http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printsto.../world/3171445
The fight for Nuevo Laredo
At the border, rival cartels are staging a violent war for the control of a city "” and for a key U.S. drug route
By JAMES PINKERTON and IOAN GRILLO
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO - On a recent Saturday night, well-heeled patrons at a fashionable restaurant in this embattled border city shared part of an evening with one of Mexico's most notorious drug lords.
Accompanied by a phalanx of heavily armed bodyguards, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, head of a cartel of traffickers operating along the Mexican border, swept into the restaurant, shocking its 40 customers.
After his gunmen locked the doors, the drug kingpin warned the diners against leaving the restaurant or using their cell phones until he had finished eating. But to atone for the inconvenience, Guzman picked up the tab for everyone in the house.
"He was there to prove a point," said FBI agent Arturo Fontes, commenting about the separate accounts by two Nuevo Laredo residents about the visit to the lavish beef and seafood eatery.
"He was there to let people know he's in town," the agent said, "that he's here to stay and he is controlling part of the (territory) in Nuevo Laredo."
The restaurant visit, which came in the midst of a nationwide dragnet for the drug-gang leader, who escaped from prison in 2001, highlights the challenge faced by the Mexican government as it attempts to put down a two-year turf war between Guzman and another powerful trafficker. Their gangs, each commanding hundreds of gunmen, are struggling for control of this border city of 500,000 people and the narcotics-trafficking routes that run through it.
Despite President Vicente Fox's deployment in March of about 800 troops and federal paramilitary police, gang gunmen armed with military-grade assault rifles, grenades and even rocket launchers continue to wage an urban street war.
Since Jan. 1, 45 people linked to organized crime have been killed here, Mexican authorities say. In addition, five police officers have been assassinated in the same period. The latest slaying of a policeman occurred Thursday when gunmen killed a 36-year-old police commander, shooting him at least 20 times, seven in the face.
Geographically strategic
Veteran supervisors and agents of the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement say Nuevo Laredo has become invaluable to Mexico's drug cartels.
Mariana Gonzalez / For the Chronicle
Police officers pursue suspected drug-gang gunmen following a shootout in Nuevo Laredo last week.
The smugglers take advantage of the city's extensive trade facilities, which process more legitimate cargo than those at any other crossing point along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border. Last year, merchants and shippers moved $89.7 billion worth of legitimate goods from 60 countries through Laredo into the United States, exceeding the $42.7 billion in merchandise that crossed at El Paso and $22 billion in San Diego, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.
In Texas, the U.S. investigators say, the gangs use the Interstate 35 corridor to move narcotics into Dallas and then to cities on the East Coast.
"Nuevo Laredo is very important because of the four bridges" to Laredo, said FBI agent Fontes, who is the bureau's border-liaison officer in Laredo. "It's also important because of 35. It's a direct route to Dallas."
Fontes said the Gulf cartel, allegedly run from prison by convicted drug trafficker Osiel Cardenas, has made Dallas a staging area for distributing cocaine and heroin to cities in the Northeast.
"It's a big city," said Kenneth Cates, who runs the immigration and customs agency's office in Dallas, "which makes it easy to hide in. It also is a single day's drive from the border. You can rapidly get out of intensive interdiction zone on the border and get to Dallas, which is well-suited to commerce, both legal and illegal."
Guzman's gang, the Sinaloa cartel, named after the state on Mexico's west coast, has been muscling into Nuevo Laredo because, Fontes said, it wants to control a key smuggling route into the United States. Sinaloa is a key region for growing opium poppies, plants that provide the raw material for heroin.
For years Nuevo Laredo was controlled by the Gulf cartel, which was formed in the border city of Matamoros. Cardenas took over the gang after its longtime boss, Juan Garcia Abrego, was convicted in a Houston federal courtroom of drug trafficking and other crimes.
In 1999, Cardenas gained notoriety when he led a group of gunmen in an attempt to seize an informant riding with two U.S. agents in Matamoros. The Americans refused to be intimidated into handing over the informant, and after a tense standoff Cardenas relented and allowed the Americans to drive away.
Three years later, in 2003, Cardenas was arrested in Matamoros and jailed on drug and other charges.
Seizures just small portion
As the turf war raged, the amount of heroin seized by U.S. agents in Laredo increased substantially. During the first seven months of the current fiscal year, U.S. Customs agents at Laredo seized 114 pounds of heroin, compared with less than 4 pounds during all of 2004, said Gene Garza of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.
The seizures are thought to represent a small amount of the drugs smuggled through Laredo. Customs inspectors said the heavy volume of traffic, with nearly 10,000 trucks and 2,000 rail cars crossing the international border daily, means they can search only a fraction of the vehicles.
Profits from smuggling are enormous. Jorge Chabat, a Mexican expert on narcotics, estimates that Mexican drug gangs make between $10 billion and $30 billion annually smuggling cocaine into the United States and even more money by transporting other narcotics.
The warring cartels sometimes smuggle the drugs themselves and sometimes subcontract the shipments to independent operatives, said Manuel Balmori, Mexico's chief federal prosecutor in Nuevo Laredo.
Many of the recent killings may have been ordered, Balmori said, because independent smugglers did not pay off the drug cartels. He said the most fiercely contested part of the city is near the customs port.
U.S. law enforcement sources estimate the Gulf cartel has 300 to 500 gunmen in Nuevo Laredo, facing off against an estimated 200 soldiers for the Guzman organization.
Casualties rising
During the first two years of the turf war, 2003 and 2004, the city's homicide rate skyrocketed, with the gangs staging ambushes and execution-style killings. More than 80 people were slain in each of those years. This year, the city is on pace to record more than 130 killings linked to organized crime.
Many of the dead were from working-class neighborhoods, men who apparently had been recruited by the cartels. Others were seasoned gangsters brought in from across Mexico or from as far away as Honduras.
Last fall, a Honduran named Juan Manuel Hernandez was among five people found blindfolded and shot dead in a Nuevo Laredo house.
Hernandez was marked by tattoos identifying him as a member of Mara Salvatrucha, the violent Central American street gang. Next to his corpse, according to a news reporter, was a handwritten note that said: "Chapo Guzman. Send more idiots like this so we can kill them!"
The gang war has spilled into the prisons, said Jesus Sepulveda, director of Nuevo Laredo's state penitentiary.
"The same gang problems on the outside are dragged in here," he said. "The drug traffickers are still members of the cartels after they are incarcerated."
Sepulveda said that until he took over in late March, the gangs ran profitable rackets in the prisons, including drug sales and prostitution. Both male and female sex workers used to enter the penitentiary, he said.
The prison's former director has been jailed on corruption charges.
Aided by corruption
Several veteran U.S. law enforcement officers said the cartels have flourished because of corruption. Some police officials, they said, have been paid to help protect drug shipments, to kidnap rivals or turncoats.
Bribes give the traffickers their initial footholds, said Al Pena, the agent in charge of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office that oversees Laredo.
There seems to be a greater concentration of individuals in Nuevo Laredo who have been compromised, he said.
Another veteran U.S. agent who asked not to be named said that few arrests have been made in the killings of more than a dozen police commanders during Nuevo Laredo's two-year street war and that little headway has apparently been made in the investigations.
"If a police commander is gunned down (in the United States), we'd go and run search warrants, pick up suspects, question people, and I don't see that happening," the agent said. "That's why it's out of control because they (traffickers) know nothing is going to happen."
State and municipal officials in Nuevo Laredo, who took office along with a new governor Jan. 1, have vowed to enforce a zero-tolerance policy on police corruption.
"We are keeping a sharp eye on every one of our officers," said Luis Roberto Gutierrez, a state police chief. "No one is above the law."
But many residents of Nuevo Laredo are not convinced.
"The public here has a distrust of pretty much all the police in the city," said Raymundo Ramos, president of Nuevo Laredo's nongovernmental Human Rights Committee.
He noted that some police officers have been attacked by the drug gangs. ''Why would they be ambushed if their hands were clean?" he said.
Some Mexican newspapers have charged that the gangs in Nuevo Laredo have compromised federal officials.
Last week, Reforma, a leading Mexico City newspaper, published extracts from statements by a protected witness. The informant charged that Guzman considered an assistant attorney general who coordinates national investigations a friend and ally.
The official formerly served as a prosecutor in Sinaloa, the state where the gang operated. The federal Attorney General's Office denied the accusation.
Fox has said that his government has vigorously attacked the drug gangs since he took office in 2000, with police arresting more than 30,000 people for narcotics offenses. But some analysts said his efforts may have inadvertently led to more violence when gunmen tried to fill the void left by the breakup of certain drug gangs.
"A power vacuum within criminal organizations resulting from the imprisonment of several of their leaders along the Mexico-U.S. border continues to contribute to a deterioration of public safety in the region," said a statement issued by the U.S. State Department last month. The department renewed a controversial advisory warning Americans of the dangers of traveling in northern Mexico, singling out Nuevo Laredo as a hot spot.
Economical effects
George Grayson, an expert on Mexico at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, rated President Fox's anti-trafficking campaign "a C-minus or D-plus."
Corruption in Mexico, Grayson said, usually increases during the last year of a president's six-year term.
Some high-level police officials and army officers are seeking bribes to augment their retirement, Grayson said, because they know they may be out of a job after the 2006 national elections.
"There's just too much money to be made," Grayson said. "You can't pay your police and your middle-level army officers enough when (drug traffickers) come to you, and you don't have to do anything actively. You just take your unit east instead of west, and you find a nice contribution to your retirement account."
Hundreds of merchants in the Nuevo Laredo's historic downtown tourist area, within walking distance of Laredo, have seen their shopping and dining business wither amid the violence.
Higinio Ibarra, president of the merchant association, said his organization has been pressing the Fox government to bring order to the city.
But, he said, it is more likely that the killing will end only when one of the drug gangs defeats the other.
"When one side gets the power," Ibarra said, "there will not be peace, but there will be order."
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