Police discovered 1,994 detonator cartridges inside a pickup truck in this northern border metropolis, Mexico’s federal Public Safety Office said Tuesday. Officers noticed the abandoned vehicle because its headlights were on and it was missing license plates, according to an official statement. The truck was left in the Kilometro 20 neighborhood of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s murder capital and the scene of car bombings blamed on drug cartels. When they inspected the vehicle, police found several boxes full of detonator cartridges, which are used to ignite the charge in explosive devices. This city just across the border from El Paso, Texas,
Read more

Smuggling drugs into the U.S. has become such a complicated and high-tech affair, with cartels building sophisticated tunnel networks and stealthy submarines to get their goods around the watchful eye of customs and border patrol agents. But a group of Mexican drug runners recently applied an 8th-century approach to their profession, using a homemade, trailer-mounted catapult to hurl bales of marijuana over the border fence. Mexican soldiers, tipped off by U.S. National Guard troops monitoring the area with surveillance cameras, seized a few dozen pounds of marijuana, a sport-utility vehicle, and the catapult it was towing near the small town
Read more

Maritime smuggling of both humans and contraband is  on the rise, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In  the fiscal year ending in September 2009, federal and other law  enforcement authorities in San Diego arrested 430 illegal immigrants  and U.S. citizens for drug and human smuggling, compared with 230 in the previous fiscal year, according to the agency’s statistics. Among  other incidents, these apprehensions included smugglers towing a  surfboard with marijuana, illegal immigrants on jet skis, three U.S.  teens with about half a ton of marijuana on their boat, a panga with 23 illegal immigrants on board, and a small Zodiac boat with 10 duffel bags with
Read more