On the streets of American cities, a drug torpedo can refer to a cocktail of marijuana and crack cocaine. But on the seas off Mexico and Central America, it can now mean a real torpedo, which is used to smuggle cocaine, cystal meth or bundles of dollar bills passed the U.S. or Mexican navy.

The Justice Department defended the Drug Enforcement Administration’s controversial money laundering stings, pointing out they have been used since 1984 to successfully bring down dozens of major gangsters. Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Ronald Weich described the DEA’s operations in a letter to Rep. Darrell Issa of California, details of which were published Friday by the Houston Chronicle. Weich said that Congress gave authority for the DEA to set up bank accounts to entrap the money of narcotics traffickers and transfer money to the gangsters in 1984 under President Ronald Reagan, who beefed up the war on drugs.

Accusations of police or soldiers in Mexico torturing and wrongfully imprisoning suspects are so common that they rarely make news. But it does make a splash when the alleged victim of the abuse is American. Shohn Huckabee, a 24-year old from El Paso, was released from prison after almost two years when the U.S. Justice Department determined that he had been tortured in Mexican custody.

They are ferocious, destroy crops and attack humans, newspapers in Mexico’s northern state of Chihuahua warn. Mexico’s environment department has issued a death sentence on thousands of wild boars that have crossed the border from Texas in recent years. The animals are from a race of European boar, which is tough and destructive to the local fauna, said department spokesman Ignacio Legarreta. They could also carry hazardous diseases.