Mexico Trucker Online

The powerful Gulf cartel is believed to have launched Wednesday’s raid on police and civilians in northern Sonora state, which sparked a giant gunbattle and left at least 22 people dead, Mexican officials said Thursday. The violence is part of the war between the Matamoros-based crime organization and the Sinaloa cartel for control of smuggling routes to the United States, said Mexican Security Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna.

That rivalry is blamed for the recent surge in killings in Nuevo Laredo and other towns along the Texas-Mexico border.

The Gulf cartel’s alleged leader, Osiel Cardenas, was extradited to Houston in December after three years in a Mexican prison, where officials say he continued to run his business from behind bars. He is awaiting trial on drug trafficking and money laundering charges.

Gangland-style killings have claimed at least 1,000 lives in Mexico this year, an increase in violence that has cast doubt on President Felipe Calderón’s decision to deploy thousands of federal troops to battle the drug gangs.

But Garcia Luna said the government had no intention of pulling the army out any time soon — at least not before it has a well-trained federal police force to take its place.

“Where the violence is, that’s where we’ll be,” he said. “This offensive is all-out. We won’t leave the public in the hands of criminals.”

Wednesday’s clash was the biggest confrontation between organized crime and the security forces since Calderón declared war on the drug gangs in December.

The standoff began just after midnight on Wednesday when a convoy carrying more than 40 black-clad, rifle-toting gunmen rolled into several towns near the Arizona border. Within an hour, they had kidnapped seven police, later killing four. They also picked up at least two civilians, authorities said.

By mid-afternoon, state police had tracked the assailants by helicopter into the mountains near the town of Arizpe, about 60 miles south of the Arizona border, and sent more than 100 police in hot pursuit. A gunbattle ensued. By the end, five police, two civilians and 15 hitmen were dead and 10 assailants were arrested, officials said.

Garcia Luna said there was little doubt of who to blame for the attacks, a suspicion fueled by witness accounts.

“They told us they were from the Gulf cartel, that they came from Tamaulipas,” one of the freed hostages told the Sonora-based Imparcial newspaper. The man added that his captors had traced a “z” on his back with a knife, the calling card of the cartel’s ruthless hitmen, the Zetas.