English Recordings

1. He is wanted for murder.
2. What does he want with me?
3. You are not wanted here.
4. She never wanted for affection as a child.
5. You should warm that child's ears.
6. Let this be a warning to you.
7. It happened without warning.
8. Don't worry, it will all come out in the wash.
9. The waves washed the deck.
10. The boxes were washed ashore by the waves.
11. This detegent will not wash woollens.
12. The waves had washed away the cliff.
13. I'm wasted on you.
14. Nothing is wasted in this house.
15. He was wasting away with fever.
16. Be on the watch, just in case.
17. We are being watched.
18. Watch out for pickpockets.
19. The gas made their eyes water.
20. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then.
21. We'll get there come hell or high water.
22. This is not drinking water.
23. The boat draws seven feet of water.
24. Still waters run deep.
25. The sight of the cake made her mouth water.
26. That theory does not hold water.
27. Don't get into hot water.
28. My mouth is watering.
29. If it doesn't rain, we'll have to water the garden.
30. We've had a wave of bad luck.
31. He waved a greeting to a friend.
32. He waved his parents' help aside.
33. We waved down a motorist.
34. I like this way of life.
35. By the way, are you coming for lunch?
36. They put the children out of harm's way.
37. He learnt the hard way.
38. You always get your own way.
39. We'll soon get under way.
40. I wouldn't go out of my way to hear him.

point out

match

partner

spell

almost

rest

die

marker

square

throw

ambassadors

goals

orally

put

ask

nationality

fill

beautiful

historical

get

each

other

take

understand

called

aim

again

recognize

reach

dry

mising

appearrance

Few cases illustrate the untrustworthiness of intelligence in the drug war more than that of Javier Herrera, a former officer in charge of operations for the federal police.
In a reformist move rare for Mexico, Herrera wrote directly to President Calderon last year, alleging high level corruption inside the government. Many police operations, he told the president, were a joke -- poorly planned, pointless, conducted with no clear goal beyond creating the appearance of action.
Drug traffickers and the corrupt cops who work for them responded to the threat Herrera posed in their usual way -- by casting him as the bad guy. Not long after he wrote to the president, Herrera was arrested on the basis of information obtained from an informant who said that Herrera had accepted a $1 million bribe from Chapo. But when Reveles, the founder of Proceso, looked into the allegation, nothing made sense.
The "witness," it turned out, was a small time forger who had been picked up late one night by federal agents and taken to an interrogation room, where he was handcuffed to a chair and coerced into making a false allegation against Herrera.
"That's when the torture began," the man wrote in a letter recanting his testimony against Herrera. "It was both physical and psychological, consisting of electric shocks to the lower part of my back and death threats to me and my family for not agreeing to do what they asked. They told me I was accused of fraud by people in Acapulco and that I was fucked because one of them had family high up in SIEDO."
The man was taken to another room and ordered to sign a statement against a former federale, whom the agents said had received a suitcase filled with cash in Acapulco. It was only later, after the man saw pictures of Herrera in the press, that he recognized the officer he had falsely accused. "I fear for my life and that of my family," he wrote. "The responsibility for what happens to me belongs to the federal authorities."
Given how thoroughly the cartels have infiltrated every level of law enforcement, it has become virtually impossible to separate the corrupt cops from the courageous ones being set up for a fall. One senior federal police officer who spoke to me was praised by officials as a brave cop and dismissed by journalists as "the worst of the worst." The officer complained that Operacion Limpieza was damaging morale. "It's hitting us hard," he says. "People don't trust us. The elites are terrified. They have lost faith in authority." He points to the arrest of Noe Ramirez, the head of SIEDO charged with accepting $450,000 in bribes from Mochomo's cartel. "I knew him very well," the officer says. "He was a nice guy. I still don't think he's guilty. How do you know that Felipe isn't a double agent sent by the narcos as part of a psychological war?"

The agents were clearly thinking about the recent disappearance of a Houston security consultant named Felix Batista, a former major in the U.S. Army. Over the years, Batista had successfully negotiated resolutions to more than 100 kidnapping and ransom cases, gaining a reputation as one of the most effective consultants who deal with secuestradores, as kidnappers are known here. In December, Batista himself was abducted by armed men outside a restaurant in the city of Saltillo and has not been heard from since.
The two American spies are convinced he is dead -- in part because he allowed himself to be quoted in the press, making him a prime target for the cartels.
According to the spies, the Calderon administration is using the War on Drugs for its own political ends. "The security situation is being used to bolster the conservative government of Calderon and marginalize the left," says Spy One.
"The problem is America," adds Spy Two. "The CIA's mission in Mexico -- - working to stop the flow of drugs into the United States -- has been diluted. They let it slip here because they were focused on Al Qaeda. But terrorists weren't going to infiltrate the Mexican government. That wasn't the real threat."
"The levels of incompetence are amazing," says Spy One.
As the two spies see it, the Felipe case -- and the cascading number of snitches who have emerged since his confession -- typify the slipshod way that U.S. agencies operate in Mexico. The problem, they say, is that much of Mexico's "intelligence" in the War on Drugs has been obtained by interrogations that involve electric shock and other coercive techniques. That's because prosecutors in Mexico are vested with dual responsibilities that give them the power and motivation to extract information by any means necessary.
"In America, prosecutors investigate, but the judge and jury decide the facts," says Santiago Aguirre, a human rights attorney in Mexico City. "Here, statements made to prosecutors are facts. There is no cross examination or right to confront accusers. If a person in Mexico confesses to a prosecutor, that is considered sufficient evidence for a detention -- so there is an incentive to get confessions."
As a result, torture is frequently used as a means of interrogation. "Prosecutors are careful that people aren't tortured while they are in detention," Aguirre says. "The torture takes place before, in an unofficial setting, with unidentified interrogators who wear no uniform." Alberto Bazbaz, the attorney general for the state of Mexico, describes the situation even more bluntly. "Basically we work with the same system that was used during the Spanish Inquisition," says Bazbaz, who is trying to reform his state's justice system. "The principle is the same as it was then -- the same person who accuses you also judges you. All the power is in the hands of the prosecutor."
In Mexico, the American spies tell me, few accusations in the War on Drugs can be trusted.
Intelligence is plentiful -- but, as in the War on Terror, much of it is suspect, given the questionable manner in which it was obtained. "The state of U.S. intelligence in Mexico is terrible," says Spy One. "They are relying on the deceit of people who have been tortured by the Mexicans. It's like Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man -- they'll say anything."

"For the whores," the police commissioner explained.
In the morning, the floor of the cave was strewn with spent condoms.
By then, with the police more focused on looting than making arrests, the Rabbit had escaped.
In Mexico, the raid on Conejo's party and the subsequent revelations of Garay's corruption played out in the press with a mix of outrage and resignation. Sensational stories of police corruption are a near-daily occurrence here. Indeed, as drug violence has spiraled out of control in Mexico, the line between law enforcement and organized crime has virtually disappeared. Many of Mexico's police officers, who are paid less than $5,000 a year on average, supplement their meager incomes by taking money from drug traffickers. In a recent investigation of 400 federales, 90 percent were linked to the cartels. Police who refuse to cooperate are frequently executed, often in broad daylight.
More than 500 police were killed last year, some of them beheaded by members of the growing cult of Santa Muerte, or Holy Death -- a group, celebrated in shrines across the country, that includes drug traffickers and police officers alike.
In January, to cite one of many grim examples, the severed head of a police comandante was dumped in front of the police station in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas.
The widespread corruption has all but handed control of large swaths of Mexico to the drug lords.
In the past year, at least 6,290 people were killed in drug related crimes, double the number in 2007. Nearly half of the victims remain unidentified because the families are too afraid to come forward to claim the bodies, lest they be targeted by drug violence.
Although more than 45,000 soldiers have been deployed to lawless regions throughout the country, the military response only appears to have escalated the violence.
In January, a man in Tijuana confessed to being "El Pozolero" -- the Stew Maker -- who disposed of the bodies of 300 murder victims for a drug cartel by dumping them in pits and dousing them with acid to dissolve the remains.
In February, an hours-long shootout between the army and a gang of kidnappers in Chihuahua, near the border with New Mexico, ended with 21 dead. No police officers took part: The town's entire police force had already resigned last year after drug traffickers murdered the police chief and two other cops.

As Mexico Descends into Brutality and Lawlessness, the Government Istelf Has Become a Tool of the Drug Lords
By Guy Lawson Return to Drug War News: Don't Miss Archive
The target of the raid was the narcotraficante known as "El Conejo" -- the Rabbit. In keeping with his stature as the main supplier of cocaine to one of Mexico's most powerful drug cartels, the Colombian was throwing a lavish party at a sprawling mansion on the south side of Mexico City. As always, there would be plenty of high-end prostitutes, who served a dual purpose: They not only made money for Conejo while they were working, they could also be sent back to Colombia loaded down with the cash from his drug trafficking -- by some accounts as much as $40 million in profits every month.
Tipped off by an informant, 100 federal police wearing ski masks and armed with assault rifles descended on the mansion at one in the morning last October, when the coke fueled debauchery was in full swing. Storming through the residence, the federales grabbed 11 Colombians. They also seized every drug raid's cliched cache: mounds of coke, cash, guns. Afterward, the Mexican media were ushered into the mansion to document the narco fantasia for the viewing audience at home: the opulent gardens, the private cinema, the cages stocked with two lions, two white tigers and two black panthers.
For once, it seemed, the rule of law had prevailed in Mexico. After years of watching the drug lords operate with near total impunity, killing and torturing thousands of victims at will, the police finally appeared to be regaining a measure of control in the War on Drugs.
But in the days that followed the raid, another version of the story emerged -- one that betrays the lying, thieving, violent, paranoia-inducing disaster that is the Mexican drug war. The federales, it turns out, had turned the takedown into a violent shakedown. According to witnesses, the police burst into the mansion screaming, "Fucking bitches! Daughters of whores! Now the real party has begun!" For the next 24 hours, the cops went on a crime spree of their own. They pocketed Cartier and Rolex watches, diamond rings, mounds of pesos.
They stole a honey colored English bulldog, which was carried to the back seat of an armored police car. They dragged the prostitutes into the screening room and administered electric shocks to the men. Then they filled the swimming pool with ice and forced the men into the freezing water, as a way of extracting names and addresses from them -- - not to arrest other traffickers, but so police could be dispatched to their residences to steal from them as well. All told, seven houses were robbed of nearly $600,000. One narco was instructed to come up with half a million dollars in cash, which was stuffed into two Winnie the Pooh bags for delivery to the officer in charge of the raid -- Gerardo Garay, the commissioner of the federal police and head of a top level commission charged with punishing misconduct and rooting out corruption in Mexican law enforcement.
At the mansion that night, while he waited for the money to arrive, Garay selected four of the 30 prostitutes at the party and retired to a room in the basement designed to look like a cave -- if a cave came equipped with a Jacuzzi. Garay then summoned one of his bodyguards and ordered a portion of the seized cocaine brought to him.

The second in command of Mexico's version of the FBI was accused of taking $10,000 a month from the cartels, and two weeks later, the head of Interpol for Mexico was also arrested.
In the most startling accusation, an informer reported that the payoffs reached all the way to Vasconcelos -- a top Calderon adviser and the Bush administration's man in Mexico.
In January, after Calderon had unveiled Operacion Limpieza, I returned to Mexico to report on the struggle to purge the government of corruption and re establish the rule of law. I met with a high ranking federal official in the lobby of a stylish hotel in an upscale district of the capital.
The official, a heavyset and well dressed man, had served in Los Pinos, the Mexican equivalent of the White House. Speaking in perfect English, he was prone to making formal pronouncements reiterating the government's official policy, only to veer into bursts of candor and knowing laughs.
He agreed to speak to me but would only talk "on background" -- a demand I encountered at every turn in a nation where having your name appear in a drug related story can endanger your life, or career, or both.
Like many Mexican officials, Backgrounder blames much of his country's drug war on the United States -- and not without justification. It is America's insatiable demand, after all, that has created the market for narcotics in Mexico. Likewise, it is Washington's fixation with the War on Drugs that has pressured Mexico to wage a shooting war within its borders to stem the flow of illegal substances north of the border.
As Calderon pointed out during his summit with President Obama in January, there are thousands of gun stores just across the border in the United States; it is these stores that arm the cartels with AK 47s that are easily smuggled into Mexico. If Mexico or Canada were arming American criminals in such a fashion, Mexican officials like to point out, it would almost certainly be taken as an act of war.
Operacion Limpieza, Backgrounder adds, was really an American initiative undertaken by the Mexican authorities to placate Washington -- and to deflect attention from the fact that the U.S. government's own security operations had been breached by Felipe. "The Americans exaggerate the problem," he says. "There are institutional reasons for the American government to say that Mexico is a big disaster. Agencies like the FBI and DEA are competing for resources. There is a problem here, of course. Cities like Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez and Culiacan are violent, but the threats have been there for years. It's bad, but it's no worse than the crack epidemic in New York in the Eighties. To question the viability of the state of Mexico is preposterous."

Throughout the fall, the secret investigation sparked by Felipe's allegations continued with a series of arrests and confessions. A top director of SIEDO, Miguel Colorado, was detained during a military operation. An official with the code name "Saul" said the Beltran Levyas were offering $10 million to help rescue Mochomo from prison. Yet another SIEDO official -- a man investigators called "David" -- confessed that he had been paid $120,000 a month to provide information to the cartels.
David described the situation inside SIEDO as so corrupt that top-level officials were using internal investigations as a way of discrediting or destroying others and protecting their own bribes.
It was at this point, just before Felipe's story broke in the Mexican press, that the federal police raided Conejo's party at the mansion. Garay, the police commissioner, had been suspected of corruption even before the bust. A few months earlier, dozens of banners known as narcomantas had been hung from traffic overpasses in 15 cities claiming that Garay was working for the drug lords.
Banners bearing the names of dirty officials have become a routine way for drug traffickers to out cops on the payroll of other cartels or to spread disinformation designed to cripple law enforcement with doubt and suspicion.
In late October, not long after the raid on the mansion, police busted "El Rey" (the King), a leading member of Chapo's cartel, in a shootout. At the presentacion, where drug traffickers are paraded in front of cameras, police displayed a gaudy array of gold plated automatic weapons that had been seized after the gunfight.
Rey's son and stepson, who were also captured, told police it was their father's men who had tipped off police about Conejo's party.
In other words, Chapo's man had set up Mochomo's main coke supplier, using the police as a means to destroy his rival's business.
The son and stepson's testimony also indicated that Garay and his subordinate, Edgar Bayardo, worked for the cartels.
The double whammy of Garay's corruption and Felipe's revelations sent the Mexican government into a free fall. Garay and Bayardo were both arrested. Ramirez, the head of SIEDO who effectively served as President Felipe Calderon's drug czar, was charged with taking $450,000 from Mochomo's cartel.

The Nineteen was picked up by authorities soon after Felipe began to talk. Once the trafficker flipped, more secrets came out. The Nineteen described meeting with the director of intelligence of SIEDO, Fernando Rivera, at a bar near the Angel of Independence in Mexico City. As the men drank, Rivera made an opening bid, noting that he had once been offered $450,000 to go easy on an investigation.
"Have you already been offered the suitcase?" the Nineteen asked.
"No," said Rivera. "That's what I'm waiting for."
"Well, this is your lucky day."
At a meeting a few days later, the Nineteen slipped a black bag containing $150,000 under the table.
Over the next six months, in return for this monthly stipend, Rivera provided the cartel with information on everything that happened inside SIEDO -- investigations, names, photographs, cellphone numbers of agents, dates and times of planned operations. On the night of Mochomo's arrest in January 2008, the Nineteen said, Rivera called him at dawn, warning that the drug lord was going to be busted in the city of Culiacan. The operation was being run by the military, not SIEDO, so Rivera had just learned of the raid. The Nineteen offered him $5 million to abort the arrest, but it was out of Rivera's hands.
"He always wanted to know if there was any news about the Beltran Levyas," Felipe
When I was in Sinaloa last year, sources with connections to Mochomo told me that the kingpin's brother, "El Barbas" (the Bearded One), had wanted to stage an assault to bust Mochomo out of prison.
At the time, it was impossible to confirm the rumor -- but the Nineteen has corroborated the story.
Rivera provided the Nineteen with a map of the interior of the SIEDO building where Mochomo was held. At night there would be only 11 guards.
If the Nineteen paid them $70,000 each, plus another $3 million for Rivera, they would allow Barbas' men to drive an armored car into the back of the building to free Mochomo. But Chapo apparently used his own connections in law enforcement to squelch the plan, and the next day Mochomo was transferred to Puente Grande, a maximum-security prison where escape is considered impossible. Unless, that is, you are as smart and daring as Chapo, who managed to break out of the facility in 2001, a feat renowned in Mexico in song and in mythology as the "golden kilogram," a reference to the weight of gold legend says he paid as a bribe.

"Can you follow up with Jay later this week?"

Situation :

Your group has asked someone from another group, Jay, to make improvements to a computer program that your group uses. He hasn't done it yet, but you want to make sure he does it. You're telling one of your employees to ask him about it in a few days.