San Diego, California, United States (AHN) – U.S. law enforcement agencies are using satellite equipment to monitor phone calls by drug cartel leaders deep inside Mexico even as concern grows among Mexican politicians about interference in their domestic affairs.
The FBI wiretaps were revealed in a recent 86-page federal racketeering indictment being used to prosecute Mexican criminal suspects.
The Mexican government was not involved in the investigation.
In another law enforcement effort, the international police agency Interpol announced this week that it coordinated the arrest of 20 people – some from Mexico – for charges that included murder. Police from 15 countries participated in the operation.
The wiretaps and arrests show how Mexico’s four-year-old drug war is enlisting efforts by other countries as violence and lawlessness continue, sometimes with corruption accusations against police and politicians.
More than 28,000 people have been killed in the struggle against the cartels.
Last month, after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested a greater U.S. role in Mexico’s drug war, members of the Mexican Congress reacted with outrage.
A deputy to Mexican President Felipe Calderon said, “The Mexican people must reject any interventionist attitude of the United States government.”
Mexican Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa said that she does “not share” Clinton’s opinion.
U.S. officials defend their actions by saying they have been able stop murders and drug cartel smuggling that the Mexicans never would have prevented alone.
Their surveillance with global positioning satellites monitored 50,000 calls in six months, some of which gathered evidence on 43 drug cartel suspects.
Thirty-five of the suspects are in jail in the United States.
Their activities included trying to set up a drug trafficking ring in San Diego that they called the Fernando Sanchez Organization, according to law enforcement officials.
The federal indictment says the drug traffickers used what they called their San Diego “office” to plot kidnappings, murders and to hire teenaged girls to smuggle drugs across the border for them for $100.
One tapped phone call recorded a conversation between a cartel leader, a former Tijuana homicide detective and a Mexican state judicial police officer discussing the possibility of setting up a death squad.
The biggest catch for the wiretap operation was the arrest of Jesus Quinones Marquez, an advisor to Mexican Attorney General Rommel Moreno, the head prosecutor in Mexico’s Baja California peninsula.
Not only did Quinones work as a liaison with U.S. law enforcement agencies, he also passed information to cartel leaders and directed Mexican police against their rivals.
U.S. law enforcement agents asked Quinones to meet with them about an investigation at the San Diego Police Department on July 22. Instead of a meeting, Quinones was thrown in jail, where he awaits trial.
In a separate law enforcement action, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced this week that it arrested 20 criminal suspects as part of its first joint effort with Interpol.
The operation sought to find criminals who commit crimes in one country but hide in other countries, such as the United States and Mexico.
Eight of the people arrested were wanted for murder. One of them was wanted in the murder of a Honduran government official and another one was a reputed Salvadoran gang member.
“This operation has been so successful, with the help of our Interpol partners, that we have decided to extend it,” Jim Chaparro, director of ICE’s Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations, said in a statement.
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