Little more than a year after President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against Mexico’s powerful drug cartels, the gangsters seem willing and able to strike back with a vengeance.The arrests last week in Mexico City of 11 heavily armed men, whom authorities say were assassins for the Sinaloa Cartel led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, suggest the crackdown is having an impact, officials say.
Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, a top anti-narcotics official in the federal attorney general’s office, told Mexican interviewers that he had been the target of at least two assassination attempts in the past month.
“They plan to generate violence to force a retreat by authorities,” Genaro Garcia Luna, Calderon’s secretary of public security and one of Mexico’s top cops, said last week.
But, Garcia vowed, “There will be no retreat. We are not going to take a step back. The fight against crime is going to to be permanent, systematic.”
Departure from the norm
If both sustained and successful, such resolve may well mark a dramatic departure from the norm in Mexico’s decades-long dance with its criminal empires.Since the country became a major transshipment point for South American cocaine headed for U.S. consumers in the 1980s, Mexico’s politicians and security forces tended to treat the crime of drug trafficking as a nuisance — and too frequently as a source of illicit gain.
Over the years, some gangsters, including cartel bosses, were jailed or killed, and some police officers and soldiers were also slain on anti-narcotics operations.
But the leaders of the cartels rarely targeted senior officials or challenged the state — as they did in Colombia — because high-level government officials never really presented much of a threat to their smuggling business.
The old style might have been best defined in the 1990s when Mexico’s drug czar, an army general praised by U.S. agents for his crackdown on Mexico’s leading trafficking gang, was convicted of working for a rival group.
But if that were once the way of things, some American and Mexican officials insist it’s not anymore. Since taking office 13 months ago, Calderon has made the crackdown on drug cartels the anchor of his administration.
“Our intention is to make it so complicated for them to come through Mexico that they will seek to smuggle through somewhere else,” a senior Mexican official said, speaking on condition he not be identified.
U.S. partnership
More than 40 tons of cocaine have been seized since the crackdown began in December 2006. Top crime bosses have been extradited to face U.S. courts.Soldiers and police have battled cartel gunmen on the streets of border cities. Intelligence-gathering has been enhanced, and more importantly, acted on.
“People who have come here, who have talked to the Mexican government, who have engaged, really see a distinction here, a real expression of political will,” said David Johnson, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for narcotics and law enforcement, who was in Mexico City last week for talks with Mexican officials.
Johnson is helping shepherd the Bush administration’s proposal to give Calderon’s government $1.4 billion worth of law enforcement technology and training in the coming years to aid in the fight.
The plan faces concerns in the U.S. Congress, which is expected to vote on it by this summer.
“We think it’s appropriate that America be a partner to try to work with the (Calderon) administration, to try to push this process forward,” Johnson said.
Daunting challenge
Mexican security forces and senior officials “must be capable of confronting all the costs, all the risks … including in lives offered to achieve the Mexico we desire,” Calderon said Friday in an offhand comment to the Mexico City newspaper El Universal.But even with such unwavering will, and with the proposed U.S. aid, the challenge facing Calderon seems daunting.
With annual earnings estimated at $10 billion, Mexico’s drug gangs are deeply embedded in the country’s economy. That’s especially true along the key cocaine smuggling routes and in areas where marijuana and heroin poppies are grown and where crystal methamphetamine is manufactured.
Cartels have upper hand
Drug gangsters control complete towns and wield influence in wide swaths of entire states. Some local and state police forces, despite periodic purges of personnel, effectively remain in the gangs’ employ.Supplied with weapons smuggled from the United States and elsewhere, the cartel’s foot soldiers are often better armed than the security forces.
Although leading traffickers like Guzman make the headlines, scores, even hundreds of smuggling gangs operated across the country. With such a lucrative return, gang bosses who are jailed or killed are quickly replaced by their ambitious lieutenants.
Mexico’s smugglers grew more powerful and wealthy this decade as Colombia’s cartels splintered into smaller organizations under the weight of that country’s anti-narcotics efforts.
‘Superior’ capabilities
At the same time, the fall of Mexico’s one-party government at the ballot box, accompanied by the growing political power of state and local governments, made it easier for gangsters to gain more political influence here, said John Bailey, a Mexico expert at Georgetown University.”Decentralization and inter-party competition complicates this whole thing,” Bailey said. “The state and local fellows don’t have the firepower or intelligence network to take on these guys. “
Still, Calderon’s senior officials insist they’ll prevail.
“The great challenge in this effort is to prevent them from taking root,” Garcia, the public security minister, said.
“Their logic of trying to generate violence to intimidate authorities is not going to work,” he said. “The capabilities of the Mexican government are superior.”
Nuevo Laredo Police, disarmed and suspended once again!
Special forces of the Mexican Army and federal agents surrounded municipal police headquarters early Tuesday all along the South Texas-Mexico border, seizing more than 1,000 police officers’ firearms and other equipment and holding an unspecified number at military headquarters.”It was a direct order from the highest level,” said a spokesman for the Army stationed in Nuevo Laredo. “Faith has been lost in the city police working in Tamaulipas.”
Nuevo Laredo Mayor Ramón Garza Barrios said his office was aware of the drastic action to be taken by the federal authorities, and is in complete support of the effort to get rid of corruption along the border.”General DEM Rigoberto García Cortez, garrison commander, had notified us,” the mayor said. “It’s part of the anti-crime operations that (national authorities) have activated in our city.”Nuevo Laredo streets, as well as those in Miguel Alemán, Río Bravo, Valle Hermoso, Reynosa y Matamoros, are now patrolled by heavily armed soldiers, federal agents and state police as every city police officer was relieved of duty until officials can ascertain whether any are involved with drug traffickers.
In Nuevo Laredo, some 500 officers were pulled off the street and disarmed. An untold number are in detention at the Army headquarters.
In 2005, the Army disarmed 600 local police and 40 of them were taken to Mexico City for interrogation at the federal public safety office. Several months later, firearms were returned to a select group of officers who underwent extensive background checks and completed new training designed to clean up the department.
All the weapons seized Tuesday were taken to the garrison in Nuevo Laredo to be checked by ballistics experts to determine whether they had ever been used in drug-related crimes.
In addition to checking the firearms, each officer’s personal documents and backgrounds will be under a microscope. Drug tests were administered to every officer.
The Army spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said every city grants its officers a license to use firearms. The checks will verify whether the weapons being carried by officers match the licenses they were issued.
The actions of the special forces, known by the Spanish acronym of GAFES, alarmed many officers in the six cities that border South Texas.
“They have us (stunned). If they know who to take, then they should fulfill their responsibility,” said one officer, who asked not to be identified. “They have lists. They have been working for some time on gathering intelligence and they know the bad officers.”
In Reynosa, soldiers and federal agents surrounded police headquarters. Some officers said they were afraid because the agents might make mistakes and arrest people who aren’t connected to drug traffickers. The police headquarters in Matamoros also was surrounded by armored vehicles, as agents and soldiers commandeered weapons and began checking identification.
Garza Barrios said that as soon as city police officers pass the inspection, they will be returned to the streets but no time frame has been established for that.
UPDATE: Nuevo Laredo Police back on the job without weapons or vehicles
Nuevo Laredo’s police force is back to its patrolling duties Wednesday but without their firearms, said city spokesman Alberto Rodríguez Wednesday morning.
All they have are night sticks and shields, he said.
El Norte (Monterrey) reported in the early afternoon that the police were being required to remain inside the city’s police station.
In a follow-up phone conversation with Rodríguez this afternoon, he said that the police don’t have access to their patrol vehicles either.
Officers are just doing foot patrols in some part of the city, he said.
No officers have been arrested and they are no longer being required to remain at police headquarters by the military, he said.
The 450-member police force is taking its normal shift changes, he said. It appears many officers remain at police HQ.
“They were just playing soccer right now,” said Rodríguez.
Local authorities ordered drug tests on the officers.
Police do not know when they will be given their weapons or vehicles or normal job descriptions back.
Editor’s Note: Anybody who thinks President Calderon and his government are not serious about fighting the cartels and suppressing the corruption, needs to think again. It is a new era in Mexico. The people are fed up with the violence and corruption and demanding change.
Four police officers and seven civilians accused of working for Mexico’s powerful Gulf drug cartel were flown to the capital Sunday for prosecution.The four municipal officers, detained in Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas, on Saturday, had allegedly funneled police and military information to the cartel by radio, Public Safety Department spokesman Edgar Millan said.
Authorities previously said they were arrested for carrying unregistered guns.
“The power of criminal organizations has permeated the police,” Millan said, adding that internal investigations are underway to weed out corrupt officers.
Police corruption is widespread in Mexico, particularly in states like Tamaulipas plagued by organized crime. In October, 25 federal police officers were detained in the state on suspicion of providing protection for the Gulf drug cartel.
Along with the four officers, seven people suspected of working for the Gulf cartel were detained in various parts of Tamaulipas state and transported to the capital Sunday. Among them was a U.S. man identified only as Marcos Estrada Delgado.
Authorities did not give Estrada’s age or home town, and the U.S. Embassy said it hadn’t been contacted about his arrest.
The arrests came after two weeks of bloody clashes along the border between federal agents and gunmen who allegedly work for the Arellano Felix and Gulf cartels.
A federal agent and a gunman were killed Thursday in a three-hour fire fight in Tijuana, days after three police officials and one of their wives were shot dead.
An officer filling in for one of the slain officials was kidnapped Saturday night by a group of armed men while he drove his car, Tijuana municipal police said. His family was later brought to a police station for protection.
Investigators also discovered an underground weapons arsenal and shooting gallery in Tijuana on Saturday, which they believed the Arellano Felix cartel used to train new members, police said.
Earlier this month, four other federal agents were killed and 13 injured in shootings in Michoacan state and Tamaulipas.
A former Border Patrol agent and his wife, who also own the restaurant Burger Patrol, were arrested Thursday on charges of conspiracy to transport illegal immigrants.An indictment unsealed in federal court Friday alleges that on three occasions in 2007, David Cruz, 32, and Susana Lopez-Portillo De Cruz, 35, conspired to transport illegal immigrants by motor vehicle.
The indictment alleges that the couple transported 10 illegal immigrants on Jan. 23 and eight on July 21.
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SAN DIEGO – A former U.S. Border Patrol agent pleaded guilty Friday to taking $100 for each carload of illegal immigrants that he helped get past one of his agency’s highway checkpoints.Jose Olivas Jr. admitted scouting a Border Patrol checkpoint on Interstate 5, north of San Diego, in his personal vehicle and then calling an accomplice to give him an all-clear to follow.
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