Mexican authorities succeeded with its biggest drug bust. Soldiers raided houses in Tijuana, confiscating marijuana worth millions of dollars.<br /><br />The Mexican military raided a group of homes in a poor suburb in the border city of Tijuana on Monday.<br /><br />They seized 105 tons of marijuana with a street value of at least 340 million U.S. dollars.<br /><br />[General Alfonso Duarte, Commander of Tijuana Army Zone]:<br />"We obtained the following results: In Tijuana, Baja California, more than 10 thousand marijuana packages weighing 105 tons, six trailers, three heavy vehicles, two pick-ups and two large weapons were seized and eleven people were detained."<br /><br />Soldiers came under fire at least once as they confiscated the drugs and arrested the suspects.<br /><br />The marijuana was carefully wrapped, labeled, and ready for distribution in the United States, according to the army.<br /><br />The bust is a boost for Mexican President Felipe Calderon, whose reputation is staked on his campaign against his country's powerful drug cartels.<br /><br />The death toll from Calderon's war on drugs has climbed to nearly 30 thousand over the past four years.<br /><br />This puts him under increasing pressure to show results, both at home where alarm is growing among citizens and abroad as Washington and foreign investors are on edge.<br /><br />Over the past decade, Mexican cartels have grown extremely powerful as violence sparked by cartel rivalries has spread beyond the long-troubled cities into formerly peaceful places.<br /><br />Mexico is one of the world's top marijuana producers, exporting about seven thousand tons a year.<br /><br />Together with home-grown heroin they generate an estimated $10 billion in exports.
