In Mexico's drug wars, fears of a U.S. front

Alex Johnson Reporter • Profile

With U.S. forces fighting two wars abroad, the nation's top military officer made an important visit last week to forestall a third.

He went to Mexico.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the trip to confer with Mexican leaders about the Merida Initiative, a three-year plan signed into law last June to flood the U.S.-Mexican border region with $1.4 billion in U.S. assistance for law-enforcement training and equipment, as well as technical advice and training to bolster Mexico’s judicial system.

The assistance is intended to help Mexican President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa step up his war against drug cartels. The drug lords and their soldiers are blamed for having killed more than 6,300 people since January 2008, including more than 1,000 in the first two months of this year alone.

That’s about 100 people every week for the last 14 months. The cartels usually do not target civilians, but dozens, perhaps hundreds, have died in the crossfire.

“It’s a real war,” says Jorge Ramos, mayor of Tijuana, Mexico, across the border with San Diego. “We’re not faking.”

The point of the U.S. initiative is not just to quell the violence in Mexico. More important for the Obama administration, it is to keep the violence from spilling across the border more than it already has, especially in the border states of Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico.

The concern is very real. Mexican drug cartels already control about 90 percent of the cocaine trade across the United States and most of the market for marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin, with operations in 230 cities, according to the U.S. Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center. They have essentially supplanted the Colombian and Dominican criminal groups that terrorized major U.S. cities through the 1980s and ’90s, the agency said.

And where Mexican-directed drug operations take root, violence is likely to follow, the federal government said in its most recent assessment of the illegal drug trade.

Mexican drug-trafficking organizations — known in law enforcement lingo as DTOs — “control drug distribution in most U.S. cities, and they are gaining strength in markets that they do not yet control,” the National Drug Intelligence Center reported in its 2009 National Drug Threat Assessment. The report warned that violent urban gangs connected to Mexican cartels were extending their network “from inner cities to suburban and rural areas.”

Its conclusion: “Mexican DTOs represent the greatest organized crime threat to the United States.”

Internecine strife ripples across region
For many Americans, the threat posed by the cartels became apparent for the first time in late February, when the Justice Department announced the results of Operation Xcellerator, a nationwide sweep by agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The operation netted more than 750 arrests and the seizure of millions of dollars, 12,000 kilograms of cocaine, 1,200 pounds of methamphetamine, 1.3 million ecstasy pills and more than 160 weapons — nearly all attributed to Mexican-connected operations.

Video   Mexico border drug bust March 10: A top drug dealer is arrested in Tijuana, Mexico, suspected of being behind a wave of violence along the Mexico border. msnbc.com

Where does it all come from?

The Department of Homeland Security said Mexico’s drug cartels were loosely organized into a small number of blocs that are at war with one another and with the government. One is loyal to the Gulf cartel, which is based in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, near the Gulf of Mexico. Another answers to the Sinaloa cartel, which originated in the state of the same name on Mexico’s Pacific coast. A third is organized around the Tijuana cartel, founded by the infamous Arrellano Felix brothers and centered south of San Diego.

The Tijuana cartel is being consumed by a savagely violent internal struggle for control. The violence that most concerns U.S. authorities is the rivalry between Gulf cartel thugs known as Los Zetas — many of them former military and police officers trained in counternarcotics tactics in the United States — and Los Negros, the Sinaloa cartel’s narco-military brigade.

Their battles take place along a 600-or-so-mile stretch of border between Ciudad Juarez, near the point where Texas and New Mexico meet, and Nuevo Laredo, farther south and east, across the border from Laredo, Texas.

U.S. authorities say the region is the most important launching pad for contraband entering the United States — very little goes on there without the knowledge and approval of the Gulf or Sinaloa cartels. There, the war is a fact of life, and it is presumed that it is only a matter of time before it reaches U.S. soil.

An msnbc.com-NBC News special report Alex Johnson is a reporter for msnbc.com. Alex Witt of MSNBC and the following NBC stations contributed to this report: KETK of Tyler, Texas; KGNS of Laredo, Texas; KNBC of Los Angeles; KNSD of San Diego; KPNX of Phoenix; KTSM of El Paso, Texas; KWES of Midland, Texas; KXAN of Austin, Texas; and WVTM of Birmingham, Ala.

“I don’t doubt for one second that it would happen,” said Randy Ponzio, who is from El Paso, Texas, just across the border from Ciudad Juarez. “The drug cartels hold a lot of power.”

Much of the region is desert and rugged mountain terrain, making it difficult to even monitor the cartels’ activities, much less counter them.

“When you’re fighting an enemy you can’t see and you don’t know where they are, how are you going to fight against that?” Ponzio asked.

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