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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | May 2008 
Shifts in Cartel Alliances Fuel Shootouts in Mexico
 Dudley Althaus - Houston Chronicle
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| | Federal police secure the area after a shootout in Vicente Guerrero, Durango state, Mexico, Tuesday, May 20, 2008. Ruben Lopez, the spokesman for Durango state's prosecutor, says two rival groups opened fire on the highway, killing eight people. Officials found 12 vehicles, assault rifles and handguns at the scene. (Jose Juan Torres/El Siglo de Durango) | | |
Mexico City — At least eight men were killed in related shootouts Tuesday as shifting alliances feed the already vicious rivalries among Mexico's criminal empires.
Initial press reports quoting town officials in western Durango state said the clashes between rival drug cartel gunmen killed as many as 19.
But a spokesman for the attorney general of Durango, where marijuana and heroin are produced and through which U.S.-bound cocaine flows, insisted that only eight men had died.
"This frightens us, because we aren't accustomed to this kind of thing here," said the spokesman, Ruben Lopez.
It was not immediately clear who the antagonists were this time. But the killings mirror others this year between criminal factions in which up to 15 people at a time have been slain.
The gangland competition for narcotics smuggling routes has been heightened by the Mexican government's success in dismantling or pressuring some of the factions that comprise the cartels, President Felipe Calderon said.
"The Mexican government has hit in a key way the financial and operating structures" of the cartels, Calderon told reporters. "This is forcing their realignment.
"A confrontation is occurring not only against public security but particularly — in a very, very intense way — between the cartels themselves."
A U.S. counternarcotics official characterized Calderon's campaign as "a muddy, bloody uphill climb."
"It's not over. It's going to get worse before it gets better," said the official, who spoke on condition that his name not be reported.
$1.4 billion package
The U.S. House voted last week to approve the first annual installment of a three-year, $1.4 billion package of equipment and training for Mexican and Central American police fighting the drug war. But the first year's spending was trimmed by about $100 million to $400 million, all going to Mexican security forces.
The Merida Plan, proposed during a summit between Bush and Calderon in that Mexican city last year, must be approved by the Senate before it is implemented.
Durango is considered the territory of the so-called Federation, which includes criminal groups based in Chihuahua and Sinaloa states.
The Federation, whose nominal head is Sinaloa trafficker Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, has been rattled recently by the reported desertion of the Beltran Leyva clan, considered a major trafficking gang. It joined the Gulf Cartel, based in the Mexican cities bordering Texas' Lower Rio Grande Valley, the Mexico City newspaper El Universal reported, quoting Mexican officials.
Fighting between the Beltran Leyvas and the Gulf Cartel's gunmen, the Zetas, has caused much of the nation's violence, including the Nuevo Laredo and Acapulco areas.
The Federation and the Gulf Cartel reportedly negotiated a truce last spring which diminished the violence for several months. But the bloodshed resumed this spring as the cartels — and the smaller criminal gangs that comprise them — jockey for dominance.
The violence was particularly intense in Sinaloa state in northwest Mexico on the Gulf of California. Among those slain there was one of Guzman's sons. In addition, Arturo Beltran Leyva, the leader of his family's clan in Sinaloa, has been singled out by Mexican officials as the likely mastermind of the May 8 assassination of a senior federal police office in Mexico City, Edgar Millan.
The Gulf Cartel's reputed chieftain, former policeman Osiel Cardenas, awaits federal trial in Houston on drug-related charges after Mexico allowed his extradition in January. Police now consider Heriberto Lazcano, a former special forces soldier who heads the Zetas, as the de facto head of the organization, officials said.
Tuesday's shootout in Durango was linked in the Mexican press to the weekend kidnapping of a state police commander in the area and to the attack on the family of a local politician.
But Lopez, the attorney general's spokesman, dismissed those reports as speculation.
Police abandon posts
Mexican newspapers reported that a weekend attack by gangsters on Villa Ahumada, a small town 95 miles south of the border at El Paso, was triggered by the arrest a week ago of the area's reputed crime boss. Among at least six people reportedly killed in the raid was the brother of the boss as well as three city police officers and innocent bystanders. Villa Ahumada's remaining police officers abandoned their posts.
On Monday, Calderon called the crackdown he launched upon taking office nearly 18 months ago a "struggle for the future of Mexico."
"No way will the Mexican government stumble in this struggle," he said.
dudley.althaus(at)chron.com |
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