8-5-2013 Money, unsurprisingly, is driving this problem. Marijuana is the largest cash crop in California. The annual crop is approximately 8.6 million pounds — worth about $14 billion, according to a 2010 RAND study.
Logue told me what the pot growers are doing to rural counties amounts to strip mining. “It looks like the Malakoff Diggins,” California’s largest hydraulic mine, Logue said of the forest areas where pot farms are located.
They are trashing forest areas, illegally cutting trees normally protected by the state, and dumping illegal poison into streams and creeks. Hillsides are illegally stripped by bulldozers for marijuana farms, creating significant erosion problems.
But county and state officials are not enforcing the state’s laws against any of this.
“Frustrated local officials asked the state for help to protect streams and rivers from harmful sediment and the chemicals used on the pot plants,” the AP reported.
“They hoped to charge growers under federal and state clean water regulations with tougher penalties than the infractions local officials could impose. But they were rebuffed.”
“It’s too dangerous, the state agency in charge of protecting the region’s water said in a letter to county supervisors.” https://calwatchdog.com/2013/08/05/sac-bee-ignores-drug-cartels-in-pot-farming-story/
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SALINAS, Calif. — This vast and fertile valley is often called the salad bowl of the nation for the countless heads of lettuce growing across its floor. Now California’s marijuana industry is laying claim to a new slogan for the valley: America’s cannabis bucket.
After years of marijuana being cultivated in small plots out of sight from the authorities, California cannabis is going industrial.
Over the past year, dilapidated greenhouses in the Salinas Valley, which were built for cut flower businesses, have been bought up by dozens of marijuana entrepreneurs, who are growing pot among the fields of spinach, strawberries and wine grapes.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/us/california-marijuana-industry-agriculture.html
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5-21-2018 The US Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the state earlier this year and the disagreement is expected to eventually reach the Supreme Court.
The main law in question, Senate Bill 54, the California Values Act, prohibits local law enforcement from diverting resources to assist federal immigration authorities and detaining citizens past their normal detention at ICE’s request. It’s backed by other laws, such as one that requires private companies to warn employees in advance of immigration inspections. Since the announcement of the federal lawsuit, many municipalities, such as Orange County and the city of Los Alamitos, have expressed their opposition to sanctuary policies and tossed their weight behind the lawsuit.
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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 [PEMX.UL], 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. …
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 U.S. 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 percent of Mexico's economy and creates yet more uncertainty for a country already reeling from U.S. threats to dismantle the North American Free Trade Agreement. …
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 percent more than in 2016. That is a 71 percent increase over 2013, Pena Nieto's first full year in office.https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2018-01-24/mexicos-drug-cartels-now-hooked-on-fuel-cripple-nations-refineries
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3-8-18 Lopez-Albarran oversaw a network of co-conspirators to assist in transferring millions of dollars in narcotics proceeds from drug dealers in the United States to drug suppliers in Mexico, including to individuals working for the Sinaloa Cartel. As part of the investigation, the FBI deployed undercover agents and task force officers from the San Diego District Attorney’s Office, Bureau of Investigation, Chula Vista Police Department, and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office to infiltrate Lopez-Albarran’s organization and after gaining the trust of the organization, agreed to pick up bulk currency across the United States for transfer to Mexico. Over the course of the last two years, undercover agents identified multiple individuals known as “money movers,” i.e., people responsible for collecting narcotics proceeds and disposing of those proceeds as directed by either the drug trafficking organization or the money brokers.
Law enforcement then received phone numbers and code words from Lopez-Albarran to contact these money movers to arrange for the delivery of narcotics proceeds. The money movers concealed and transported amounts ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in narcotics proceeds at a time, hidden within compartments in vehicles, luggage, duffel bags and shoeboxes. These cash deliveries took place in locations such as parking lots of retail stores, hotels, and restaurants across the United States, including ones in San Diego, California; Los Angeles, California; Kansas City, Missouri; New York, New York; Cincinnati, Ohio; Dayton, Ohio; Lexington, Kentucky; Boston, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Chicago, Illinois. By targeting these money movers, law enforcement was able to discover multiple drug trafficking cells across the United States responsible for importing and distributing substantial quantities of fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/nationwide-takedown-targets-brazen-international-money-laundering-scheme
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