Turf wars among imprisoned drug gang leaders are responsible for a wave of violence in northern Mexico, the country's new attorney general Daniel Cabeza de Vaca said May 27. Ironically, Mexico's success in putting drug lords behind bars has prompted a bloody scramble for control of the international trade, with some leaders issuing commands from their prison cells. "Some of the leaders of the big, known cartels are operating behind bars, and that in large part creates the climate of conflict," he said.

The latest wave of killings has rocked Sinaloa state on Mexico's north Pacific coast, home to the cartel of drug baron Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who escaped from prison in 2001. "They are struggling to control cities like Culiacan using executions," Cabeza told reporters, referring to Sinaloa's capital. "We have the cartels that we all know. But these are breaking apart, forming subgroups."

As we have noted, all US soldiers accused of killings in Iraq have thus far been acquitted. This particularly grisly case will really put Pentagon justice to the test. But we again note that, in any case, higher-ranking officers--who the accused GIs say "had sanctioned their actions"--are getting off the hook...

The Russia-based Iraqi Resistance Report website cites a story from the Iraqi newspaper Mafkarat al-Islam June 1 that US forces beseiging the central town of al-Ramadi are using restoration of water and other basic services as a bargaining chip to get the populace to turn over information on resistance fighters:

Amnesty International is defending its description of Guantánamo prison as a "gulag," and urges the US to allow independent investigations of allegations of torture at its detention centers for terrorism suspects. A verbal feud between Amnesty and Washington has escalated since the group's new annual report compared Guantánamo Bay to the brutal Soviet system of forced labor camps where millions of prisoners died. President Bush dismissed the report as "absurd" the Amnesty report, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the description "reprehensible."

"The administration's response has been that our report is absurd, that our allegations have no basis, and our answer is very simple: if that is so, open up these detention centers, allow us and others to visit them," Amnesty International secretary general Irene Zubaida Khan told a news conference.

Emulating recent jihadi tactics in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Iraqi resistance has targetted a gathering of Sufis for a suicide attack, as well as escalating attacks against Shi'ites.

A suicide bomber blew himself up at a gathering of Sufi Muslims north of Baghdad June 2, killing 10 and injuring at least 12. The attack took place at a house in the village of Saud, near the northern town of Balad as Sufis gathered for a religious ceremony, Interior Ministry officials said. Ahmed Hamid, a Sufi witness, told the AP: "I was among 50 people inside the tekiya [Sufi gathering place] practicing our rites when the building was hit by a big explosion. Then, there was chaos everywhere and human flesh scattered all over the place."

President for life Saparmurat Niyazov, the self-styled Turkmenbashi, or "leader of all the Turkmen," has made good on a pledge to order all hospitals outside the Turkmen capital Ashbagat shut.

This comes on the heels of his decision to close the country's libraries. "No one goes to libraries and reads books anyway," explained Niyazov. Opera, ballet and circuses, among many other things, were already banned in Turkmenistan. (IWPR, Apr. 21) Required study, at work, in schools, and in mosques, is Ruhknama, the spiritual treatise penned in Turkmenbashi's own hand. Now, for all devotees of this Central Asian post-communist insect that preys upon the lives of his people, Rukhnama is available online in English.

A dozen men armed with assault rifles killed two children of a man who belongs to a peasant ecologist group in Mexico's Pacific coast state of Guerrero May 19, and soldiers arrested three members of the same group on weapons charges the following day. The shooting attack, which also wounded the boys' father, Alberto Peñaloza, and two older sons, occurred in the Sierra Petatlan, the scene of a decade-long struggle between loggers and campesinos. Peñaloza is a founder of the local Organization of Campesino Ecologists, which has blockaded logging trucks on the mountain roads.

The Independent Task Force on the Future of North America, a New York-based body coordinated by the Council on Foreign Relations, has released a detailed set of proposals that build on the recommendations adopted by Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, Mexican President Vicente Fox, and U.S. President Bush at their March trilateral summit in Waco, TX. The recommendations concern how to pursue and strengthen the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), which was adopted at that summit, to coordinate border security and anti-terrorist cooperation among the three NAFTA members.