Word: drugging
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...Many Sinaloans hail the traffickers as heroes, saying they have fought hard to bring wealth to the hardscrabble region, and crediting them with helping the poor by rebuilding houses, buying medicine and handing out extravagant Christmas gifts. Their exploits are celebrated in song in narco corridos or drug ballads, which are banned on radio and television but are immensely popular on the street, where the gunslingers are often referred to valientes, or brave ones - and stores with names like "Mafia Clothes" sell gold chains of Kalashnikov rifles to heavily armed men in alligator-skin boots who drive huge, gleaming pickups...
...some ways, the federal forces who arrived earlier this month were being deployed behind enemy lines, as a show of strength in the heartland of Mexico's drug trade. And that sense may have been underscored, on Tuesday, when local gangsters gunned down seven federal officers raiding a local house - one of the worst ever losses suffered by the agency. Newspaper editorials despaired that government forces have never appeared so vulnerable. Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna retorted that the villains had a home-ground advantage, and ordered more troops to Sinaloa. "We need to be in the very place...
...honored by the shrine to Jesus Malverde in Culiacan, so often packed with locals, is no ordinary Mexican saint - Malverde was a Sinaloan bandit who has been adopted as a kind of a patron saint by the northern province's drug traffickers. Sinaloa is the cradle of Mexico's narco-trafficking industry, producing the majority of the nation's drug kingpins in recent decades. Their number includes such storied figures as Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, who ran the Guadalajara Cartel and ordered the savage killing of a DEA agent; Amado Carrillo Fuentes, alias "The Lord of the Skies," who died...
...Some 500 miles from the U.S. border on the Pacific coast, Sinaloa is a crucial battleground in President Felipe Calderon's war on drug cartels - a campaign that the Bush Administration seeks to back with $1.4 billion in cash and equipment. It is in Sinaloa's arid mountains that Mexico's drug trade was born, with peasant farmers first growing opium poppies - the raw ingredient for heroin - back in the 1940s. These pioneers developed violent organized crime structures that later took over the business of supplying marijuana, cocaine and then crystal meth to hungry American consumers - a market worth...
...Even some of the residents opposed to the traffickers in their midst argue that the military presence does more harm than good. Since Calderon began his crackdown against drug gangs in December 2006, soldiers at Sinaloan checkpoints have killed at least nine unarmed civilians, including three children. "Fighting violence with violence doesn't work. Now we are oppressed by soldiers and gangsters," says Culiacan human rights activist Mercedes Murillo, part of a growing chorus calling for a demilitarization of the anti-drug effort...