Peru sees cocaine making a comeback

After a lull, production is rising, feeding demand in Brazil, Europe and East Asia, officials say. With flashy cartel men replaced by a piecemeal network, the trafficking is harder to combat.

By Patrick J. McDonnell
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 23, 2008

SANTA LUCIA, PERU — Rustic mule trains ferry vital chemicals to clandestine jungle labs.

Booby-trapped fields ward off intruders.

Trekkers never seen on the Discovery Channel backpack the prized finished product on epic journeys from steamy Amazon hideaways to chilly highland distribution depots.

And a shadowy remnant of the notorious Shining Path rebel army, led by a charismatic man named Artemio, uses its muscle to pocket a fortune in a sinister protection racket.

Peru's cocaine industry, the world's largest and most violent in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is again on the upswing. Plots of coca bushes, whose leaves yield cocaine, have increased by about one-third since 1999, to about 127,000 acres, according to Peruvian and United Nations estimates.

And this time, the traffickers may be more difficult to combat because the flashy kingpins from Colombia have been replaced by a piecemeal network, a sort of gold rush of international entrepreneurs.

Production is still well below the record highs of the early 1990s, and neighboring Colombia has surpassed Peru as the global cocaine leader, supplying 90% of the U.S. market, according to the State Department. Moreover, President Alan Garcia is a staunch foe of the drug.

"Peru will not resign itself to be a country of narco-trafficking," vowed the pro-U.S. Garcia, who took office in 2006.

But Peru, the world's No. 2 supplier, feeds a booming demand in Brazil, Europe, East Asia and as far away as Australia, authorities say. The density of coca plantings has doubled in some cases, experts say, and the fertilizer-nourished leaf now yields a greater proportion of cocaine alkaloid, the active ingredient in cocaine.

A wave of drug-related lawlessness -- assassinations, ambushes, threats against prosecutors -- has fanned fears of the kind of narco-instability that afflicts Colombia and Mexico. The Tijuana cartel is suspected in the 2006 slaying in Lima, the Peruvian capital, of a judge hearing a case against an alleged cartel capo.

And renewed militancy among the peasants who grow the coca leaf has sparked road closures and violent clashes with law enforcement officers.

The Garcia administration initially agreed to suspend eradication efforts, a mainstay of the U.S.-backed anti-drug policy. But Garcia later reversed course and even suggested that clandestine laboratories be raided and bombed. With U.S. aid that totals about $50 million a year, Peru has trained and deployed hundreds of anti-drug police officers.

"If we don't kill the danger now," Garcia declared, Peru could be confronted with "an insurgency as large as occurred in our neighboring country" -- a reference to Colombia, where cocaine underwrites guerrilla armies.

Former Interior Minister Fernando Rospigliosi has warned of the corrosive effect of a burgeoning drug trade. "Its tentacles always reach to the halls of the highest authority," he said.

During the 1990s, U.S.-backed enforcement efforts chased much of the coca trade to Colombia. Now, some say, the wheel is turning: Pressure in Colombia is shifting production here.

But today's tableau is distinct from the brazen scenario of the late 1980s and early '90s.

Gone are the Colombian drug barons swaggering around in opulent jungle redoubts such as the nearby town of Uchiza, once dubbed the world cocaine capital, with its gaudy discos and bordellos. Replacing the Colombians is a multinational network that reaches from the Amazon basin to a globalized market.

"We're up against an army of ants," said Gen. Miguel Hidalgo, who heads Peru's national anti-drug police.

Authorities here have identified smuggling rings from Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Nigeria and the Dominican Republic, among other countries. A Peruvian gang allegedly headed by a petite woman known as Floricienta (after the lead character in an Argentine soap opera of the same name) is said to control a massive chemical-supply network.

Today, Peruvian traffickers produce pure cocaine for export, not the paste that was once regularly shipped to Colombia for final processing.

U.S.-supported police efforts have shut down clandestine landing strips and pinched road access to the isolated planting districts on the Andes' lush eastern flanks. But ever-adaptable traffickers have expanded cultivation zones while employing pack animals and mochileros -- backpackers -- to maintain the illicit flow.

Negotiating extreme terrain, low-tech legions use mules to haul in the essential chemical precursors, and cocaine-laden backpackers stealthily travel age-old Inca trails beneath the canopy, creating invisible contraband thoroughfares.

"Everything is now done on a small scale, a lot of little pieces," said Col. Whitman Rios, head of special operations at the U.S.-supported anti-drug base here in the Upper Huallaga Valley, Peru's most notorious production zone.

This is an area of hypnotic natural beauty, where the mighty Huallaga River meanders through luxuriant hills and sumptuous flatlands like a chocolate-colored pretzel in a vast sea of green. From the air, there is no hint of the battles raging amid the verdant expanses.

On the ground, government forces deploy against targets gleaned from satellite imagery and informants. Then, Vietnam-era U.S. helicopters ferry in "eradicators" armed with metal tools designed to yank coca plants from their roots. Unlike Colombia, Peru bans chemical spraying; it is all done by hand.

Coca growers, known as cocaleros, have devised a crafty countermeasure: Some plants are rigged with homemade bombs; rat traps serve as triggering devices.

"I reached for the bush and it exploded in my face," said Jose Angel Solano Gomez, 40, an eradicator who lost his left eye and suffered other injuries in an encounter with a pipe bomb attached to a coca plant. He says he was thrown three yards into the air.

In the last two years, 73 eradication workers have been wounded and two killed, the government says. More than two dozen police officers have died in drug-related violence.

Flanked by armed escorts, eradicators set out in the stifling heat, like an odd amalgam of ancient and futurist warriors: They don helmets, eye-protection gear and bulletproof vests and, when needed, carry 10-foot lances that provide some distance from booby-trapped shrubs. Paramedics tote antivenin for snakebites and medication for blast and gunshot wounds. Teams of U.S.-trained bomb dogs sniff the fields.

"The campesinos say we're taking away their livelihoods," said Hugo Gozar, 50, a veteran eradicator, referring to the farmworkers.

Throughout the Andean Amazon basin, the imperative of the marketplace pushes peasants to the dependable coca plant. About 65,000 Peruvian families make a living off the coca leaf and trafficking, according to a U.S. State Department report released last month.

Alternative crops such as oil palm and cacao have met with some success, U.S. officials say. But many impoverished farmers insist that no legal product can replace the myth-shrouded bush and its profitable harvests.

"Here, there is no alternative to coca," said Juan Leon Echegaray, a father of six and a cocalero near Tingo Maria. "They come and they offer us a few chickens and some cacao. How am I to survive on that?"

Despite the cocaleros' hostility, authorities managed to eradicate about 27,000 acres of coca last year in the Upper Huallaga. But that only kept pace with new plantings, often in previously eradicated zones.

Many cocaleros have migrated to ever-more-remote patches of the Apurimac and Ene river valleys known in narco-parlance as "liberated zones."

"The narcos and their sicarios [hired killers] act in these zones with complete impunity," said Rospigliosi, the former interior minister. "They've bought off local officials and have complete control."

The flourishing narco trade, authorities say, is stimulating a fresh incarnation of the Maoist rebel group Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, which terrorized the nation before being beaten down in the 1990s. Shining Path was never vanquished in coca country, where the rebels have long imposed "taxes" on traffickers, timber harvesters and others.

The Sendero band along the Huallaga is led by the elusive "Comrade" Artemio, a veteran guerrilla who commands somewhere between a few dozen and more than 100 armed men, authorities say.

Following the blueprint of Colombian guerrillas, police say, Shining Path cadres are deep into the coca trade, ambushing police, targeting eradicators and killing suspected informers. The guerrillas also provide rolling security for cocaine-laden backpackers and secret drug labs, where handwritten signs warn recruits that loose lips can cost them their heads, literally.

Like their Colombian counterparts, authorities say, senderistas are integrating vertically: Insurgents have moved into the production side, planting coca, processing leaves and smuggling.

"Shining Path isn't about ideology anymore," said Gen. Juan Zarate, who heads Peru's eradication effort. "Now it's all about the narco-business."

patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com

Special correspondents Felipe Paucar in Tingo Maria and Adriana León in Lima contributed to this report.

Extrajudicial slayings on rise in Colombia

Soldiers, under pressure to show progress in a U.S.-funded war, allegedly are killing civilians and passing them off as rebels.

By Chris Kraul
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 21, 2008

GRANADA, COLOMBIA — Street vendor Israel Rodriguez went fishing last month and never came back. Two days later, his family found his body buried in a plastic bag, classified by the Colombian army as a guerrilla fighter killed in battle.

Human rights activists say the Feb. 17 death is part of a deadly phenomenon called "false positives" in which the armed forces allegedly kill civilians, usually peasants or unemployed youths, and brand them as leftist guerrillas.

A macabre facet of a general increase in "extrajudicial killings" by the military, "false positives" are a result of intense pressure to show progress in Colombia's U.S.-funded war against leftist insurgents, the activists say.

Rodriguez's sister Adelaida said he had served three years in the army and was neither a guerrilla nor a sympathizer. "He never made any trouble for anyone," she said, adding that she believed the army killed her brother to "gain points."

Such killings have spread terror here in the central state of Meta. Last year the state led Colombia in documented cases of extrajudicial killings, with 287 civilians allegedly slain by the military, according to the Colombian Commission of Jurists, a human rights group. That's a 10% increase from the previous year

Although there appear to be no official -- or unofficial -- tallies of "false positives," human rights activists say they believe such incidents are on the rise, along with the overall increase in killings by the military, based on their discussions with victims' families and analyses of circumstances surrounding individual cases.

"It's quite likely, because the same scenario appears over and over again in the cases I review," said John Lindsay-Poland of the New York-based Fellowship of Reconciliation. "Victims last seen alive in civilian clothing later are found dead dressed in camouflage and claimed as guerrilla casualties."

The killings have increased in recent years amid an emphasis on rebel death tolls as the leading indicator of military success, the human rights groups say. Even Colombian officials acknowledge that soldiers and their commanders have been given cash and promotions for upping their units' body counts.

Since President Alvaro Uribe took office in 2002, the military has scored notable successes in winning back territory from leftist rebel groups and improving security, buoyed by billions of dollars in military aid from the United States under Plan Colombia, the program that fights drug trafficking and terrorism.

But at the same time, the military's human rights record is getting worse, charged a coalition of Colombian and international human rights groups.

And new research by two U.S. peace groups into the killings raises serious questions about whether the United States is doing enough, as required by law, to bar U.S. funding to Colombian military units that have elicited allegations of killings and other human rights violations.

Amnesty International USA and the Fellowship of Reconciliation have found that the U.S. government "vetted" or approved military assistance to at least 11 Colombian armed forces units last year despite "credible allegations regarding killings, disappearances and collaboration with outlawed paramilitary forces," Renata Rendon of Amnesty International USA said in Washington this month.

"It's outrageous this is happening. It's up to the [U.S. government] to ensure that we are not providing aid to abusive units," Rendon said.

While not responding specifically to the claims, an official at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota said this month that Colombian armed forces' killings of civilians were a "serious problem, a serious concern."

"It's something we take very seriously. If you're going to win a war like this, a big part is establishing rule of law and winning the people's confidence in your legitimacy and commitment to legal institutions," said the official, who was not authorized to speak for attribution. He defended the vetting process but said it was complicated by the fact that allegations of human rights abuses often were "not sufficiently specific or verifiable."

To address the issue of impunity, Colombia's attorney general last year set up special investigative teams in Meta and Antioquia states, which had the highest numbers of alleged abuses by the military. In November, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos sent a directive to military commanders ordering major changes, including giving civil courts more jurisdiction in investigating incidents.

But the killings are still spreading terror here in Meta state. Ramiro Orjuela Aguilar, a Bogota human rights attorney representing 20 families of suspected "false positive" victims in Meta, blamed the military's use of paid informants or demobilized guerrillas for many of the killings.

"They have an incentive to name people as rebels because they are paid for information whether it's correct or not," Orjuela said.

Several of the Meta victims last year were youths living in and around Granada, the hub of a cattle and farming region that has been fiercely contested in recent years by leftist guerrillas, the armed forces and right-wing paramilitary troops. It is also home to the army's 12th Mobile Brigade, a unit that Orjuela says is implicated in many of the killings.

Orjuela alleges that the army is engaging in "social cleansing" in Meta, home to four of the five municipalities that made up the so-called neutral zone occupied by Colombian guerrillas from 1998 to 2002. Killings and mass displacements of residents here are efforts to deprive guerrillas of sympathizers, Orjuela said.

"They are trying to deprive the fish of its water," he said.

Kidnapped on an outing to the Ariari River, Rodriguez, the street vendor, may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, relatives theorize, caught by a band of police officers or soldiers who were on a "fishing trip" of their own for victims.

Orjuela said cases involving alleged "false positives" seemed to decline after the Colombian army issued the November directive to all commanders ordering that officers and the rank and file be made aware that the most important standards of success are demobilizations and captures of guerrillas, and then body counts. But he said he had noticed a resurgence lately, noting the Rodriguez killing.

Adelaida Rodriguez said that despite the government's initiatives, she and her family were reluctant to press for an investigation. Referring to her brother, she said, "If we make noise, we'll end up like him."

chris.kraul@latimes.com

Drug Trade Tyranny on Mexico's Border

Cartels Rule With Bribes And Murder

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 16, 2008; A01

TIJUANA -- The killers prowled through Loma Bonita in the pre-dawn chill.

In silence, they navigated a labyrinth of wood shacks at the crest of a dirt lane in the blighted Tijuana neighborhood, police say. They were looking for Margarito Salda¿a, an easygoing 43-year-old district police commander. They found a house full of sleeping people.

Neighbors quivered at the crack of AK-47 assault rifles blasting inside Salda¿a's tiny home. Rafael Garc¿a, an unemployed laborer who lives nearby, recalled thinking "it was a fireworks show," then sliding under his bed in fear.

In murdering not only Salda¿a, but also his wife, Sandra, and their 12-year-old daughter, Valeria, the Loma Bonita killers violated a rarely broken rule of Mexico's drug cartel underworld: Family should remain free from harm. The slayings capped five harrowing hours during which the assassins methodically hunted down and murdered two other police officers and mistakenly killed a 3-year-old boy and his mother.

The brutality of what unfolded here in the overnight hours of Jan. 14 and early Jan. 15 is a grim hallmark of a crisis that has cast a pall over the United States' southern neighbor. Events in three border cities over the past three months illustrate the military and financial power of Mexico's cartels and the extent of their reach into a society shaken by fear.

More than 20,000 Mexican troops and federal police are engaged in a multi-front war with the private armies of rival drug lords, a conflict that is being waged most fiercely along the 2,000-mile length of the U.S.-Mexico border. The proximity of the violence has drawn in the Bush administration, which has proposed a $500 million annual aid package to help President Felipe Calder¿n combat what a Government Accountability Office report estimates is Mexico's $23 billion a year drug trade.

A total of more than 4,800 Mexicans were slain in 2006 and 2007, making the murder rate in each of those years twice that of 2005. Law enforcement officials and journalists, politicians and peasants have been gunned down in the wave of violence, which includes mass executions, such as the five people whose bodies were found on a ranch outside Tijuana this month.

Like the increasing number of Mexicans heading over the border in fear, the violence itself is spilling into the United States, where a Border Patrol agent was recently killed while chasing suspected traffickers.

Drawing on firepower, savage intimidation and cash, the cartels have come to control key parts of the border, securing smuggling routes for 90 percent of the cocaine flowing into the United States, according to the State Department. At the same time, Mexican soldiers roam streets in armored personnel carriers, attack helicopters patrol the skies, and boats ply the coastal waters.

"The situation is deteriorating," Victor Clark, a Tijuana human rights activist and drug expert, said in an interview. "Drug traffickers are waging a terror campaign. The security of the nation is at stake."
Dominated by a Private Army

More than 1,900 miles southeast of Tijuana, the city of Reynosa stretches along the Rio Grande across from south Texas. This is Gulf cartel country, a region dominated by the cartel's private army, Los Zetas. Their arsenal befits a military brigade, exceeding those of some Mexican army units.

Led by Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, Los Zetas are a highly disciplined mercenary squad composed of former elite Mexican troops, including officers trained by the U.S. military before they deserted. The group has become an obsession of Calder¿n's administration, which has sent more than a thousand troops to Reynosa and neighboring cities.

Soldiers crowd the slender canal bridges that crisscross Reynosa, stopping drivers at random and staring across the cityscape with their fingers on the triggers of heavy weapons. The tense atmosphere has led to mistakes.

On Feb. 16, soldiers fatally shot Sergio Meza Varela, a 28-year-old with no apparent ties to the drug trade, when the car he was riding in didn't stop at a checkpoint. "You're scared to leave your house," Alejandra Salinas, Meza's cousin, said in an interview outside the family tire shop. "We're just in the way."

In Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and Nuevo Laredo, the growing Sinaloa cartel is fighting rivals over smuggling routes. But in Reynosa, police say, only Mexican soldiers threaten the Gulf cartel's control.

To prepare for battle, Los Zetas have stocked safe houses with antitank weapons, assault rifles, grenades and other heavy weapons, including some that Mexican law enforcement authorities believe once belonged to the U.S. Army.

"How can I fight them?" said Juan Jos¿ Mu¿iz Salinas, Reynosa's police chief. "It's impossible."

On Feb. 7, soldiers stormed the dusty "El Mezquito" ranch outside Miguel Aleman, west of Reynosa, and found one of the largest illegal arsenals in recent memory: 89 assault rifles, 83,355 rounds of ammunition, and plastic explosives capable of demolishing buildings. Two days later in nearby Nuevo Laredo, soldiers found a weapons cache that included eight military uniforms used as disguises.

The mounting evidence that cartels have infiltrated many border police forces has prompted drastic action.

In Reynosa, soldiers disarmed the entire police force in January, leaving them without weapons for 19 days while ballistics tests were conducted. Police officers, who make $625 a month, were also forced to provide voice samples for comparison with recordings of threats made over police radios, Mayor Oscar Luebbert Guti¿rrez said in an interview.

"It wasn't worth it," said Mu¿iz Salinas, the police chief. "They come after us, but it's other authorities that are really involved. Look at the state police, the federal police and the military."
The Enemy Is in the House

It was New Year's Day in Tijuana, the hilly city at the foot of America's busiest border crossing. City workers prepped for celebrations, but Jes¿s Alberto Rodr¿guez Meraz and Sa¿l Ovalle Guerrero, both veteran police officers, had other plans.

They were going to get rich.

The officers stole one ton of marijuana from the Arellano F¿lix drug cartel. But before they could sell the load they were kidnapped. Four days later their bodies were found, Tijuana's new police chief, Jes¿s Alberto Capella, said in an interview.

The killings barely registered in Mexico, lost in an avalanche of at least 30 police officer murders in the past three months and dozens more in the past year. Their case illuminates the pervasive police corruption created by drug money.

One of every two police officers murdered in Mexico today is directly involved with drug gangs, according to estimates by police officials, prosecutors and drug experts.

Capella, nicknamed "Tijuana Rambo" because he fought his way out of an assassination attempt shortly before taking office, estimates that 15 percent of the city's 2,300 police officers work for drug cartels, earning a monthly stipend as body guards, kidnappers or assassins. In Baja California alone, Mexican justice officials estimate that 30 percent of the local and federal police force is on a cartel payroll.

"We have the enemy in our house," Capella said.

The killings in Loma Bonita here were related to a police corruption case, Capella and other police officials said. A few days earlier, Tijuana police had killed an officer working as a bodyguard for a drug gang that tried to rob an armored car.

Cartel assassins, using police radios, vowed revenge. Within a week, Salda¿a, his family, and two other officers had been murdered.

Some of the killings have come with specific messages taunting Mexican authorities.

During one week in mid-February, six bodies were found with signs lashed to them that included information such as the phone number and address of the Mexican army office set up to receive tips about organized crime. According to analysts, such "narco-messages," some of which are carved into the bodies, are intended to keep residents from reporting tips.

The decline of the Arellano F¿lix cartel's dominance of Tijuana has had the unexpected effect of deepening police corruption.

After one brother was assassinated and two others were arrested, a war erupted because the cartel's new leadership -- including a sister, Enedina -- refused to share territory with the Sinaloa cartel, a police official said on condition of anonymity. Once loyal to the Arellano Felix cartel, some police officers switched sides.

"The police became armed wings of the warring cartels," the police official said.

At the same time, tighter border enforcement following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks has made it harder for cartels to smuggle drugs into the United States. So the cartels developed a local market by giving out free samples of drugs, according to Clark, the Tijuana-based drug expert and human rights activist.

The estimated number of addicts in Tijuana doubled from 100,000 in 2004 to 200,000 in 2007, Clark said. The number of small stores or houses where drugs are sold increased fivefold -- to 20,000 outlets -- over that time. Each outlet pays protection money to police, so their proliferation meant more payoffs.

In response, authorities in Baja California and several other border states have begun giving police lie-detector tests. The questions range from the innocuous to queries such as "Have you ever worked with a drug trafficker?"

Rommel Moreno Manjarrez, Baja California's attorney general, said in an interview that out of every 1,000 officers tested, 700 fail.

"It's impossible for the narco to succeed without the help of the police," he said. "The success that the narco has been having is because of the police."
Transformed by Drug Money

About 20 minutes south of Tijuana, high-rise condominiums line the coast near Rosarito Beach. Once a sleepy hideaway for Hollywood stars, the town had over time exploded into a gaudy party magnet, drawing tourists to the beach and the studio where the movies "Titanic" and "Master and Commander" were filmed.

Rosarito's further transformation has been propelled by drug money and culture, turning the surfer's haven into a key transshipment point for cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamines. City hall is now an armed encampment. Soldiers in armored personnel carriers guard the front entrance.

The new police chief, Jorge Eduardo Montero ¿lvarez, now occupies an office inside the cordon. His headquarters was rendered uninhabitable by a December attack.

Investigators believe Rosarito Beach police -- working on behalf of the drug gangs -- were behind the attack, which killed one of Montero ¿lvarez's bodyguards. Days later, Mexican soldiers disarmed the entire 149-officer Rosarito police force.

"I'm more afraid of the police than the narcos," said Jorge Luis Qui¿ones, a Rosarito Beach physician and businessman, reflecting a feeling that has built for years among many of the surrounding area's 150,000 residents.

In June 2006, three Rosarito Beach police officers were beheaded. For Hugo Torres Chabert, scion of the wealthy family that founded the famed Rosarito Beach Hotel, it was a grim wakeup call.

Convinced that almost every level of the city's government had become tainted with drug money, Torres Chabert ran for mayor and won. Soon after taking office last December, he fired 80 of the city's 500 employees. But he says he hasn't been able to press for arrests for lack of evidence.

"They were corrupt, but not stupid," he said.

To the children of Rosarito Beach, narco gunmen had already became local heroes because they drove the fanciest cars, wore the latest styles and acted like they owned the town. "Black commandos," the drug cartel hit men, began openly flashing their weapons, snorting cocaine and strutting through the beach town.

"It became impossible to avoid drug dealers -- your kids go to school with their kids," Aurelio Casta¿eda, a Rosarito Beach bar owner and merchants association official, said in an interview. "You'd go to a bathroom in a bar, and they'd be selling cocaine. They don't even try to hide it, and there was nothing you could do about it, nobody you could turn to."

Casta¿eda's once-busy bar, El Torito, is often empty. He says his business is down 80 percent since 2001, when Rosarito Beach's drug violence spiked, scaring off most surfers and other tourists.

Beyond the flash of the bars and hotels, Rosarito Beach is a warren of impoverished neighborhoods where developers, after paying off city officials, did not bother to install water lines or electrical connections. The dismal living conditions created fertile recruiting grounds for drug traffickers, who have found many willing to "mule" their product across the border for $500 a trip.

But great quantities of drugs stay in Rosarito and are sold at hundreds of convenience stores or private homes that thrive under police protection. Not long ago, a Baja California journalist began digging into the problem. The cartels found out and, in a series of phone calls, threatened to kill him.

It wasn't the first time. He'd had enough. Terrified, the journalist left the business.

"I was saying to myself, 'This is an important subject,' " the journalist said on condition of anonymity, fearing for his safety. "But I wasn't willing to lose my life over it."

Cartels Suspected In Mexico Killings

33 Bodies Found At Gang Sanctuary; 7 Die at Law Office

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 15, 2008; A08

MEXICO CITY, March 14 -- Mexican authorities announced Friday that a total of 33 bodies had been found in graves at a drug cartel safe house and that seven people were killed in a law office that has represented drug traffickers.

The law office shooting took place Thursday in Guadalajara, a prosperous industrial city in western Mexico that has experienced far less drug violence than many other parts of the country, authorities said. The victims appeared to be attorneys as well as low-level assistants, and some were found tied up and shot execution-style, a common technique of cartel hit men, authorities said.

The law firm, Rangel Garcia & Associates, has represented Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman, the head of the Sinaloa cartel and widely considered Mexico's most powerful drug lord, according to a report in the Reforma newspaper. Guzman's cartel has attempted to expand across Mexico and is battling rivals in half a dozen states. The war among the cartels has left more than 5,000 people dead since January 2006.

News of the Guadalajara killings was quickly subsumed by word that 24 additional bodies were found at a house linked to the Juarez cartel in Ciudad Juarez, a violence-torn border city. Work crews have been digging behind the house since March 1, when nine bodies were found.

The Juarez cartel is reportedly trying to stop its Sinaloa rivals from seizing its smuggling routes.

There was immediate speculation that the discovery might be linked to the deaths of 400 women in Ciudad Juarez over the past 14 years, a development that has drawn international attention. But the attorney general's office said in a statement that only three of the victims were women.

Investigators said that the corpses were found in 14 graves and that the deaths were probably connected to drug gang violence. The bodies had been buried for about five years, the statement said, adding that an anonymous tip led to the site.

Latin American Crisis Resolved

Colombia Apologizes At Regional Summit

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 8, 2008; A09

BOGOTA, Colombia, March 7 -- The presidents of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela on Friday agreed to end a bitter standoff that had resulted in troop deployments, a downturn in trade and a rupture in diplomatic relations.

The crisis began after Colombia bombed a rebel camp last Saturday just inside Ecuador, killing 24 guerrillas, including Luis Edgar Devia, a top commander. The strike marked the first time the army had killed a member of the directorate of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a guerrilla group that has been fighting here for 44 years.

Colombian President Álvaro Uribe had come under criticism from various Latin American governments for the incursion, but at a regional summit in the Dominican Republic on Friday he heartily shook hands with Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. All three of those nations had broken relations with Colombia over the incident.

The resolution of the crisis, at a meeting of the 20-nation Rio Group, came in the form of a declaration that noted Uribe had apologized for the raid and that he promised never to violate another nation's border. "With the apology and the promise of never again violating a brother country, we have overcome this very grave crisis," said Correa, in comments that were broadcast live across much of Latin America.

Although the meeting ended on a positive note, the most serious issue raised in the debate -- that Colombian rebels operate with the help of foreign governments -- has not been resolved and is sure to fester.

The news came soon after the Defense Ministry in Bogota reported the death of a second member of the FARC's top command. Manuel Jesús Muñoz, better known by his nom de guerre, Iván Ríos, did not die in battle, but rather was killed by his own men this week in a mountainous, coffee-growing region of north-central Colombia, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos told reporters.

The slaying appeared to reflect serious internal divisions in an organization that has in recent months seen several seasoned, mid-level commanders killed in combat and hundreds more desert.

Colombian officials said that Muñoz's men, tired of running from troops, decided to kill him. Santos said they then severed his hand and presented it, along with Muñoz's identification card and computer, to an army column that had been pursuing the guerrillas. The United States had placed a $5 million bounty on Muñoz's head, accusing him of coordinating drug-trafficking operations.

The issue of Colombian guerrillas and whether they are harbored by Venezuela and Ecuador marked the often heated exchanges at Friday's summit, which had been scheduled previously. Ecuador, Venezuela and Nicaragua focused on Colombia's violation of Ecuador's sovereignty, while Colombia said that its people are under threat from rebels hiding outside its borders.

Uribe came out firing, accusing Correa of ties to the FARC. He cited as evidence a letter culled from a computer that commandos recovered in the camp that belonged to Devia. Uribe said the letter showed that the FARC supported Correa during his 2006 presidential campaign.

Correa, a leftist, U.S.-trained economist, angrily rejected the allegations, accused Uribe of lying and explained that his government has battled against FARC units in Ecuador's northern jungles.

"How hard it is to believe something from someone who has lied so many times," Correa said. "My hands are clean, and free of blood."

Other presidents at the summit applauded the Ecuadoran leader, who along with Chávez had vowed to marshal international condemnation for Colombia's incursion.

Chávez, who had been accused this week of assisting the FARC, also denied any ties. "I have never done it and will never do it," he said. "I could have sent a lot of rifles to the FARC. I will never do it because I want peace."

Uribe, though, said his country had been attacked 40 times since 2004 by Colombian rebels who used Ecuador as a launching pad. He also explained why he didn't inform Correa of the strike against Devia, who had been located with the help of a rebel who deserted, military officials said.

"I didn't inform him of the operation because we have not received cooperation from his government in the fight against terrorism," Uribe said.

Tensions eased after Dominican President Leonel Fernández, the host of the summit, appealed for calm and said, "What all of us would like is for this meeting to end with a hug, a handshake, between the presidents of Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador."

With the hearty handshakes, the countries resumed normal diplomatic and commercial relations. Uribe also said that he would not file a complaint with the International Criminal Court accusing Chávez of aiding the FARC, as he had vowed earlier.

Bush Says US Stands by Colombia

The Associated Press
Tuesday, March 4, 2008; 2:58 PM

WASHINGTON -- President Bush criticized "provocative maneuvers" toward Colombia by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, saying Tuesday that the United States stands with its ally, Colombia President Alvaro Uribe.

"America fully supports Colombia's democracy," Bush said. "We firmly oppose any acts of aggression that could destabilize the region."

Bush said he personally delivered this message to Uribe during a phone call earlier Tuesday. Colombia has received some $5 billion in U.S. aid to counter the drug trade and battle leftist guerrillas since 2000, and Uribe is considered a right-leaning ally of Bush's in a region dominated by leftist politics.

Relations have hit a new low between Uribe on one side and Chavez and Ecuador's President Rafael Correa on the other. Bush, making a rare and hastily scheduled personal appearance to describe a private conversation with a foreign leader, added himself to Uribe's side.

The raised tensions were triggered by a weekend raid by Colombian troops into Ecuador that killed a top commander of the FARC, Colombia's main rebel group, which had set up a camp there. Since then, Colombia and Ecuador have traded accusations and Chavez, sympathizing with the leftist rebels, ordered thousands of troops to move toward Venezuela's border with Colombia.

"America will continue to stand with Colombia as it confronts violence and terror and fights drug traffickers," Bush said.

Colombian military officials have said that U.S. satellite intelligence and communications intercepts have been key to putting the FARC on the defensive.

Bush said one of the chief ways that Washington can help Uribe is for Congress to approve a free-trade deal with Colombia. Though signed by the two countries in 2006, Capitol Hill's Democratic leaders have refused to pass the agreement, citing human rights violations in Colombia and its standing as the deadliest country in the world for organized labor.

Supporters have argued that the pact would level the playing field for U.S. products by requiring Colombia to lower or eliminate tariffs on them when many Colombian products already get such preferences in the American market.

Bush has sought to add new urgency to the debate by proclaiming the issue also a matter of national security _ and he used the crisis in South America as an opportunity to do so again.

"If we fail to approve this agreement, we will let down our close ally, we will damage our credibility in the region, and we will embolden the demagogues in our hemisphere," he said. "(Uribe) told me that the people across the region are watching to see what the United States will do. So Republicans and Democrats in Congress need to come together and approve this agreement."

Drug Gang, Police Battle For 5 Hours In Tijuana

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, March 4, 2008; A13

MEXICO CITY, March 3 -- Mexican soldiers and federal police fought a five-hour gun battle with suspected drug gang hit men late Sunday and early Monday in a residential area of Tijuana. At least one of the heavily armed suspects was killed and two were injured, authorities said.

The confrontation was the latest in a series of street battles that have terrorized the border city, where rival drug cartels also turn their weapons on each other. In January, another residential neighborhood was paralyzed by a three-hour gun battle that prompted the evacuation of a preschool and ended with the discovery of six dead kidnapping victims inside a cartel safe house.

Monday's battle took place in Tijuana's La Mesa neighborhood, a troubled area where the police commander was killed in January, a spokesman for the Baja California public safety agency told reporters. Federal police and soldiers were conducting an operation to shut down a suspected cartel safe house. Local police, many of whom are suspected of helping cartels, did not take part.

Soldiers and police began exchanging gunfire with the suspects at about 10 p.m. Sunday and fought through the night. At least 200 soldiers cordoned off several blocks during the battle, authorities said. Horrified neighbors told local news media that they hid inside their homes until the shooting stopped at about 3 a.m.

In Tijuana, two powerful drug gangs -- the Arellano Felix cartel and the Sinaloa cartel -- have been fighting over control of smuggling routes. Mexican President Felipe Calderon has dispatched hundreds of troops and federal police to the city to confront the cartels.

In Monday's shootout, authorities appeared to make new use of a strategy initiated after Calderon took office, according to Jorge Chabat, a Mexico City-based drug expert. Rather than focusing primarily on nabbing kingpins, Chabat said in an interview, soldiers also are attacking the safe houses that serve as refuges for hit squads and are trying to disrupt street operations of smugglers.

"There's a bigger focus on gathering intelligence," Chabat said. "But the narcos are responding with violence, and we're going to probably see a lot more of these street fights because the narcos have big numbers of assassins on their side."

Prosperous Haven in Mexico Is Invaded by Drug Violence

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 4, 2007; A01

MONTERREY, Mexico -- Biti Rodriguez could have gone anywhere for her 10-year-old's birthday party. But Incredible Pizza, a mammoth restaurant and fun house tucked into the corner of a strip mall here, offered her something that suddenly has become a consuming obsession: safety.

She herded her daughter, Alejandra, and a dozen other giggling girls through two metal detectors one recent afternoon at this pizza parlor that promises "incredible security for your children," then dumped bags of presents on a table to be probed by a guard. It took a while to actually get inside, but Rodriguez didn't care. She thinks all the extra security is "super bien" -- super good.

Not so long ago, metal detectors at a pizza place would have been unimaginable in Monterrey, Mexico's third-largest metropolitan area, with more than 3.6 million residents. The city once seemed as if it could do no wrong -- two years ago it was named the safest city in Latin America by an international consulting group, it boasted the region's wealthiest residential neighborhood, and it was a strong competitor for the Major League Baseball franchise that became the Washington Nationals.

But in the past year, the drug violence raging across Mexico has landed hard in Monterrey, jarring residents who once felt immune to the shootouts so common in other big Mexican cities.

In the first six months of 2007, Monterrey registered 162 killings, nearly as many as were recorded in all of last year and about 50 more than in all of 2004. But it wasn't just the killings that shook up the Biti Rodriguezes of this city -- it was the brazenness of the killers.

A hit man walked calmly into the landmark Gran San Carlos restaurant, past rows of Monterrey's signature hanging roasted cabrito, or goat, and shot dead a man seated at a table beneath the stained-glass cupola. Gunmen launched volleys of bullets into a popular seafood restaurant at the height of the lunch rush, and police officers were mowed down in broad daylight.

The killings triggered tremors of fear. Newspapers now run daily tallies of slayings. A roadside hotel has advertised bulletproof rooms. Heavily armored cars have become a new status symbol, with corporate chieftains dishing out as much as $400,000 for Mercedes-Benz sedans that ward off not only bullets but also grenades. In the San Pedro Garza Garcia suburb, where hillside palaces rival the mansions of Beverly Hills, a new saying was born: "There are no Tuesdays without killings."

"I can't say Monterrey is the safest city in Mexico anymore -- that would be a lie," Jesús Marcos Giacomán, president of the 122-year-old Monterrey Chamber of Commerce and Tourism, said in an interview. "I can say we're going to make it the safest again."
An Economic Powerhouse

Monterrey wraps around the stunning, rocky peaks of the Sierra Madre, 130 miles southwest of McAllen, Tex. Gleaming towers form its skyline, and U.S.-style malls and upscale restaurants line its wide boulevards.

Known as the "Sultanate of the North" because of its popularity with Middle Eastern businessmen, Monterrey revved into an economic powerhouse after the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994. The world's largest cement maker is here, as well as Mexico's biggest beer producer and one of the world's largest glass manufacturers. Major American corporations operate huge plants.

For the past five years, Monterrey stayed mostly peaceful while the rival Sinaloa and Gulf drug cartels fought over territory in other cities near the border, such as Nuevo Laredo. But something more complicated has happened here in the past year, Aldo Fasci Zuazua, deputy attorney general of Nuevo Leon state, said in an interview at his Monterrey office.

For unknown reasons, the local drug lords who warehouse cocaine, methamphetamines and marijuana for the big cartels began fighting each other, Fasci said. Their bloody battles unnerved the national and transnational cartels that counted on Monterrey's small-time operators to funnel tons of drugs into the United States.

A business that had run smoothly for years was suddenly a mess, and the national cartels felt compelled to sweep into Monterrey to "restore order," Fasci said. In the vernacular of organized crime, that meant killing people.
Fear Takes Hold

By April, assassinations were so rampant that the U.S. Embassy issued a travel warning for Monterrey noting that "Mexican and foreign bystanders" had been killed in Mexico. The next month, the business magazine America Economia dropped Monterrey from the top of its list of best places to do business in Latin America, a blow for a city that reaped a bonanza of publicity in 1999 when Fortune magazine dubbed it Latin America's top business locale.

Within days of America Economia's piece, Mexican President Felipe Calderón dispatched federal troops to patrol Monterrey's streets, one in a series of military assaults against cartel strongholds across the country.

Monterrey's wealthy -- the city is said to be home to more than a dozen of Mexico's most powerful families -- were well prepared to withstand the violence in their streets. Top corporations began hiring armed security forces. Executives and their families now travel in protective bubbles ringed by bodyguards and live behind high walls fitted with motion sensors and cameras.

But Monterrey's middle class, the pride of a state that boasts that its annual per-capita income of $14,000 is twice the national average, became frantic. Biti Rodriguez cringed each night when she watched the news. In her neighborhood, parents stopped letting their kids walk to school. School administrators tightened rules about who could pick up children.

Authorities know that private schools accept drug dealers' money to educate their kids, but "there's nothing that the government can do about it," Fasci said.

Rodriguez felt compelled to do something she'd never done before: She started locking the doors of her suburban Monterrey home.
Underworld Infiltration

With hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into the pockets of drug traffickers, authorities here suspect that organized crime has diversified, investing in criminal enterprises such as kidnapping and the smuggling of illegal immigrants, as well as legitimate businesses such as real estate.

The underworld has infiltrated state and municipal governments and police forces, damaging confidence in public institutions even though about 400 law enforcement officers suspected of corruption have been taken off the streets. One councilman here estimated that as many 200,000 people in the state of Nuevo Leon -- 5 percent of the population -- may be involved directly or indirectly in the drug trade.

Local politicians, especially in the many municipalities that abut Monterrey, say they feel like targets. One recent afternoon, a municipal councilman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that he "feels threatened all the time" and that even the most minor decisions become complicating labyrinths that can paralyze local governments afraid of unknowingly angering drug lords.

To protect himself, he conducts extensive investigations, gaming out every possible scenario about the possible ripple effects of his votes. But those inquiries carry risks, too. "If you're asking all these questions," he said, "sometimes these narcos find out and get nervous."

Although he can afford to buy a car, he doesn't. He said driving the same car would make him easy to spot, so some days he grabs a taxi, other days he hops a bus. His route to the office varies from day to day -- it takes much longer, but he feels safer.

His municipality and others around Monterrey suffer from police shortages as officers quit rather than risk their lives at a time when several dozen officers have been killed. Authorities say police victims range from good cops who challenge the cartels to corrupt cops killed for favoring one cartel over another.

José Antonio Samaniego Hernández might have been one of those good cops, his family said in an interview. He survived one assassination attempt but was gunned down three months later while leaving the ramshackle home where he lived in a cramped bedroom with his wife, daughter and mother. Samaniego became a number that day -- execution victim No. 33 of 2007, according to the newspaper Milenio.

But to Anna Calderón Garcia, 15, he was the police officer down the street, the guy in the uniform who stopped to talk to all the kids. He was also one of half a dozen police officers she has known -- either as neighbors or because they spoke at her school -- who have been shot dead.

After never hearing a gunshot in her life, Calderón said, she has twice been startled by gunfire. One night while leaving a Wal-Mart, she and friends saw the bodies of two slain policemen lying in the parking lot.

"It changed my life forever," she said. "Now I'm always looking around me, wondering if I might get shot."

While most of the shooting victims in Monterrey have been alleged drug traffickers, innocent victims have also fallen, including a 42-year-old mother of five caught in the crossfire during a gun battle in December.

Kids in Calderón's class, like children in so many other places, once dreamed of being police officers, putting on uniforms, playing a glamorous real-life game of cops-and-robbers. Not anymore.

She lives three blocks from a funeral home and cups her ears when she hears sirens. Each time, she said, she whispers to herself: "Another dead one."

Mexican cartels outgun towns

Ill-prepared and often corrupt, rural and border city police and officials are the weakest link in the war on drugs.
By Héctor Tobar and Carlos Martínez
Times Staff Writers

July 9, 2007

NACO, MEXICO — The message came on police emergency radio: An army of drug traffickers with machine guns mounted on their pickup trucks was headed toward this town of 5,000 people on the Arizona-Mexico border.

Like a sheriff in a western, police chief and part-time schoolteacher Juan Bracamontes gritted his teeth and assembled his 15 officers, who had nothing better than old .38-caliber revolvers to face off against the enemy.

"Those who want to leave can leave," the chief said. "Those who want to stay and fight, line up behind me and we'll give it to them good."

One officer quit on the spot. The others deployed around the town, but not before taking off their uniforms and abandoning their patrol cars for unmarked vehicles.

In other Mexican towns, local authorities have not shown as much courage in the face of threats from cash-rich drug traffickers. Underarmed, under-prepared and often corrupt, small-town officials and police are the Achilles' heel of President Felipe Calderon's offensive against the nation's drug traffickers.

Calderon has made the battle to rein in Mexico's drug cartels the centerpiece of his presidency, committing large portions of the army and much of the federal police force to the effort.

The cartels have been fighting one another for control of smuggling routes to the United States. The resulting violence claimed more than 2,000 lives last year, and the killings this year have been on a pace to exceed that toll.

In the rural and border areas where smugglers operate, police frequently find themselves on the front line of the drug wars. Arresting a cartel operative might mean death. Even those who agree to protect one band of traffickers risk being attacked by rival gunmen.

Municipal officers account for 60% of the police force in Mexico, with state and federal police making up the rest. Mexican officials and analysts say city police and city officials receive a big share of the estimated $3 billion that drug traffickers pay in bribes each year.

Officials at Mexico's Public Safety Secretariat estimate that traffickers pay police an average monthly bribe of $500 to $600, roughly equal to a starting officer's monthly salary in towns such as Naco and neighboring Cananea.

"The training these officers receive is very precarious, as is their pay," said Raul Benitez, a professor at American University in Washington and a specialist in Mexican security issues. In many towns, Benitez said, the only requirement for becoming a police officer is being a friend of the mayor: The police force is a prime political plum.

These undertrained officers face an increasingly sophisticated enemy, as Mexico's drug cartels form small armies in which many of the "troops" have at least some military-style training.

Two days before the report of a "caravan of death" headed for Naco, as many as 50 armed men attacked Cananea. Five municipal officers were kidnapped and killed in the May 16 incident. Within hours, half of the 48-officer Cananea police force had turned in their guns and quit.

"We have no protection," several Cananea officers told reporters gathered around the town's police station. With allegations of links to traffickers swirling around the force, eight officers were fired, as was the police chief.

"On the one side organized crime is killing police officers, and on the other side the government is investigating and firing them," said Jose Arturo Yanez, a researcher at the Professional Police Training Institute in Mexico City. "No one is protecting them."

Security officials have resigned or been fired en masse in at least 18 states in nearly every region of Mexico.

Dozens have walked away from their jobs. A few have fled in the face of arrest warrants. Others, such as Orlando Valencia of Cananea, disappear from their offices.

Valencia was both the mayor's spokesman and the city emergency coordinator. In late May, he disappeared, and officials announced that they were seeking his arrest on suspicion of aiding drug traffickers in their escape after the attack on Cananea.

Even for those brave enough to serve in the country's most dangerous towns, discretion is usually the better part of valor. One high-ranking police official in a town in Zacatecas state explained the advice he gives his officers to keep them safe:

"I told them that if they see something suspicious, they should withdraw," said the official, who asked not to be named. "It doesn't matter what it is, just withdraw…. These people are well-armed and we just have the basics."

After an encounter with suspected cartel hit men, many officers in his town received telephone death threats. A good chunk of the force resigned.

"I don't know why they quit," the official said. "And you know what? I don't care."

The estimated 50 cartel hit men who descended on Cananea had attended a two-month camp to prepare for their assault, said Sonora state authorities, who interviewed the surviving hit men. The training was led by a former member of the Hermosillo city police department. And federal officials said at least four of the gunmen were army veterans.

The hit men were working on behalf of a drug-trade organization allied with a local trafficker, Francisco Hernandez Garcia, also known as "The Two Thousand."

The Two Thousand had agreements with local police chiefs to protect his shipments, according to news reports. Such agreements are called compromisos here, a Spanish word meaning commitments or obligations.

But the pacts were broken, setting off a series of violent incidents that climaxed with the raid on Cananea.

Home to 30,000 people, Cananea is famous for a 1906 miners' strike that helped spark the Mexican Revolution. Set amid the dun hills of the Sonoran Desert, it is a place where the daily routine of police work rarely involves anything more violent than a domestic dispute or drunken fight at a party.

All that changed early on the morning of May 16. Cananea police received word that a pair of officers had been attacked and beaten at a checkpoint outside town. Five officers were dispatched to assist them.

The five set off with shotguns and .223-caliber rifles recently provided by state authorities, though the bulletproof vests promised by the state had not yet arrived, officials said. When the officers reached the scene, they encountered four dozen cartel hit men: The officers surrendered without firing a shot; they were later tortured and executed.

The mayor summoned help. State and federal officers tracked the gunmen to a remote mountain settlement. In the ensuing gunfight, 15 suspected cartel hit men were killed.

"There hadn't been a battle like that here since the revolution," said Martin Ballesteros Rios, now Cananea's acting chief of police.

Gabriel Hurtado, the police chief at the time, was fired five days later; sources say he had abandoned his post. Although he faces no charges, there are rumors. He hasn't been seen in the town since he left, officials said.

Ballesteros Rios stepped in.

The acting chief says he isn't worried about what might happen to him, despite warnings from friends and relatives.

"My conscience is clean, because I don't have any compromisos with anyone," he said.

Thirty miles away in Naco, Mayor Jose Lorenzo Villegas has fired six police chiefs during his two terms in office. He fired Chief Roberto Tacho in January; weeks later, U.S. officials arrested the former lawman as he allegedly tried to smuggle about 60 pounds of marijuana into the United States.

Tacho and his brother Ramon were part of a small circle that until recently controlled the police in three neighboring towns — Naco, Cananea and Agua Prieta. Ramon Tacho, the police chief of Agua Prieta, was assassinated outside his office in February by suspected cartel hit men.

In Naco, a windblown town of squat buildings hugging the U.S. border, there is a growing sense that the community is being drawn into a larger conflict.

On the day the drug traffickers' army was reported to be headed their way, town residents responded as though war had broken out.

Businesses and schools shut down. City Hall was evacuated, and some officials fled to the United States.

U.S. Border Patrol agents with machine guns took up positions on the roof of the border-crossing station in Naco, Ariz., which overlooks the Mexican Naco's small downtown.

Mayor Villegas was in Hermosillo, Sonora's state capital, picking up new 9-millimeter pistols and AR-15 rifles issued to his police force.

"We lived some very ugly moments that day," the 34-year-old mayor said. "By phone, people were telling me I should declare a state of siege."

But the report of the "caravan of death" headed for Naco turned out to be a false alarm.

At the end of the day, after the crisis had passed, Villegas arrived in Naco with boxes of pistols and rifles.

"Look at this beautiful thing," Police Chief Bracamontes said, taking one of the new pistols from its holster. "And this one too," he said, raising a sleek, black AR-15 rifle that was propped up against the wall of his office.

Like most of the new weapons, it still hasn't been fired.

hector.tobar@latimes.com

--

Tobar reported from Naco and Martínez from Zacatecas.

Calderón's Offensive Against Drug Cartels

Use of Mexican Military Increasingly Criticized

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 8, 2007; A15

MEXICO CITY -- Every Monday morning, President Felipe Calderón settles in at the head of the table in the presidential library at Los Pinos, Mexico's fortresslike chief executive's compound.

Calderón presides over strategy sessions with the leaders of Mexico's army and navy, key players in the centerpiece initiative of his seven-month-old presidency: a military assault against drug cartels. No Mexican president in recent history has convened his security council with such regularity, but few of his modern-day predecessors have faced such a daunting security crisis.

Calderón is betting his presidency on a surge of Mexican troops -- one of the country's largest deployments of the military in a crime-fighting role -- to wage street-by-street battles with drug cartels that are blamed for more than 3,000 execution-style killings in the past year and a half. Sending more than 20,000 federal troops and police officers to nine Mexican states has made Calderón extremely popular; his latest approval ratings hit 65 percent.

But as the campaign drags into its eighth month and the death toll mounts, Calderón is facing a growing cadre of critics, including the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights representative in Mexico, who opposes the use of the military in policing. Calderón is also contending with foes in Mexico's Congress who want to strip him of the authority to dispatch troops without congressional approval. The Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization, has faulted him as quick to use the military but slow to reform Mexico's corrupt police.

All this is familiar territory for Calderón, a former congressman and energy secretary who appears comfortable in the role of political scrapper.

Pundits predicted he would struggle in office after collecting barely more than a third of the vote in last July's election and being forced into a two-month legal battle -- twice as long as the Bush-Gore electoral crisis in 2000 -- before being declared president by Mexico's Supreme Electoral Tribunal.

But Calderón has not only pounced on the drug violence. He also has pushed through a controversial reform of Mexico's corrupt and antiquated pension system, and he is gaining momentum for a massive fiscal initiative aimed at reducing the country's dependence on oil revenue.

"This seems to be his political destiny," wrote Ramón Alberto Garza, editor of the weekly Indigo. "To sail with the wind against him, a storm on the horizon, with a mutinous crew but to finish the journey safe in port."

Calderón inherited Mexico's drug problem, which was beginning to rival in scope and savagery the 1980s drug wars in Colombia. Drug lords, who make their riches trafficking in cocaine, but also methamphetamines and marijuana, were beheading rivals and killing police officers, municipal officials and journalists who got in their way. Some municipal governments and police forces were so infiltrated by organized crime that they essentially ceased to function as public service entities and became virtual arms of the cartels.
A War Over 'Plaza'

As far back as mid-July 2006, with the election outcome still in doubt, Calderón began laying the groundwork for the military campaign, Mexico's attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, said in an interview. With corruption raging throughout local governments and only 27,000 federal police officers available, Medina Mora said, the military seemed to be the only viable option.

"The size of the problem was large enough to understand that using the full federal deployment of police was not enough," Medina Mora said as a Beethoven piano sonata played in the background at his high-rise headquarters in Mexico City.

By the time Calderón took office in December, Mexico's two most powerful drug organizations -- the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels -- were deep into a war over "plaza," as Mexicans call drug territory. Carnage led the news almost every night. It was then that Calderón, a careful, wonkish public speaker not known for soaring rhetoric, started hitting verbal home runs.

"My hand won't tremble" in acting firmly to stop the crime that is holding Mexicans hostage, Calderón said repeatedly.

On Dec. 11, 10 days after taking office, Calderón launched the first of six military operations, sending more than 6,000 federal troops and police officers to his home state of Michoacan. The next day, a cousin of first lady Margarita Zavala was found murdered in the trunk of a car outside Mexico City -- a killing that some suspect was retribution by drug gangs. Undaunted, Calderón sent a force of 3,000 to Tijuana three weeks later.

The day after the Tijuana raid became a signal moment in Calderón's drug war. He donned a khaki hat and military uniform to review his troops in the city of Apatzingan, purportedly the first time in a century that a Mexican president had dressed in military attire. Columnists fretted that he would turn Mexico into a military state. Others mocked the hang of a baggy uniform on the diminutive, unathletic Calderón.

"He looked pathetic," Sen. Graco Ramírez -- a Calderón nemesis who is the son, grandson and brother of Mexican army generals -- sniffed during a recent interview at Mexico's legislative palace.

Ramírez is more than a fashion critic; he and other members of the Democratic Revolutionary Party are among the leaders of a push to declare the use of the military in drug raids unconstitutional. Medina Mora counters that under the Mexican constitution, the armed forces "have not only the power but the duty to preserve internal order."

Calderón dismissed the criticisms. In February, he announced a 45 percent pay increase for the army, a move that contrasted neatly with a decision to lower his own salary by 10 percent and abolish pensions for Mexican presidents.
Admirers in the U.S.

In the six months since he first appeared in a military uniform, Calderón has sent thousands of troops to the infamous drug zones of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua, known as the Golden Triangle, and to Acapulco, Veracruz and the states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon, home to Mexico's industrial capital, Monterrey. The soldiers operate roadblocks, cordon off urban areas for house-to-house searches and often engage heavily armed drug dealers in gun battles.

The troops have arrested more than 580 people, according to the government, though only one would qualify as a major figure. Since the military campaign began, 19 troops and 168 police officers have been killed; more than 1,080 civilian deaths have been recorded, though most of those were the result of infighting among cartels.

Analysts say it is too soon to tell whether the military operations will have a long-term effect. Execution-style killings have decreased somewhat in recent weeks, but some news reports attribute that to what they call a truce between warring cartels; Medina Mora credits the military and said there was no evidence of such a truce.

None of the deaths has resonated like five that occurred mistakenly June 2, when soldiers shot two unarmed women and three children at a roadblock in the northern state of Sonora. The killings set off fierce criticism in Mexico, but Calderón has kept to his military strategy.

The approach has won admirers in the United States, where law enforcement agencies have long pushed for Mexico to confront drug cartels more aggressively.

That positive reception comes at a potentially critical moment in U.S.-Mexico talks to dramatically increase American aid.

News accounts originally compared the Mexican initiative to the multibillion-dollar Plan Colombia, an extensive aid package designed to eradicate coca and erode support for Marxist rebels. Mexican diplomats scrambled to note that their proposal differed in one key way: It does not contemplate a U.S. military presence similar to the one in Colombia. Any hint that U.S. troops would operate in Mexico is wildly inflammatory here; people still bear historical wounds from the Mexican-American War of 1846-48.

María Eugenia Campos Galván, chairwoman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the lower house of Mexico's Congress, said in an interview that Mexican authorities have considered asking for as much as $1 billion. U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, is pushing for a major commitment of U.S. dollars.

"If we're smart, it'll be very high," Reyes said in an interview.

Mexican authorities say they've demonstrated cooperation by sharply increasing extraditions -- already in 2007 breaking Mexico's annual record with 63 extraditions in the first six months of the year. They are hoping the United States will reciprocate by paying for additional training and equipment, including technology that would allow for instant transfer of information between law enforcement officials on each side of the border. Calderón, in particular, is suggesting that the United States has an obligation to help with Mexico's law enforcement costs because of the extent of Americans' illegal drug use.

The talks have been complicated by sensitivities in the United States related to Mexico as Capitol Hill lawmakers were debating immigration proposals.

"When there was a school shooting over in Russia, I got e-mails saying, 'That's why we need a wall on the Mexican border,' " Reyes said. "Regardless of what we do, there are going to be those who try to politicize it."

Mexican authorities are well aware that political tensions could delay or scuttle proposals for more U.S. aid. For now, they are preparing for months, maybe years, of military battles with drug leaders without more help from the United States and for long Monday mornings in the presidential library.

Mexico's feared band of hired guns takes a hit

By Carlos Martínez
Times Staff Writer

July 3, 2007

MEXICO CITY — Luis Reyes Enriquez was lying on the bed of a $13-per-night hotel room in a provincial town when federal troops came for him. Reyes, a leader in Mexico City of the infamous band of hit men known as the Zetas, was caught off guard: He was hung over from a wedding party the night before.

The arrest of the man also known as "Zeta 12" and "El Rex" was the latest in a series of blows in recent weeks to the Zetas, an organization born in the late 1990s when the Gulf cartel of drug traffickers began recruiting Mexican army deserters.

Reyes, 39, was an army deserter, as well as a former federal police officer who had once been assigned to work in the attorney general's office. As a well-trained gunman with an official pedigree, he was precisely the kind of man who helped build the Zetas' reputation as a paramilitary army at the service of drug traffickers.

Since taking office in December, President Felipe Calderon has declared an aggressive war on drugs and deployed thousands of federal troops throughout several Mexican states.

During the first seven months of his administration, authorities have arrested five Zeta leaders. A sixth Zeta was killed in an ambush with rivals. And the group's leader and founder, Osiel Cardenas, has been extradited to face drug-trafficking charges in the United States.

Three years ago, the Mexican attorney general's office had 44 members of the Zetas on its most-wanted list. As of May, with a growing number of Zetas in prison or dead in gun battles with authorities and rival traffickers, the number had declined to 27.

Analysts say Calderon's crackdown, along with a split in the Gulf cartel that is pitting old partners in crime against each other, is leading the Zetas to seek new avenues of income, such as kidnapping and extortion.

"There has been a clear effect on the Mexican drug market, which in turn has reduced the cash flow of these criminal groups and forced them to diversify their activities," said Erubiel Tirado, a security expert at the Ibero-American University here. "All of a sudden they're kidnapping businessmen. That's when they put themselves more at risk of getting caught."

A kidnapping scheme led to the arrest this year of Nabor Vargas, also a Zeta member.

Vargas, alias "El Debora," was captured in April when federal agents stormed a house in Ciudad del Carmen in the Gulf state of Campeche, looking for kidnapping victims and weapons. After a brief standoff, authorities rescued a prominent local businessman and arrested 19 people.

To the surprise of authorities, the kidnappers were being led by El Debora, one of the most-wanted criminals in Mexico and one of the first soldiers to desert and join the Zetas.

Vargas "was one of the founders of the Zetas and one of the few active members who was personally recruited by Osiel Cardenas," columnist Raymundo Riva Palacio wrote in the newspaper El Universal. For Vargas to be engaged in a kidnapping scheme illustrated a tremendous fall from power, Riva Palacio said.

It was an anonymous call that alerted police to the presence of Reyes in Atotonilco, a town in Hidalgo state, according to news reports. El Rex had attended a friend's wedding, and his heavily armed crew attracted the attention of residents.

In the early hours of June 24, after a night of partying, he headed to La Fuente Hotel to rest, unaware that he was under surveillance by dozens of soldiers and federal agents. He was arrested without incident. When authorities presented him to the media the next day in Mexico City, he was still dressed in a khaki suit and white dress shirt.

Not all arrests of Zetas are the result of the federal crackdown. Some are simply slip-ups by criminals known for their impulsive and reckless behavior.

Such was the case of Jose Ramon Davila Lopez, alias "El Cholo," who was arrested in February in the northern state of Tamaulipas.

According to the newspaper Reforma, El Cholo was cruising through the state capital, Ciudad Victoria, with his girlfriend when he caught a passerby staring at them. For a man considered one of Mexico's most dangerous criminals, this was apparently a grave insult.

El Cholo threw his car into reverse and called out: "What are you looking at?" A few seconds later he pulled a gun and opened fire, narrowly missing the man who had offended him.

The gunfire attracted local police. After a brief shootout, El Cholo was taken in. It took authorities six days to identify him as one of the Zetas.

Although it remains unclear how much power the Zetas still have, U.S. officials say the Mexican government is making important progress in many of the states where it has deployed troops to fight the drug trade.

"By going to places like Michoacan, Guerrero, Tamaulipas, Tabasco and Veracruz, you're able to knock many of these cells off their base of operations and circles of protection," said a senior U.S. official who asked not to be named. Mexican authorities are beginning to penetrate the "command-and-control structure" of several trafficking organizations, the official said.

Times staff writer Héctor Tobar contributed to this report.