Posted on 08/19/2005 9:42:50 AM PDT by SwinneySwitch
MEXICO CITY - President Vicente Fox's government has arrested more drug lords than any of his predecessors.
Yet for all the dramatic captures, drug-trafficking murder and mayhem seem out of control along the Texas border and in southern cities like Acapulco, where gangs are fighting to control turf.
The U.S. and Mexico are also skirmishing, with words, over who is to blame.
A key reason for the Fox government's apparent reversal of fortune: Mexico's police, prisons and courts are still extremely weak institutions and are so corrupted or intimidated by drug gangs that criminals continue to do business behind bars.
The drug gangs' power and the free rein they have in border cities have U.S. officials worried that the border could become more porous - and more vulnerable to terror attacks.
Mexico likes to point out that the problem essentially is a creation of the United States, the world's biggest illicit drug market. Americans spend $65 billion a year on cocaine, methamphetamines, marijuana, heroin and other substances whose smuggling is now dominated by Mexican cartels.
Drugs and crime in America now go hand in hand. About half the men arrested in Atlanta in 2003, for example, tested positive for cocaine.
This week Fox openly wondered, "How do all the drugs that cross over to there get to the consumer markets? What is being done on that side?"
But it appears that it is the post 9/11 threat of terror, more than curbing narcotics consumption, which is driving the Bush administration to pressure Mexico to crack down on gangs.
"Mexico is clearly central to any strategy designed to yield a North American continent free from terrorism," U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza said in a speech in Denver earlier this week.
U.S.-Mexico tensions over border violence and illegal immigration increased after the governors of New Mexico and Arizona declared states of emergency along their borders with Mexico.
For one week this month, Garza took the unusual step of closing the U.S. consulate in Nuevo Laredo, which borders Laredo, Texas, and where scores have died this year in drug-related violence and U.S. citizens have been murdered or gone missing.
"Mexico realizes, as we do, that a terrorist attack on a commercial port of entry like Laredo, Texas, would affect the North American economy in a profound way," Garza said. "Nearly 50 percent of our trade with Mexico passes through this single city."
Mexico's gangs have thrived on political corruption and successfully used intimidation for so long that they will not be easily subdued.
U.S. officials complain that the "big house" in Mexico - federal prison - is actually a safe house from which drug lords easily dispatch assassins and orchestrate smuggling with impunity.
Recognizing this, Mexican anti-crime authorities last January sent in more than 700 police and army troops to raid La Palma, a prison outside Mexico City where notorious leaders of various drug cartels are either serving sentences or awaiting trial.
Cartel lawyers and bogus "human rights" representatives had been visiting gangsters for up for 12 hours a day, officials said. Guards occasionally confiscated cell phones, along with weapons, narcotics, food and luxuries being smuggled in.
Inside the prison, two drug lords arrested within the last three years had apparently cut a deal from their cells to jointly defend their smuggling routes from a third cartel's attempts to take it over.
One of the kingpins is Osiel Cardenas, a former Mexican cop who is the accused leader of the Gulf of Mexico cartel, headquartered in the coastal city of Matamoros but whose traditional territory extends inland to Nuevo Laredo.
The other jailed drug lord is Benjamin Arrellano Felix, who was on the FBI's Most Wanted list as a leader of the Tijuana-based cartel across from San Diego.
Meanwhile, the competing Sinaloa-based cartel has been trying to muscle into Nuevo Laredo territory. Fugitive drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001, allegedly leads that cartel and some Nuevo Laredo officials say he has been cited in that border city.
All these kingpins face indictments in the United States.
Cardenas and Arrellano have supposedly been separated since the prison raid in January by government forces.
But a U.S. official who requested anonymity for security reasons said recently, "Guess what? He's still running the business. Why is Osiel allowed to see all these attorneys? Mexican law allows it."
LOL! Good one, SS!
Grow up Dane. You kept insisting the ponytailed creep was Travis, when in fact, Travis's pics appear on his page, and the ponytailed creep is on your side...lol.
Agree completely.
In fact, I took the picture of the ponytailed freak throwing the Nazi salute, wearing the American flag Swastika shirt. This was at the Carlsbad rally last week, when the Open Borders Lobby was out in force.
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