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 News from Around the Americas | April 2007 
Nicaragua Attacks Advancing Mexican Drug Cartel
 Reuters
| | The vast majority of cocaine destined for the United States now passes through Central America (and the hands of guys like this). |
Nicaragua is cracking down on a Mexican drug cartel that has established a foothold in the Central American country, arresting 17 people in two days following recent death threats against the chief of police.
Twelve people linked to Mexico's Sinaloa cartel were captured on Saturday, police said, adding to the arrest of five Mexicans the day before.
"With this we are taking apart a very dangerous and powerful group that wanted to establish itself here," said the deputy chief of the national police, Carlos Palacios.
Palacios said police had also uncovered a secret landing strip used by the drug smugglers and had seized shotguns, automatic weapons, vehicles and speed-boat engines.
Drug gangs often use small, fast boats to transport cocaine along the coasts of Central America.
In February, Nicaraguan anti-drug authorities said they had thwarted a plan hatched by the Sinaloa cartel to assassinate chief of police Aminta Granera following an increase in drug seizures.
Mexico's gangs have grown in power and wealth in recent years and are now believed to control a large part of the cocaine trade stretching from producer countries like Peru to the streets of cities in the United States, the world's top consumer of the drug.
In Mexico itself more than 600 people, many of them police officers, have been killed so far this year in a vicious war between rival cartels for control of trafficking routes into the United States.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon has promised to end the turf war, sending thousands of troops into Mexico's northern border cities and other trouble-torn states, but the violence, which claimed 2,000 lives last year, has continued unabated.
Palacios said one of the men arrested on Saturday, two or three of whom were Mexicans, had the word Sinaloa tattooed on his back. He said the seized weapons were used to defend a landing strip located close to the Inter-American highway, where gang-members received aircraft loaded with cocaine.
The Sinaloa cartel, actually a powerful coalition of drug gangs from the Pacific state of the same name, is led by Mexico's most wanted man, kingpin Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman.
Guzman, who stands just 5 feet tall and escaped from prison in a laundry van in 2001, is now trying to expand his empire by taking over Central American smuggling routes and production of the raw material for cocaine in Peru, authorities say.
Last month, U.S and Panamanian anti-drug authorities seized 19.4 tons of cocaine on a ship in the Pacific. Fourteen people on the boat were arrested, most of them Mexican.
The vast majority of cocaine destined for the United States now passes through Central America. |
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