Mexico’s Largest Pot Bust Likely Hit Sinaloa Gang
Oct 19, 2010 Comments Off Grizz
AP
MEXICO CITY – Mexico’s largest-ever seizure of marijuana packaged for sale is even bigger than the original estimate of 105 tons and probably belonged to the powerful Sinaloa cartel, authorities said Tuesday.
The government so far had counted 15,000 packages – 5,000 more than first announced after the seizure during early-morning raids Monday in the border city of Tijuana, said Alejandro Poire, President Felipe Calderon’s security spokesman.
Authorities were still weighing the haul Tuesday to determine just how much bigger it is than originally thought, he said.
“There are indications that it belongs to the organization of the Pacific,” said Poire, using another common name for the Sinaloa cartel headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
Soldiers and police grabbed the U.S.-bound marijuana in pre-dawn raids in three neighborhoods after police arrested 11 people following a shootout, army Gen. Alfonso Duarte Mujica said at a news conference Monday.
He said the drugs had an estimated street value of 4.2 billion pesos, about $340 million.
The drugs were wrapped in different colors and labeled with apparently coded phrases and pictures that included Homer Simpson.
The bust occurred after Tijuana municipal police on patrol came under fire from gunmen in a convoy of vehicles, Duarte said. One police officer and one suspect were injured.
The Sinaloa cartel has long eyed Tijuana’s lucrative land and sea routes leading into California.
Territorial warring both inside the local Arrellano Felix cartel and with other gangs result in much of the border city’s bloodshed.
Violence peaked in Tijuana in 2008 amid a showdown between two factions headed by Fernando “The Engineer” Sanchez Arellano and Teodoro “El Teo” Garcia Simental, a renegade lieutenant who rose through the ranks by dissolving bodies in vats of lye. The violence has dropped off since Garcia’s January arrest.
Calderon recently praised the new calm in Tijuana as a success story in Mexico’s drug war. He discounted speculation that the peace stems from one cartel taking over.
“The truth is that in the last two years, the government has made important hits on the criminal structures,” he told The Associated Press in an interview.
Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/10/19/20101019mexico-pot-bust-largest-ever.html#ixzz12qTDKlWP
