of his arrest. Among his campaign pledges was to root out drug-related corruption. His security-assessor's arrest a year earlier had greatly “shocked” him.

Also interesting, Gregorio Sanchez is married to a Cuban woman named Niurka Saliva, daughter of one of Cuba's top intelligence (Ministry of the Interior) officials. According to police sources, Boris Del Valle worked closely with the Sanchez couple; he was the hands-on operative for the smuggling of drugs and humans into the U.S. with help from Los Zetas and a sophisticated visa-counterfeiting operation that had all the earmarks of Cuban DGI technology.
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In brief, according to some of Mexico's most diligent investigative reporters, Fidel Castro's minion “El Boris” had set up his own police and military fiefdom in the Cancun area working handin-glove with Los Zetas. He also imported hundreds of fellow Castroite functionaries to staff his smuggling operation. Most of these Cuban agents entered Mexico under the guise of “cultural exchanges,” also a major initiative of the Obama State Department with Cuba.
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At the time of Sanchez's arrest, Mexican investigative reporter Raymundo Riva Palaci ran an article in Mexico's prestigious
El Financiero
newspaper entitled, “Cuban Intelligence's Penetration” of Cancun.

In June 2010 the Mexican news organization SIPSE ran an investigative report saying: “The Cuban Mafia seeks to use our state as a trampoline [into the U.S.] for illegals.”

And here, perhaps, we see why Fidel Castro loudly joined the liberal rants against Arizona's SB 1070- “A brutal violation of human rights!” is how Governor Brewer's law was denounced by the Stalinist dictator.

Governor Brewer's law probably stung the Castro regime hard—and right where it hurts most. The drug and human contraband—including Cubans, Russians, Chinese and perhaps Al-Qaeda-affiliated Somali terrorists—from their little Mexican fiefdom and way-station, courtesy of Gregorio Sanchez, his Castroite wife, his Castroite “security-assessor” and Los Zetas, were mostly bound for the U.S., with Arizona a probable entry-point.

Connecting a few dots regarding the above-mentioned human contraband: on June 4, 2010 the
New York Daily News
reported that “Anthony Joseph Tracy, 35, was set free after pleading guilty to human-smuggling charges.... Tracy, a former informant to two U.S. intelligence agencies, was collared at JFK Airport last January. He copped to helping 272 Somalis illegally enter the U.S. from Kenya though
Cuba.
Tracy allegedly helped the Somalis
get travel visas to Cuba.
After traveling from Kenya to Dubai to Moscow to Cuba, they then went to South America before
entering the United States through the border in Mexico.”
(emphasis mine)

The Border Patrol calls them OTMs (Other Than Mexicans) and The Department of Homeland Security, SIAs (Special Interest Aliens) . These are people from “Special Interest Nations” (Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan) caught trying to enter the U.S. from Mexico.

In 2007 National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell confirmed to the
El Paso Times
that terrorists were definitely using the Mexican border to enter the U.S. “Coming up through the Mexican border is a path,” he said. “Now are they doing it in great numbers? No. Because we're finding them and we're identifying them and we've got watch lists and we're keeping them at bay. There are numerous situations where people are alive today because we caught them [the terrorists].”

Testifying before a congressional committee in 2006, FBI Director Robert Mueller confirmed that some Hezbollah terrorists had crossed into the U.S. from Mexico. Then, for obvious security reasons, he clammed up. A year later Mueller told reporters that “we have had indications that leaders of other terrorist groups may be contemplating ... having persons come across assuming identities of others, and trying to get across the border. There is intelligence that indicates there have been discussions on that.”

“Mexican drug cartels, including the Zetas, have infiltrated 276 U.S. cities and represent the nation's most serious organized-crime threat;”
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this according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which somehow also declares our border “safe and secure.”

In 2009 the U.S. DEA launched Operation Xcellerator, billed as a “nationwide takedown” of Mexican drug-traffickers. Taken down were more than 750 members of the Sinaloa cartel. The arrests were made from sea to shining sea, with many in Washington, D.C. itself, not far from DEA headquarters. In the process the DEA also seized 13 tons of cocaine, eight tons of marijuana, a ton of methamphetamine 149 motor vehicles, three planes, three boats and 169 weapons. On the Mexican side, the cartel's arsenal included rocket-propelled grenades, shoulder-mounted missiles and attack helicopters.

These types of weapons didn't come courtesy of Eric Holder's “Fast and Furious.”

“Several reports, citing U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence sources, document that Hezbollah operatives have provided
weapons and explosives training to drug-trafficking organizations that operate along the U.S. border with Mexico”—this according to testimony by Roger Noriega, former U.S. ambassador to the OAS, to the House Committee on Homeland Security's Subcommittee on Counter-terrorism and Intelligence on July 7, 2011. “But the U.S. and Mexican governments have declined to share information publicly on these cases.” Continued ambassador Noriega: “Our inquiries to at least one Mexican official about a specific arrest of a suspected Hezbollah operative in Mexico in June 2010 were met with the response, ‘Don't ask about that.'”

“If our government and responsible partners in Latin America fail to act,” Noriega added, “I believe there will be an attack on U.S. personnel, installations or interests in the Americas as soon as Hezbollah operatives believe that they are capable of such an operation without implicating their Iranian sponsors in the crime.”

The arrest of a Hezbollah member tasked with setting up a cell in Tijuana was confirmed in a memo from the Tucson Police Department in April 2010. “Many experts believe Hezbollah and drug cartels have worked together for decades.” wrote U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “Hezbollah operates almost like a Mafia family in Northern Mexico, often demanding protection money and ‘taxes' from local inhabitants.” She also noted that lately gang tattoos of many prisoners in Arizona jails are written in Farsi.

According to Sheriff “Sigi” Gonzalez of Zapata county, Texas, the practice of beheading enemies is relatively new to the Mexican gangs and ma have been inspired by Middle Eastern terrorists traveling through Central America and Mexico.

Perhaps related to this issue, in September 2011 the Italian daily
Corriere della Sera
reported that Hezbollah was setting up a base of operations in Cuba in order “to extend its ability to reach Israeli targets in Latin America.” According to the Tel Aviv daily
Yedioth Ahronoth,
three members of Hezbollah had already arrived in Cuba to set up the cell, which will allegedly “include 23 operatives,
hand-picked by Talal Hamia, a senior member tasked with heading the covert operation.” The clandestine terror operation was reportedly called The Caribbean Case, and was mainly a base for logistics purposes, including “intelligence collection, networking
and document forgery.”
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(my emphasis)