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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | January 2008 
Mexico Cracks Down on Drug Cartels
 Dudley Althaus - Houston Chronicle
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| | Men arrested by Mexican federal police stand behind weapons found Tuesday in a home in Mexico City. (Gregory Bull/AP) | | |
Mexico City — Federal police raided two houses in an upscale neighborhood of the Mexican capital Tuesday and arrested 11 suspected gangsters linked to one of the country's powerful drug cartels.
Police also seized an arms stockpile that included 20 automatic rifles, 12 grenade launchers, 30 grenades and 40 bullet-proof vests.
The suspects appeared to have been planning an attack, a senior police commander told a news conference, and he speculated that government officials had been targeted.
Those arrested allegedly belong to the Sinaloa cartel, which smuggles narcotics to U.S. suppliers and is battling the Gulf cartel for control of trafficking routes to the United States. On Monday, an alleged top leader of the Sinaloa cartel, Alfredo Beltran Leyva, was captured in Culiacan, capital of the Pacific Coast state of Culiacan.
Police stations raided
Elsewhere Tuesday, on the Texas border, Mexican troops raided police stations at dawn in five cities — including Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros — that are home to the Gulf cartel. The soldiers interrogated officers about alleged ties to drug gangs and checked their weapons and vehicles to see if they had been used in crimes.
Local officials called the border police inspections "routine," but the simultaneous raids came just days after the arrests of four Nuevo Laredo police officers suspected of spying on federal police and troops for the Gulf cartel.
"They're acting on the intelligence," a U.S. official said of the Mexican raiders in the capital and on the border. "It seemed before they used to hold back and not be as aggressive. They're (now) really trying to make a difference."
Faced with a wave of drug gang-related violence claiming 2,500 lives nationwide, President Felipe Calderon sent thousands of soldiers and federal police against the gangsters shortly after taking office 13 months ago. Hundreds of alleged gangsters were arrested, and tons of cocaine and other drugs were seized.
'The operations continue'
Edgar Millan, the police commander who suggested the plot against officials, said Tuesday's raids in the capital and sweeps along the border "form part of a systemic attack on the criminal structure."
Millan offered no details of the attack allegedly being planned in Mexico City and no evidence of it. But if an attack was in the works, the two houses raided would have offered good bases of operations.
The larger of the houses is in the city's picturesque San Angel neighborhood, once home to the late artists Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo and now favored by politicians.
The homes of a former federal attorney general and a treasury minister from the 1990s are within blocks of the raided house. So is the one-time mansion of a Mexican president from the 1960s.
The San Angel mansion occupies the corner of two cobblestone streets on which many homes are concealed behind high walls armed with security cameras. The Bazar Sabado, an artisan's street market favored by Mexican and foreign tourists, is two blocks away. The San Angel Inn, one of the city's more famous restaurants, is nearby.
The raids offered Mexico City residents evidence, if any was needed, that the country's underworld syndicates were active in even the capital's best neighborhoods, Millan said.
"We have just seen, in two safe houses in residential zones, people with special armament," Millan said. "They are working here in Mexico."
"The operations continue," he said. "We are working on the dismantling of these cartels that operate here in Mexico City."
Mexico's gangsters have long favored the special comforts and headaches of the chaotic capital.
Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the one-time boss of a drug trafficking gang based across the Rio Grande from El Paso, lived at least part time in a mansion in the cities exclusive Lomas neighborhood. He reportedly died in 1997 during a plastic surgery operation performed at a small clinic in another wealthy residential neighborhood.
Last March, police seized more than $200 million in cash from a Lomas house owned by Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese businessman. Mexican authorities accuse him of smuggling tons of precursor drugs used in the making of methamphetamine, which has become a major produce for Mexican gangs, which traffic it here and in the U.S.
dudley.althaus(at)chron.com
Reporters Sean Mattson and Lynn Brezosky of the San Antonio Express-News contributed to this story. |
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