Crew abandons ship attacked in the Red Sea, UK military says
The U.S. Navy's Mideast-based 5th Fleet referred questions to the military's Central Command, which said it was aware of the incident without elaborating.
Moammar al-Eryani, the information minister for Yemen's exiled government opposing the Houthis, identified the vessel attacked as the Magic Seas and blamed the rebels for the attack. The ship had been broadcasting it had an armed security team on board in the vicinity the attack took place and had been heading north.
'The attack also proves once again that the Houthis are merely a front for an Iranian scheme using Yemen as a platform to undermine regional and global stability, at a time when Tehran continues to arm the militia and provide it with military technology, including missiles, aircraft, drones, and sea mines,' al-Eryani wrote on the social platform X.
The Magic Seas' owners did not respond to a request for comment.
The Houthi rebels have been launching missile and drone attacks against commercial and military ships in the region in what the group's leadership has described as an effort to end Israel's offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The group's al-Masirah satellite news channel acknowledged the attack occurred, but offered no other comment on it as it aired a speech by its secretive leader, Abdul Malik al-Houthi. However, Ambrey said the vessel targeted met 'the established Houthi target profile,' without elaborating.
Between November 2023 and January 2025, the Houthis targeted more than 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones, sinking two of them and killing four sailors. That has greatly reduced the flow of trade through the Red Sea corridor, which typically sees $1 trillion of goods move through it annually.
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Newsweek
34 minutes ago
- Newsweek
Lavrov Lists Russia Demands for Ukraine Peace
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov listed Moscow's demands for a peace deal that would end its ongoing invasion of Ukraine in an interview with the Hungarian publication Magyar Nemzet. Lavrov said an end to the security threat posed to Russia by NATO's expansion, including its potential inclusion of Ukraine, was essential. Moscow's top diplomat demanded the demilitarization of Ukraine to ensure Kyiv's neutrality. He also said his country wants protections for ethnic Russians and Russian culture in Ukraine, which he accused Kyiv of "destroying" since 2014. Moreover, Lavrov demanded "international legal recognition of the new territorial realities," citing Russian occupation of Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. And Lavrov called for "lifting sanctions on Russia, rescinding all lawsuits against Russia, and returning the illegally seized Western-based assets." "These provisions must be included in a legally binding agreement for peaceful settlement," Lavrov told Magyar Nemzet. U.S. President Donald Trump is trying to broker an end to Russia's war, but said a recent call with Russian President Vladimir Putin left him very disappointed, and he did not think Moscow wanted to end the fighting. This is a developing article. Updates to follow.
Atlantic
an hour ago
- Atlantic
American Bloodshed
You would be forgiven for not knowing which lesson, exactly, Americans ought to take from the bloody morning of September 13, 1859. On that day, in the mouth of a clearing by Lake Merced, in the hills of San Francisco, two men decided to settle an argument the old-fashioned way: with a pair of handcrafted .58-caliber pistols and a mutual death wish. Theirs wasn't the most famous duel in American history. But David Terry's murder of his friend turned rival David Broderick that California morning is, I would argue, America's second-most-famous duel, and possibly its most consequential. Broderick and Terry had originally traveled westward in search of gold—Broderick from his hometown of Washington, D.C., and Terry by way of Russellville, Kentucky. Instead they found careers in public service, which is how they crossed paths: Broderick as a U.S. senator, Terry as the chief justice of the California Supreme Court. They were both Democrats, but very different kinds of Democrats, at a moment when those differences were matters of life and death. Over the years, their friendship had been badly strained by the question of slavery—Terry was for it, Broderick against. This disagreement hardened into disgust. Their relationship fell apart publicly and spectacularly. Locals were so seized by the drama that on that fateful Tuesday in September, a caravan of spectators rode out in carriages to the lake to watch the ritual unfold. The duel ended as duels often did, quickly and irreversibly. Ten paces, wheel around, fire. Broderick had a reputation as a superior marksman. He was also given first dibs on his position at the dueling grounds. But neither advantage did him any good. The hair trigger on his pistol—the guns, with their smooth walnut handles, had been provided by a Terry ally—meant that Broderick accidentally fired too early, the bullet disappearing into the sandy soil at his feet. Terry knew he could take his time. He aimed his pistol carefully. He shot. Broderick crumpled. He died three days later. Duels were still common in those days, and although they were not exactly popular with the public, they were tolerated. (At the time, the U.S. Navy lost two-thirds as many men to duels as to combat.) Duels were a matter of honor, and an established political rite. Broderick's murder changed all of that. He was the first—and still the only—sitting U.S. senator to be killed in a duel. His death made headlines nationwide, as newspapers recounted the face-off obsessively. The public was mesmerized by the coverage but also repulsed by the violence. After that, Americans still dueled here and there, but not as they had before. Today, many consider the Broderick-Terry duel to have been the last real American duel—the one that turned the nation against dueling once and for all. I was thinking about Broderick and Terry recently after a gunman disguised as a police officer assassinated the lawmaker Melissa Hortman, along with her husband, Mark, in their Minnesota home last month. For many years I have been preoccupied by questions about political violence in America—most of all with the question of how to interrupt a cycle of political violence before more people are killed. Those who study political violence have told me that it frequently takes a catastrophe to shake a numbed citizenry to its senses about the violence all around them. Ending any cycle of political violence requires a strong collective rejection—including the imposition of a political and social cost for those who would choose or cheer on violence to get their way. When I wrote about this subject at length for this magazine, in an April 2023 story, William Bernstein, the author of The Delusions of Crowds, told me he was not optimistic that anything other than a violent shock to the system would work against the current spasm of political violence in America. By that point it had become clear that any hope that January 6, 2021, would prompt a course correction—that it could be the event that forced Americans into a shared mass rejection of political violence—had long since evaporated. 'The answer is—and it's not going to be a pleasant answer—the answer is that the violence ends if it boils over into a containable cataclysm,' Bernstein told me at the time. What if, he went on—'I almost hesitate to say this'—but what if they actually had hanged Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi on January 6? 'I don't think it ends without some sort of cathartic cataclysm,' he said. 'I think, absent that, it just boils along for a generation or two generations.' I have heard echoes of that bleak projection from many experts in the intervening years. Given that the violence in our nation is not only tolerated but often celebrated, I worry more now than I did even two years ago about how bad it will have to get for this particular fever to break. In addition to the recent assassinations in Minnesota, Americans have in the past year alone witnessed two assasination attempts against Donald Trump; the Midtown Manhattan murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO; an arson attack at the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro; the murder of a young couple leaving the Capital Jewish Museum, in Washington; the murder of an 82-year-old woman in a firebombing attack in Colorado; and the attempted kidnapping of the mayor of Memphis. With startling frequency, Americans are attempting to resolve political disagreement through violence. And all the while, leaders at the highest levels of American government are aggressively stoking this national bloodlust, and demonstrating a willingness to carry out violence against citizens. The president of the United States has repeatedly fantasized about violently hurting and even killing Americans. He describes those who disagree with him politically as 'vermin' and has said that 'the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.' Trump infamously mused about executing General Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and proceeded to take away Milley's security detail. (His anger was prompted by a profile of Milley by The Atlantic 's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who detailed the numerous ways that Milley had defended the U.S. Constitution from Trump during his first presidency.) Trump has repeatedly described, in bizarre detail, his desire to see Americans journalists suffer—he is specifically preoccupied with fantasies of journalists being beaten and raped in prison. According to Trump's former defense secretary Mark Esper, Trump implored Esper to have troops shoot into a crowd of protesters. (Trump has denied this.) And on January 6, as Trump's supporters ransacked the U.S. Capitol, he angrily pushed back against those in his administration who expressed alarm, saying, 'I don't fucking care that they have weapons. They're not here to hurt me,' as his former aide Cassidy Hutchinson has testified. Trump promised he would act as a dictator on the first day of his second term. And on that day, he pardoned more than 1,500 people who had been convicted for their actions in the 2021 insurrection, including those with ties to various extremist groups and those who had violently attacked law enforcement at the Capitol. One of the most chilling aspects of living through any period of intense political violence is not knowing, while you are in it, how long it will last or how bad it will get. That is in part because, somewhat counterintuitively, you can't properly account for political violence simply by tallying attacks. As Erin Miller, the longtime program manager at the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database, once told me, 'There are a lot of people who are out for a protest, who are advocating for violence,' but who will never actually take violent action. 'Then there's a smaller number at the tip of the iceberg that are willing to carry out violent attacks.' We're not yet at the level of violence that plagued the nation during the Civil War, nor even at the level of violence that ripped through American cities in the years before and after World War I, when dynamite attacks were common. Scholars lately have been debating whether things are officially as bad as they were in the 1960s and '70s. And many point out that America's political-violence problem could just as easily be described as a gun-violence problem. As the legendary columnist Henry Fairlie wrote in The Washington Post shortly after the attempt on then-President Ronald Reagan's life, in 1981: 'Nothing links Lee Harvey Oswald to Sirhan Sirhan to Arthur Bremmer to Sarah Jane Moore to Lynette Fromme to John Warnock Hinckley Jr., except guns.' No matter where you fall on the spectrum of these debates, political violence in America is clearly worsening across several key measures. Vigilante violence is on the rise—mostly in the form of lone-wolf attacks, or what the FBI sometimes calls 'salad-bar extremism.' At the same time, organized violence may be poised to resurge—not only because so many leaders of violent extremist groups recently waltzed out of prison with their golden-ticket Trump pardons, but also because of the ever more extreme tenor of political debate in America. In a recent report from a nonpartisan group at Princeton University about the biggest threats we face in 2025, researchers found that immigrant groups are at an especially high risk of political violence this year and for the foreseeable future. 'Proposed bounty bills, in particular, could embolden private citizens to engage in self-styled enforcement actions targeting immigrants and their allies,' the report said. At the same time, trust in law enforcement is down. Police killings of citizens are back up. Death threats and violent attacks against public servants are way, way, way up. And although many Americans are highly concerned about domestic political violence, many people are also moving toward violence rather than away from it. A 2024 poll shows that as many as one in five Americans believes they may have to resort to violence to get what they want. A more recent poll shows that even more Americans—one in three—believes that 'because things have gotten so far off track, Americans may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.' One of the challenges of addressing political violence in America lies in navigating the many intellectual cul-de-sacs—all worthy in their own right—that can distract from the task of preventing further violence. There are debates over what counts as political violence in the first place. (I favor a simple, classic definition: Political violence is violence that is intended to prevent or provoke change.) There are arguments over how bad political violence actually is. (My colleague Graeme Wood makes a persuasive argument that everyone in America should actually just calm down about all this.) And, of course, there are legitimate disagreements over when and whether resorting to violence is ever morally permissible, or even necessary (a people's uprising against an oppressive dictator, for example). And some violence is already seen as permissible by law—acting, for instance, in self-defense. Political violence is of course fundamentally at odds with the philosophy of democratic self-governance. This is because violence poses an existential threat to the conditions—republican independence and freedom from government interference chief among them—that allow for the people to hold power. Or as Sarah Birch, the author of Electoral Violence, Corruption, and Political Order, has put it: 'A community that will tolerate violence will get violence. A community that does not tolerate violence is much less likely to have violence.' Birch has argued that it is up to 'every single citizen to condemn violence and to talk in such a way that makes it unacceptable.' She's right that the communities that tolerate violence will get it. They'll get it from vigilantes, from organized extremist groups, and—most concerning of all—from the state itself. Throughout history and around the world, periods of political violence have been met with the enthusiastic opportunism of those who seek to quash democracy and seize power for themselves. Even in instances where resorting to violence gains broad public support—as when, for example, workers facing deadly conditions demand basic protections on moral grounds—the crackdown on civil liberties that often comes in response is a terrible threat to American values and freedoms, and has left many stains on our history. I don't have to tell you that Trump seems particularly eager for such opportunities to come his way. His record speaks for itself. (See also his deployment of thousands of National Guard troops and some 700 Marines to Los Angeles in a show of force against protesters there.) Back in Broderick and Terry's day, public revulsion over the duel ended Terry's political career—but not just that. His eagerness, and that of other defenders of slavery, to resort to violence doomed their cause. And so, among the several lessons that one might take from the bloody events of September 13, 1859, there is this: Nothing good can happen between two furious men pointing pistols at each other before dawn. Also: If you believe in settling arguments with violence against those who disagree with you, you should expect to die that way. And: If you look away while others resolve their differences violently, if you believe you can comfortably compartmentalize certain kinds of violence from a safe distance, you should expect to die for what you believe, too, because political violence does not stay contained or ideologically pure. Political violence has a way of perpetuating itself—feeding on itself, spilling ever more blood—until enough people are willing to say, 'No more.' Politicians often react to political violence by insisting that it is alien to our character, that it is not who we are. They are wrong. In just the three decades leading up to the Civil War, there were at least 70 violent skirmishes among members of Congress, according to Joanne Freeman, a scholar of political violence at Yale and the author of The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War. That included the time when, in 1841, a brawl broke out in the U.S. House of Representatives; several members of Congress piled on top of one another, and others stood on tables. (One journalist who observed the fight described having seen several canes above the melee, 'raised up as if in the act of striking.') In 1850, Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi pulled a pistol on Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri on the Senate floor. (Benton was not one for de-escalation. He reportedly ripped open his shirt and shouted, 'Let the assassin fire!' before onlookers successfully grabbed the pistol out of Foote's hands.) The congressional pile-on of 1841, with all of those canes hoisted as weapons, calls to mind another infamous tremor of political violence that I've been thinking about lately. This particular incident happened three years before Broderick's death, on May 22, 1856. That day, Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina, confronted Charles Sumner, a congressman from Massachusetts, over (once again) their differing views on slavery. Brooks owned slaves and wanted to keep it that way. Sumner was an abolitionist. So right there on the Senate floor, Brooks lifted his thick, metal-topped cane and beat Sumner until blood ran into his eyes and he slipped into unconsciousness. Brooks didn't stop beating him until the cane had broken apart into bloody pieces. Today, people remember Brooks's attack for its terrible brutality and sheer pettiness. But in retrospect, one of its most terrifying aspects is not the violence itself—as horrible as it was—but what came next. Sumner was permanently injured, and would spend years trying to regain basic functions. Brooks never apologized for what he did. He only doubled down. Yet after the attack, Brooks's many supporters in Congress took to wearing fragments of the broken cane, fashioned into rings that they strung around their necks, in a gruesome showing of solidarity. And then the people of South Carolina reelected him. They began to send him new canes, more than he could ever use, bearing inscriptions such as Hit Him Again and Good Job. This wasn't just tolerance of political violence, or forgiveness of it, but full-throated support. Often, it is only when events recede into history that a society can see clearly what it has endured—and how close it has come to disaster. For generations, a portrait of Charles Sumner that hangs in the Capitol went mostly unnoticed. But on January 6, 2021, there it was in the background of photos showing the unthinkable: insurrectionists stalking the halls of the Capitol, 150 years after the end of the Civil War, waving the Confederate flag under Sumner's nose. The mass pardoning of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol is a clear message: Good job. Hit him again. Those pardons are also a signal to society that violence is in fact the way that we settle political differences in America. The president of the United States has made clear to the American people that when you want to get your way, you can do it however you want—whether with a Belgian pistol, or a cane, or the blunt end of a flagpole, or an AK-47 and a rubber mask on your neighbor's doorstep in the middle of the night. It need not be this way. It should not be this way. But right now, it is. And it will get worse until Americans demand otherwise—from one another, from our elected officials, from ourselves. A society in which people resign to resolve their differences through bloodshed will eventually carry that logic to every possible argument, every small town, and every last household. This is our national paradox. Political violence is deeply, inescapably American. It has been this way since the very beginning. The first recorded duel in the New World took place in 1621, not long after the landing at Plymouth. Our nation was born in a swirl of revolution and musket smoke, and episodes of political violence can be found in every decade since we declared our independence. Yet for us to build the country we have promised ourselves, and that we have promised our children—for the guarantee of the very freedoms our fellow citizens have fought and died for—we must find a way for America to be America without killing one another over what we want this nation to be. We must insist on resolving political differences passionately but peacefully. We must return to power only those who believe in decency, honor, and dignity—not only for their political allies but for all Americans. Two centuries ago, Americans defended their honor through acts of violence against one another. Today, Americans should defend their honor through the courage to show restraint. It is too late for David Broderick, and for Bobby Kennedy, and for Martin Luther King Jr., and for Melissa Hortman, and for every other American who was ever lynched, executed, tortured, or killed for their beliefs. But it is not too late for this nation and its citizens to choose peace.
Los Angeles Times
an hour ago
- Los Angeles Times
How ‘El Diablo,' a corrupt Mexican lawman, helped create a narco-state
MEXICO CITY — By his own admission, the Mexican lawman known as El Diablo — The Devil — supervised a scourge of torture, murder, kidnappings, land grabs and other abuses while amassing a fortune in cartel bribes that bankrolled purchases of homes, cattle and a fleet of buses. Edgar Veytia's transgressions came while he was the top cop in Nayarit, a small Pacific Coast state that evolved from a sleepy backwater to one of Mexico's most violent cartel battlegrounds. Veytia, who honed the public persona of a crusading, pistol-packing prosecutor, brazenly traveled between Mexico and the United States, confident that no one would see beyond his righteous, tough-on-crime facade. 'I didn't think I would be arrested,' Veytia testified later. His sense of invulnerability was shattered on March 27, 2017, when U.S. agents busted Veytia at a border crossing in San Diego. This was no low-level mule who ferried drugs on his person, but a state attorney general who had facilitated cartel smuggling for years. Veytia pleaded guilty in January 2019 to narcotics trafficking. El Diablo, however, knew where the bodies were buried — a knowledge he peddled tirelessly to his U.S. handlers. And when he testified against an even bigger Mexican narco-politician, he secured a get-out-of-jail card — before completing even half of his 20-year U.S. prison sentence. Veytia, 55, was released from prison in Februaryand is currently a free man, residing in the northeastern United States. But now he is facing some of his alleged victims in a singular legal action. Five Nayarit families — among them farmers, small business owners and a former police officer — are suing Veytia in federal court in Washington, D.C., under the Torture Victim Protection Act. The law, passed in 1992, allows civil claims against abusers who, while acting in official capacities for foreign governments, engaged in atrocities anywhere in the world. The Nayarit plaintiffs say they endured torture, death threats and extortion during El Diablo's reign of terror. While Veytia may have paid his dues under U.S. law, they say his mostly anonymous victims in Mexico, some long-ago slain or disappeared, merit a reckoning. 'When the very institutions meant to protect and deliver justice become perpetrators of torture and abuse, they leave citizens with no recourse,' the plaintiffs said in a statement. 'In the face of that abandonment, we came together—as civil society—to resist silence and impunity.' Representing the Nayarit residents — who are seeking unspecified damages — is San Francisco-based Guernica37, a nonprofit organization seeking accountability for global rights abuses. Assisting are pro-bono lawyers and UC Irvine's Civil Rights Litigation Clinic, founded by attorney Paul L. Hoffman, a co-counsel and pioneer in such international actions. Veytia denies the residents' charges. His New York-based lawyer, Alexei Schacht, labels the accusers 'shake-down artists' and 'fraudsters' seeking a big payday. 'Mr. Veytia committed some terrible crimes, but he paid for it in a maximum-security prison and he's trying to turn his life around,' said Schacht. 'It's unfortunate that these people are lying about him.' Whatever the truth, Veytia's history of heinous crimes dramatizes the intractable nexus between Mexican officialdom and the country's ruthless mafias. For decades, the lure of cartel cash has ensnared prosecutors, generals, mayors, governors — and even the country's onetime top law enforcement honcho, Genaro García Luna, against whom Veytia testified in federal court in Brooklyn. That so many corrupt functionaries and cartel capos ultimately face responsibility in the United States — and not in Mexico — underscores a fundamental weakness of the Mexican justice system, observers say. 'It's one more instance of official impunity in Mexico,' said Guillermo Garduño, a researcher at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City. 'Organized crime and many politicians in this country are one and the same. The Veytia case is a very clear example of that, though it's far from the only one.' The Massachusetts-sized state of Nayarit, population 1.2 million, boasts both a tourist-beckoning coast ('The Nayarit Riviera') and a mountainous interior where cultivation of opium poppies and marijuana has long provided a subsistence living for some peasants. Nayarit's location, sandwiched between the drug-trafficking hubs of Sinaloa and Jalisco states, made it prized turf as organized crime syndicates expanded their terrain and embraced new rackets. Violence escalated rapidly in Nayarit, and elsewhere in Mexico, after President Felipe Calderón, with U.S. backing, declared 'war' in 2006 on drug cartels. Gun battles and gang killings convulsed Tepic, Nayarit's volcano-ringed capital, where the homicide rate soon rivaled that of Mexico's hyper-violent border cities. 'There were people hung from bridges,' Veytia testified when asked to describe Tepic in those days. 'There were people who showed up skinned.' And, he added, there was an especially macabre practice, a warning that evoked pozole, the signature Mexican corn and meat stew. 'They were these big tins where they would put dismembered parts like legs, heads,' Veytia said. 'And they would add some corn grains to it, and call it pozole.' Veytia, who attended elementary school in San Diego — he is a joint U.S.-Mexican citizen — arrived in Tepic in the early 1990s, running a transport firm and a jewelry shop, according to his testimony. He says he later earned a law degree. Veytia hitched his fortune to the spurs of the charismatic Roberto Sandoval, a glad-handing pol in a cowboy hat who was elected mayor of Tepic and, in 2011, governor of Nayarit. Sandoval named Veytia to top law enforcement slots in both the capital and the state as the folksy politician amassed illicit riches, according to prosecutors. (Sandoval remains jailed in Mexico on corruption charges, which he denies.). Veytia, a portly figure with a bushy mustache, seemed an unlikely Eliot Ness, but he was credited with reducing violence and hailed as 'the terror of every criminal' in a laudatory corrido, or ballad. In fact, human rights activists say, Veytia crafted a kind of a paz narca, or narco-peace: His legions of corrupt cops didn't mess with Veyta's favored mobsters of the moment — the ones lining his pockets. That guaranteed one gang's dominance. Intra-cartel warfare plummeted, but drug trafficking boomed. From the moment of his arrest, Veytia tried to secure favor by informing on other narcos, and in 2019 he got his big break with the arrest in Texas of García Luna, Mexico's security chief under ex-President Calderón. García Luna was a big fish ready to be fried in Brooklyn. But during his testimony, Veytia recounted his own crimes. During his nine-year law enforcement career, Veytia said, he pocketed about $1 million in kickbacks, along with gifts, including Rolex watches, from traffickers — who dubbed him El Diablo — Veytia admitted being 'responsible' for the murders of 10 'or more' people and the torture of dozens of others utilizing various methods — sometimes electric shocks, sometimes waterboarding. While testifying against García Luna, Veytia dropped a bombshell: He said a former Nayarit governor (not Sandoval) had told him that orders came from then-President Calderón and García Luna to protect the legendary Sinaloa cartel boss, Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán. Calderón, who was never charged in the case, denounced Veytia's testimony as 'an absolute lie.' But a jury in 2023 convicted García Luna of pocketing millions of dollars in bribes from the Sinaloa cartel. He was sentenced to 38 years in prison. A judge halved Veytia's sentence, from 20 to 10 years. When Veytia walked out of prison in February, he had served slightly less than eight years. According to his lawyer, Veytia lost most of his accumulated wealth on legal fees and seizures of properties in Mexico, where prosecutors are seeking his extradition on kidnapping, torture and other charges. The ghosts of crimes past have proved persistent. In the civil lawsuit, Nayarit residents say Veytia tortured them, threatened to kill them and engaged in systematic property theft as he inflamed a statewide 'culture of fear.' Among the plaintiffs are Gerardo Montoya and his wife, Yadira Yesenia Zavala. In June 2016, the couple allege in court papers, cops waylaid them on a road, handcuffed them and drove them to see 'boss Veytia' at a police headquarters in Tepic. According to Montoya, Veytia threatened to kill him unless he turned over a property the couple owned. Montoya said he was beaten so badly that a paramedic was called to check on him. His wife says she was sexually harassed and forced to go home and retrieve the deed. The couple says Veytia forced them to sign away the property. Before he was released, Montoya said, Veytia warned him: 'If you say anything, you're a dead man.' Yuri Disraili Camacho Vega, a former Nayarit state police officer, said he resigned from the force fearing for his life. Camacho said he received death threats after filing a criminal complaint with federal authorities denouncing Veytia's directive ordering police to protect members of an infamous crime family. Upon returning to Nayarit more than a year later to visit his ailing mother, Camacho said he was arrested, accused of driving a stolen vehicle, tortured and jailed. According to Camacho, Veytia demanded that Camacho withdraw his allegations against him — and fork over 1 million pesos, then the equivalent of about $77,000. Camacho said he was severely beaten and subjected to waterboarding, or simulated drowning. If he didn't agree to Veytia's terms, Camacho said he was told, he and his loved ones would be killed. Camacho said his family made the payment and he withdrew the complaint. In court papers, Veytia denies it all. He accused Montoya of being 'a longtime drug trafficker' and called Camacho a 'thoroughly corrupt officer' who worked for the Sinaloa cartel and tried to kill Veytia. Veytia's lawyer, Schacht, said the allegations defy credibility. Recalling how Veytia wielded power in his narco days, Schacht said, 'If my client wanted to torture you, you would be dead.' Special correspondents Cecilia Sánchez Vidal and Liliana Nieto del Río contributed to this report.
