| | |  Americas & Beyond | February 2009 
Officials: Mexico Drug Cartel Violence Spills into U.S.
 Associated Press
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| | Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Tuesday that he was asking Homeland Security Secretary to send resources and 1,000 more troops to the Texas border as violence escalates in northern Mexico. (AP) | |
Washington — Mexican drug cartels are shipping more than massive quantities of drugs north of the border. Increasingly, they're also exporting bloody mayhem.
Seeking to stem the growing influence of the Sinaloa cartel within the United States, federal agents arrested more than 50 suspects in raids Tuesday night and Wednesday morning at different ends of the country. The raids capped a 21-month operation by the Drug Enforcement Administration that rounded up 755 suspects and seized more than $59 million in criminal proceeds.
"These cartels will be destroyed," Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday at a press conference announcing the arrests.
The overnight roundup by DEA and state and local police included arrests in California, Minnesota and the Maryland suburbs of Washington.
Holder called the cartels a threat to national security, adding, "They are lucrative, they are violent, and they are operated with stunning planning and precision."
The attorney general also suggested that re-instituting a U.S. ban on the sale of assault weapons would help reduce the bloodshed in Mexico, where last year 6,000 people were killed in drug-related violence.
Increasingly, U.S. law enforcement officials see cartel violence spill into the United States, often as far away as Phoenix and Atlanta.
As he discussed the problem, Holder spoke briefly in Spanish, pledging continued cooperation with Mexican authorities who have increasingly come under direct fire from the heavily armed drug gangs.
U.S. officials have a responsibility to make sure Mexican police "are not fighting substantial numbers of weapons, or fighting against AK-47s or other similar kinds of weapons that have been flowing to Mexico," Holder said.
DEA Acting Administrator Michele Leonhart said the raid showed the tentacles of the crime syndicate had spread far across the U.S. — not just to major cities like Washington and Los Angeles, but to quiet, smaller communities like Stow, Ohio, which the cartel allegedly used as a conduit to funnel drugs around the country.
Leonhart said the Sinaloa cartel has become one of the largest organized crime operations in the world.
"They've been hit hard, and their ability to spread death and destruction has been diminished" by the arrests, Leonhart said.
Last year, a sweeping corruption probe led to the arrest of a dozen high-ranking Mexican officials accused of collaborating with the Sinaloa group or its one-time ally, the Beltran Leyva gang. Those arrested include former drug czar Noe Ramirez, who is accused of taking $450,000 from Sinaloa.
The U.S. government has praised President Felipe Calderon's government for rooting out corruption at the top.
Yet over the many months the DEA's investigation proceeded, cartel violence on both sides of the border increased substantially.
The State Department issued a travel warning Friday, urging U.S. citizens traveling to Mexico to be aware of the increased threat of violence and kidnapping, especially along the border. The situation in Ciudad Juarez, which lies across the border from El Paso, is of special concern, the State Department cautioned.
It also issued an advisory on Spring Break in Mexico, where more than 100,000 U.S. citizens visit each year. The department warns of the increased violence along the border and advises revelers in Matamoros and Nuevo Progresso, popular destinations for spring breakers on South Padre Island, Texas, to "exercise commonsense precautions such as visiting only the well-traveled business and tourism areas of border towns during daylight and early-evening hours."
The advisory came as a U.N. official said the world risks losing decades of progress in drug control if it fails to counter the emergence of a criminal market of "staggering proportions,"
"I confess I feel somewhat frustrated," Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said following a meeting to commemorate a century of international work on curbing trafficking in opium and other drugs.
Countries should "take control of organized crime far more seriously. Otherwise the accomplishments generated over the past few decades could be undermined," Costa said of the threat from criminal syndicates spreading their reach across almost every continent.
International efforts to curb trading in opium and other narcotics began in 1909 in Shanghai, then China's main hub for the opium trade, with the meeting of the 13-country International Opium Commission.
The delegates meeting Thursday issued a "Shanghai declaration" lauding progress in controlling the trade in opium and its derivatives in the decades that followed that first meeting but urging stronger efforts to combat modern drug scourges.
"We must have the courage to look at the dramatic, unintended consequences of drug control: the emergence of a criminal market of staggering proportions," Costa said. He did not make any specific recommendations at the commemoration.
Countries have so far failed to implement anti-crime measures in a way that has had an impact on the drug trade, he added, describing efforts to curb use of the Internet for drug trafficking and other crimes as "inept to say the least."
The international opium commission did not put an end to opium trafficking in China, which persisted in the chaotic times leading up to the 1949 Communist revolution.
But its decision to begin trying to regulate the opium trade holds a special significance for China, a country whose appetite for the drug left it bankrupted and vulnerable to humiliating defeats by colonial powers.
In the 1950s, China largely eradicated widespread drug use, mostly of opium, along with prostitution and gambling.
But as social controls were loosened in the past several decades, the drug trade in China has flourished. Government statistics put the number of known addicts in China at 1.2 million, including 700,000 heroin users, more than two-thirds of them under the age of 35.
"The achievements made by the international community in drug control remain fragile with a strong possibility of reversing," said Chinese Public Security Minister Meng Jianzhu.
The resurgence in drug abuse has brought with it rising rates of HIV infections, often due to sharing of needles. Last year, AIDS was the top killer among infectious disease, the government reported earlier this month.
In China, heroin and opium come from Burma and Laos and, to a lesser extent, Central Asian nations. Occasional reports say opium is also being cultivated in isolated parts of southern China. Ketamine and menthamphetamines are growing problems.
But the biggest source of opium globally, accounting for 90%, remains strife-torn Afghanistan, Costa said. |
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