Robert Beltran Burgos Captured in Sinaloa

The Secretary of Defense reported today that military personnel assigned to the Military Zone based in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Performing patrols in response t0 complaints about the presence of armed men on board luxury vehicles in the Salduero Culiacan, detained Robert Beltran BURGOS (a ) "THE DOCTOR" lieutenant of Joaquin Guzman Loera (a) "El Chapo Guzman."

The importance of this arrest is that BELTRAN BURGOS served within the structure of the organization "Guzman Loera, the functions that once made ALFREDO BELTRAN LEYVA (a)" THE MOCHOMO "and subsequently VICENTE ZAMBA FOG (a)" THE VICENTILLO "in the plaza of Culiacan, Sinaloa. He is an operator directly subordinate to Joaquin Guzman Loera (a)" El Chapo Guzman, "and ZAMBA ISMAEL GARCIA (a)" THE MAYO ZAMBA.

Their position within the criminal organization was to be responsible for
receiving and transmitting orders issued directly by Joaquin Guzman Loera (a) "El Chapo Guzman" to other members of this drug organization.

BURGOS BELTRAN, had a network of informants who warned of the operations undertaken by the Federal Government against the organization "Guzman Loera" in several places in the country.

He coordinates a group of fourteen lawyers for legal support to members of his criminal organization.

During his detention, officiaks secured three firearms, a Hummer vehicle, over $ 3,200,000.00 (THREE MILLION TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND PESOS MN), over 350,000.00 Dlls. (Three hundred and fifty thousand U.S. dollars), communication equipment and various documents.

With the arrest of Robert Beltran BURGOS (a) "THE DOCTOR" will significantly affect the operational capacity and safety of the organization "Guzman Loera.

The inmate was secured and made available to the Agent of the Public Prosecutor's Office of the Deputy Attorney Specialized Investigation of Organized Crime, the Attorney General.

Source: Directorate General of Communications,
Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA).

Vicente Carrillo Leyva of Juarez Cartel Arrested

Vicente Carrillo Leyva, son of the late kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes, is arrested in Mexico City.
By Ken Ellingwood
April 3, 2009

Reporting from Mexico City -- Mexican authorities on Thursday announced the capture of Vicente Carrillo Leyva, a suspected top leader of a family-run drug gang based in Ciudad Juarez and one of the country's most wanted figures.

Federal law enforcement officials said Carrillo Leyva, the 32-year-old son of deceased drug kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes, was arrested Wednesday while exercising in a wealthy neighborhood of Mexico City.

Full coverage of Mexico's drug war

The younger Carrillo was listed among the country's 24 most wanted drug suspects last week when the federal government offered $2-million rewards for each.

Authorities described him as an heir to the organization once led by his father, who was known as the "Lord of the Skies" for his use of aircraft to move drugs.

The announcement came on the same day U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano met outside Mexico City with top Mexican security officials to discuss how to stanch the southbound smuggling of weapons to drug cartels from the United States.

The arrest of Carrillo Leyva represents a significant victory for Mexican President Felipe Calderon's 28-month-old war against drug traffickers. But authorities say the younger Carrillo's uncle, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, known as "the Viceroy," remains in place as the leader of one of the four largest trafficking organizations in Mexico.


Carrillo Leyva, considered the Juarez group's No. 2 figure, helped manage the gang and launder proceeds from its drug sales, authorities said.

Officials said Carrillo Leyva was living in Mexico City under an assumed name: Alejandro Peralta Alvarez. They said they were able to find him in part because his wife, Celia Karina Quevedo Gastelum, kept her name.

Mexico is seeing a crop of younger, university-educated narco juniors emerging as leaders of drug-trafficking organizations that are bound primarily by family ties. Carrillo Leyva was paraded before news cameras in a white Abercrombie & Fitch sweatsuit and stylish glasses -- a far cry from the narco archetype decked out in cowboy boots and oversized jewel-studded belt buckles.

Two weeks ago, Mexican authorities arrested the 33-year-old son of Sinaloa-based suspected trafficker Ismael Zambada in another wealthy section of Mexico City. He was presented to reporters looking chic in jeans, dress shirt, jacket and fashionably stubbly face.

Marisela Morales Ibañez, who heads the organized crime unit of the Mexican attorney general's office, said Carrillo Leyva's capture reflects the "absolute commitment of the federal government to combat all organized crime groups that attack the peace, tranquillity and security of the population."

The Juarez gang has been locked in a vicious turf war with a band of traffickers based in the northwestern state of Sinaloa and led by Joaquin Guzman, the country's most wanted fugitive.

The bloodletting left about 1,600 people dead in Ciudad Juarez last year. Violence continued in the border city during the first two months of 2009 but has dipped since Calderon sent 5,000 more troops and hundreds of additional federal police there in recent weeks.

At least 10,000 people have died nationwide since Calderon launched his crackdown on organized crime groups soon after taking office in December 2006.

Thursday's meeting of top U.S. and Mexican officials near the city of Cuernavaca produced fresh pledges on both sides of common action against gun trafficking. But there were few specifics beyond creation of a binational working group to recommend strategies.

The visit of Napolitano and Holder comes amid a flurry of diplomacy between the neighboring countries. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spent two days in Mexico last week on a visit that focused on border security. President Obama is scheduled to visit April 16-17.

Last week, Napolitano unveiled a border security plan aimed at attacking the cartels and keeping serious violence from spilling into the United States. The plan envisions sending hundreds more federal agents and intelligence analysts to the border region.

Clinton said the White House would seek funding to provide Mexican authorities with $80 million worth of Black Hawk helicopters. Some of those funds would come out of $700 million already approved under the three-year security aid plan for Mexico known as the Merida Initiative.

U.S. and Mexican military officials have discussed greater cooperation against drug-trafficking groups, but Calderon this week ruled out joint operations on his country's soil.

U.S. lawmakers have proposed boosting aid to Mexico, which already was to receive a total of $1.4 billion under the Merida program, now in its second year.

Mexican officials have urged U.S. authorities to clamp down on the smuggling of drug money and the thousands of assault rifles and other weapons that fortify the cartels' arsenals.

U.S. law enforcement agencies estimate that Mexican and Colombian traffickers make $18 billion to $39 billion in the U.S. each year -- much of it smuggled back into Mexico.

In addition, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives says 90% of weapons seized in Mexico and reported to the agency can be traced to the United States.

"There's no question that the vast majority of weapons, and especially high-powered weapons, that are found here in Mexico . . . come from the United States," Holder told reporters. "That's the reality we have to face."

The Rest @ LA Times
ken.ellingwood@latimes.com

Bajadores Infect Arizona Drug Markets

Morning News, 3/17/09
By Bryan Griffith, March 17, 2009

As Manuel exited the Radio Shack in Phoenix with his family one afternoon last month, a group of Hispanic men standing in the parking lot watched him closely. "Do it now, do it now," one said to another in Spanish, according to a witness. One of the men approached Manuel, pointed a revolver at his head and tried to force him into a Ford Expedition parked close by. "Please, I'll get into the car, just don't touch me," Manuel pleaded as he entered the vehicle, his wife told police. Nearby, she said, another man in a Chrysler sedan aimed a rifle or shotgun out the driver's side window. At some point, shots were fired, said witnesses, although apparently no one was hit. Then the vehicles tore off with a screech of tires.

Later that evening, the phone rang. When Manuel's wife picked up, a male voice said in Spanish, "Don't call the police," and then played a recording of Manuel saying, "Tell the kids I'm OK." The man said he'd call again, then hung up.

Despite the warning, Manuel's wife contacted the cops. In subsequent calls, the kidnappers told her Manuel owed money for drugs, and they demanded $1 million and his Cadillac Escalade as ransom.

When two men later retrieved the Escalade and drove off, the cops chased them and forced them off the road. Both men, illegal immigrants from Mexico, said they'd been paid by a man (who authorities believe has high-level drug connections) to drive the vehicle to Tucson. So far, police say, Manuel hasn't reappeared, and his family has been reluctant to cooperate further with law enforcement.

"He's a drug dealer, and he lost a load," says Lt. Lauri Burgett of the Phoenix Police Department's recently created kidnapping squad. "He was probably brought to Mexico to answer for that."

Surprising as it may seem, Phoenix has become America's kidnapping capital.

Last year 368 abductions were reported, compared with 117 in 2000. Police say the real number is likely much higher, since many go unreported. Though in the past most of the nabbings stemmed from domestic-violence incidents, now the majority are linked to drug-trafficking and human-smuggling operations that pervade the Arizona corridor. It's still unclear to what extent the snatchings are being directly ordered by Mexican cartels, but authorities say they're undoubtedly a byproduct of the drug-fueled mayhem south of the border. "The tactics are moving north," says assistant police chief Andy Anderson.

"We don't have the violence they have in Mexico yet--the killing of police officers and the beheadings--but in terms of kidnappings and home invasions, it has come."

That raises an unnerving prospect: that the turmoil in Mexico--where drug violence claimed more than 6,000 lives last year--is finally seeping across the border.

• According to a December report by the Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center, Mexican drug-trafficking organizations have established a presence in 230 U.S. cities, including such remote places as Anchorage, Alaska, and Sheboygan, Wis.
• The issue is preoccupying American officials. "This is getting the highest level of attention," including the president's, says Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. She tells NEWSWEEK that the administration is dispatching additional Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel to the border, and it's reviewing requests from the governors of Arizona and Texas for help from National Guard troops.

Earlier this month, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Mexico to discuss assistance and to share potentially relevant lessons that the United States has learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, says a senior Pentagon official familiar with details of the trip who wasn't authorized to speak on the record.

All the attention has stoked public debate on a particularly fraught question--whether Mexico is a failing state. A U.S. Joint Forces Command study released last November floated that scenario, grouping the country with Pakistan as a potential candidate for "sudden and rapid collapse." Such a comparison is excessive, says Eric Olson of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Mexico Institute in Washington, D.C., though the Mexican government confronts "real problems of sovereignty in certain areas" of the country.

Administration officials are striving to tone down the rhetoric and focus on ways to help. Among the priorities, says Olson: to cut American demand for drugs, to provide additional training and equipment to law-enforcement and military personnel in Mexico, and to clamp down on drug cash--an estimated $23 billion per year--and assault weapons flowing into the country from the United States.

As the violence continues to spiral in Mexico, reports of cartel-related activity are on the rise in American cities far removed from the border.

• Last August the bodies of five Mexican men were discovered bound, gagged and electrocuted in Birmingham, Ala., in what was believed to be a hit ordered by Mexican narcotraffickers.
• A few months later, 33 people with cartel ties were indicted in Greeneville, Tenn., for distributing 24,000 pounds of marijuana.
• In neighboring North Carolina, "there are cartel cells ... that are a direct extension from Mexico," says John Emerson, the Drug Enforcement Administration's special agent in charge in the state.
• Law enforcement in Atlanta, where a maze of interstates provides distribution routes throughout the Southeast, has dubbed the city "the new Southwest border." "All those trends are coming here," says Fred Stephens of the Georgia Bureau of Investigations. "We are seeing alarming patterns, the same violence." He ticks off a spate of cartel-linked crimes in the state--assaults, abductions, executions.
• Last May authorities in Gwinnett County found a kidnap victim, along with 11 kilos of cocaine and $7.65 million in shrink-wrapped bundles, in a house rented by an alleged Gulf cartel cell leader.
• A few months later, a suspected drug dealer in Lawrenceville was abducted by six men, dressed commando-style in black, and held for a $2 million ransom (he escaped).
  

Nothing rivals the rash of kidnappings in Phoenix, however.

• As border enforcement has tightened the screws on the California and Texas crossings, Arizona has become a prime gateway for illicit trafficking--in both directions. "The drugs and people come north, the guns go South," says Elizabeth Kempshall, the DEA's special agent in charge of the Phoenix division.

Arizona is mostly dominated by the Sinaloa cartel, which authorities say is trying to assert greater control over the U.S. drug trade.

Yet analysts believe the organization has fractured--most notably last summer, when the Beltrán Leyva brothers reportedly split from leader Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzmán.

That internecine conflict, along with cartel encroachment north of the border, has created something of a free-for-all in Phoenix's criminal underworld. Among the groups that have stepped into the breach:

• Roving Mexican gangsters called bajadores, or "takedown" crews, who are responsible for many of the city's kidnappings. Often operating in packs of five, they typically cross the border to commit crimes, then retreat south, say police.
• Some work as enforcers for the cartels, collecting payment from dealers who have stiffed the capos or lost their loads.
• Others function as freelancers, stealing shipments of drugs or illegal immigrants from traffickers. "We've seen an uptick in the bajadores since last summer," says Al Richard, a Phoenix police detective. "We are seeing a lot more professionals coming up here now."

Mas Information En CIS

Beltran Leyva Enforcers Aimed at la Familia Captured in Tultitlan

Drug Cartels War For Control of Narco Trade in Mexico Capital

MEXICO CITY -- The Sinaloa and Gulf drug cartels are waging "a war" to control the trade in illicit substances in this capital, Mexican federal police commissioner Rodrigo Esparza said."

There's a turf war and a war for the market between these two gangs in the metropolitian area," Esparza said when telling reporters about the capture of 10 people accused of being enforcers for the Beltran Leyva brothers, allies of the Gulf cartel.

• Those taken into custody allegedly told interrogators that they had instructions to murder members of La Familia, a group backed by the Sinaloa cartel
• The reputed hired guns, who were presented to the press Thursday, were arrested by federal agents in the municipality of Tultitlan, at some 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Mexico City
• Among the crime suspects are a woman and two minors.
• Seized from the group were six AK-47 assault rifles, two handguns and six vehicles as well as significant amounts of cocaine and marijuana.

On Tuesday, also in the municipality of Tultitlan, police arrested another group of 10 individuals said to be linked to La Familia.

The Rest from Latin American Tribune

Sinoloa uses Bribes - Gulf uses Violence - Both are Parasites

Sinaloa uses Bribes - Gulf uses Violence - Both are Parasites, but it may explain while Calderon's government is more vulnerable to penetration by the Sinalo Cartel...

-Editor

MEXICO CITY (AP) — President Felipe Calderon's war on drug trafficking has led to his own doorstep, with the arrest of a dozen high-ranking officials with alleged ties to Mexico's most powerful drug gang, the Sinaloa Cartel.

The U.S. praises Calderon for rooting out corruption at the top. But critics say the arrests reveal nothing more than a timeworn government tactic of protecting one cartel and cracking down on others.

• Operation Clean House comes just as the U.S. is giving Mexico its first installment of $400 million in equipment and technology to fight drugs.
• Most will go to a beefed-up federal police agency run by the same people whose top aides have been arrested as alleged Sinaloa spies.

"If there is anything worse than a corrupt and ill-equipped cop, it is a corrupt and well-equipped cop," said criminal justice expert Jorge Chabat, who studies the drug trade.

U.S. drug enforcement agents say they have no qualms about sending support to Mexico.
"We've been working with the Mexican government for decades at the DEA," said Garrison Courtney, spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration. "Obviously, we ensure that the individuals we work with are vetted."

• Agents who conduct raids have long suspected Mexican government ties to Sinaloa, and rival drug gangs have advertised the alleged connection in banners hung from freeways.
• While raids against the rival Gulf cartel have netted suspects, those against Sinaloa almost always came up empty — or worse, said Agent Oscar Granados Salero of the Federal Investigative Agency, Mexico's equivalent of the FBI.
  

"Whenever we were trying to serve arrest warrants, they were already waiting for us, and a lot of colleagues lost their lives that way," Salero said.

The U.S. government estimates that the cartels smuggle $15 billion to $20 billion in drug money across the border each year.

The Following have been detained or accused of complicity

• officials from the Mexican Attorney General's office
• Federal police
• Mexico's representatives to Interpol
• An officer who served in Calderon's presidential guard
• The acting federal police chief,
• Former drug czar
• a Mexican federal agent

have been detained on suspicion of acting as spies for Sinaloa or its one-time ally, the Beltran Leyva gang. An officer who served in Calderon's presidential guard was detained in December on suspicion of spying for Beltran Leyva.

Gerardo Garay, formerly the acting federal police chief, is accused of protecting the Beltran Leyva brothers and stealing money from a mansion during an October drug raid. Former drug czar Noe Ramirez, who was supposed to serve as point man in Calderon's anti-drug fight, is accused of taking $450,000 from Sinaloa.

Most of such tips are coming from a Mexican federal agent who infiltrated the U.S. embassy for the Beltran Leyva drug cartel.

No such infiltrators have been found for the Gulf cartel, which controls most drug shipments in eastern Mexico and Central America.

Sinaloa controls Pacific and western routes.

The DEA's Courtney agrees that there has been a greater crackdown on the Gulf Cartel in both the U.S. and Mexico, with more than 600 members of the gang arrested in September. But he declined to answer questions about Mexico favoring Sinaloa.

Calderon has long acknowledged corruption as an obstacle to his offensive, which involved sending more than 20,000 soldiers to battle drug trafficking throughout the country.

The U.S. aid plan includes technology aimed at improving the way Mexico vets and supervises police.

The president vows to create a "new generation of police," consolidating agencies under Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna, who heads all federal law enforcement.

That's what worries Granados Salero and other agents. So many of Garcia Luna's associates are under suspicion of Sinaloa ties that many wonder how he could not have known.

Calderon has publicly backed Garcia Luna, calling him "a man of great capacity."
"Obviously, if there was any doubt about his honesty, or any evidence that would call into question his honesty, he would certainly no longer be the secretary of public safety," the president said recently.

But some see the alleged Sinaloa ties with Garcia Luna's lieutenants as an old tactic used widely under the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for 71 years with a tight fist. Officials in the past preferred to deal with one strong cartel rather than many warring gangs — what Calderon faces now. More than 5,300 people died in drug-related slayings in 2008.

"I fear that Secretary Garcia Luna ... is working on the idea that once one cartel consolidates itself as the winner, that is, Sinaloa, the violence is going to drop," said organized crime expert Edgardo Buscaglia, who tracks federal police arrests and has studied law enforcement agencies' written reports.

Garcia Luna has denied being involved in corruption. He has acknowledged that authorities in the past chose the path of managing cartels. But in an interview with the newspaper El Sol, he said that approach only strengthens the gangs in the long run.

Others say the high number of Sinaloa infiltrators is a reflection of the two cartels' very different styles.

The Gulf cartel is led by military-trained hit men so violent that they reportedly planned to attack even U.S. law enforcement agencies.

"They don't necessarily try to build networks of corruption. They prefer networks of intimidation," said Monte Alejandro Rubido, who leads Mexico's multi-agency National Security System.

Sinaloa, on the other hand, appears to use bribery and infiltration at least as much as its gunmen. Cartel leader Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman bribed his way out of a Mexican prison in 2001, provoking suspicions the government was on his side.

Many Mexicans worry about giving so much money and power to a still corrupt force. Of more than 56,000 local and state police officers evaluated between January and October last year, fewer than half met the recommended qualifications, Calderon reported to Congress in early December. No similar numbers are available for federal police.

Agents like Granados Salero wonder who is in charge of police integrity.
"We agents find out about a lot of things," he said, "but who can we turn to?"

Associated Press Writer Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington contributed to this report

Obama - Calderon Their fist Conversation -Mexico On the Brink

Felipe Calderon In Washington

As recent tradition would have it, Felipe Calderon was the first foreign leader to meet with President-elect Obama since winning the Nov. 4 election.

During their often interrupted 90 minute-long conversation, the leaders discussed several topics of shared interest.

• The deeply troubling security situation in Mexico (which may not have been adequately appreciated until now by the incoming president),
• a snap-shot of the current status of the immigration imbroglio and
• The future of NAFTA during the current economic recession,

were amongst the most pressing issues.

Calderon mainly pushed Obama to continue U.S. assistance in responding to the narco-fueled violence that has paralyzed Mexican society since Calderon’s election in 2006.

“The more secure Mexico is, the more secure [the] U.S. will be,” said Calderon referring to the importance of U.S. cooperation in the struggle to halt the expanding crime wave from spreading even further.

Recently, the U.S. released another $99 million dollars of the proposed $1.3 billion allocated to the Merida Initiative program that was engineered under the Bush administration. Obama mechanically praised Calderon’s troubled anti-drug offensive and pledged to help stop the southbound flow of weapons and laundered U.S. funds that fuel the drug cartels’ enterprises, and pledged to continue to back the Merida Initiative framework.

But, under the present perilous economic situation it will remain to be seen whether the administration will be able to continue funding the program at the present level.

The Mexican president expressed strong opposition to Obama’s campaign promise of reengineering NAFTA, a topic that was pressed but brought only perfunctory acknowledgements from the new administration’s spokesperson, Robert Gibbs, “[Obama] expressed his continued commitment to upgrading NAFTA to strengthen labor and environmental provisions to reflect the values that are widely shared in both of our countries.”

Mexico City has generally opposed NAFTA revisions as they would be likely to reduce local production while reducing exports abroad as well as inducing further northbound immigration due to a contraction of its economy.

Obama, who won the election partly due to a historically large Latino vote, has promised to mend hemispheric relations, particularly with Mexico, which suffered from woeful neglect under the Bush administration.

Calderon and Obama both demonstrated a great deal of optimism and confidence in what was labeled “an extraordinary relationship” during their conversation; but caution will remain as the same was said when Bush met with Vicente Fox after he assumed office.

The Contagion Spreads Southward

The comparatively weak security apparatus in Guatemala has been placed strain by expanding Mexican cartels within is borders. Rember Larios, director of Guatemala’s National Civilian Police (PNC), recently estimated that the figure for the last year’s nation-wide violent death toll was 6,234, averaging an estimated 17 deaths per day, in a country of roughly 13 million.

“Narcotrafficking has been the difference between the amount of violent deaths in 2007 and 2008.

Therefore all our strategies and tactics that we will apply in 2009 will be to fight this social phenomenon,” said Larios in reference to the difficulties Guatemala’s already over-extended and pervasively corrupt security forces are now having to deal with.

President Colom, who was elected last year on the promise of alleviating Guatemala’s poverty woes, admitted to the Guatemalan daily Nuestro Diario that “Our perception failed. We had a plan [for 2008], but on the way we realized that the topic of security is deeper.

• Our projections did not anticipate the avalanche of Mexican narco-trafficking, which caused a lot of deaths.”
• President Colom now wants to begin his second year as president by eliminating corruption, and augmenting the country’s security forces.

Since he made those statements, he has begun the new year by shaking up his cabinet and appointing Salvador Gándara as his interior minister. With widespread concern that he might take a mano dura approach to the crime issue, Gándara has said that he will produce short-term results in the face of Guatemala’s massive insecurity problems.

The Fragility of the US Border

There is potential for the same spillover phenomenon to occur along the United States-Mexico Border, as the flow of weapons continues with relative ease and the business continues to boom. The fiercest battles have been in the two largest U.S.-Mexican border cities:

Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez.

Tijuana has suffered a horrifying 843 violent murders in the past year, most of them attributed to the brutal Arellano-Felix cartel’s efforts to maintain control of the lucrative Tijuana smuggling corridor which runs into California, specifically San Diego.

The fight to fill the power vacuum resulting from Arellano-Felix’s waning influence, has contributed to the undeniable insecurity the city has been forced to suffer.

• A former lieutenant of the Arellano-Felix cartel, Teodoro Garcia, is trying to wrest control of Tijuana from his former bosses.
• Garcia, now being joined by Arellano’s rivals the Sinaloa Cartel, has gained notoriety for unparalleled violence by pursuing a brutal new business model for the cartel, one that adds kidnapping, assassinations and extortion in addition to his trafficking activities.

Garcia’s henchmen’s acts in 2008, included sadistic torture, beheadings and dissolving victims in vats of acid, which shocked the local and international media.

Tony Garza, current U.S. ambassador to Mexico, believes that the struggle against the cartels is going to take a long time to resolve, maybe one of the few times he got things right during his largely, irrelevant and intrusive ambassadorship.

The largest city in the state of Chihuahua, Ciudad Juarez, also earned deserved infamy in 2008 due to fight over the El Paso smuggling route.

• In the year, violence in Ciudad Juarez spiked to around 1,500, people were gunned down in drug-related crimes.
• The turf war between the Sinaloa cartel and the Beltran Leyva brothers for jurisdictional control over the profitable Ciudad Juarez’s drug corridor, turned out to be the bloodiest battle ground for that year.
• Much like in other parts of cartel-controlled territory, Mexican security forces had difficulties stemming the brutal clashes as decapitation, kidnappings as well as large numbers of accidental casualties of crossfire became a disturbing fact of life.

The overwhelming corruption found within all ranks of the local state police has left Ciudad Juarez largely a grotesque and lawless entity.

Even though several specific anti-corruption policies have been put into place and 2,000 troops have been performing random raids, available resources have been far too few to disrupt either the violence of the drug trade or increase the authorities’ control of the situation.

Failing State or Failing Policy?

The violence that characterized Mexico in 2008 has continued its escalation during the first two weeks of 2009. The question now is not whether the drug-cartels can be stopped, but how far is their influence going to reach.

• Central American governments are already being placed under heavy strain due to cartel related crime that can only be anticipated to grow even further.
• U.S. and Mexican border cities that share deeply rooted cultural ties will undoubtedly share similar social afflictions. This means that as Calderon’s offensive surely expands, the response from the cartel’s riposte will certainly grow as well.

Tony Garza, former Bush aide turned Bush appointed ambassador, recently discussed these issues with the Dallas Morning News, “Calderón must, and will, keep the pressure on the cartels, but look, let’s not be naïve – there will be more violence, more blood, and, yes, things will get worse before they get better. That’s the nature of the battle. The more pressure the cartels feel, the more they’ll lash out like cornered animals.”

The issue has gained mainstream attention outside of Mexico, having been mentioned in reports authored by the Joint Forces Command and Gen. Barry McCaffrey.

Both underline the same issue:

The Mexican state is on the brink of losing control of its territory to the overwhelming power of the cartels.

General McCaffrey strongly recommends President-elect Obama to reorganize his priorities to place Mexico at the top, as a failing Mexican state would create catastrophic security and economic repercussions across the region. Calderon’s actions have revealed his resolve to fight the mounting threat on all its levels, yet it is clear that his administration’s resolve alone will not be enough to take on the cartel’s pursuit for the U.S. markets.

Mexican and U.S. officials alike now see that it is only through true collaboration from the U.S. and other governments, as well as a coordinated strategy that addresses all facets of the menace, that regional security and stability will ever be a possibility.

This analysis was prepared by Tomás Ayuso January 13th, 2009

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