| | |  Editorials | Issues 
Cartels Expand South of Mexico's Border
 Chris Hawley - USA Today
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June 02, 2010
 |  | The Mexicans are gaining ground here, and the police can't stop them.
- Helen Mack |  | | |
Acayucan, Mexico— On a balmy night, five sport-utility vehicles full of gunmen roared up to the gates of the immigration detention center in Acayucan. They were on a mission.
The gunmen pointed assault rifles at the guardhouse. They entered without firing a shot and loaded up 13 Guatemalans who had been detained while traveling to a training camp run by the Zetas, a Mexican cartel. Then they sped off into the night, according to the Mexico Attorney General's Office.
The April raid is part of a disturbing new trend in the U.S.-backed war against Mexico's drug cartels as Mexican traffickers turn to Central America for reinforcements, ammunition and protection by corrupt authorities, experts say.
"The Mexicans are gaining ground here, and the police can't stop them," said Helen Mack, president of Guatemala's Myrna Mack Foundation, which studies crime trends.
Three days after the April 19 raid in Acayucan, six of the freed Guatemalans were recaptured in Tlaxcala state, hundreds of miles away. They told the attorney general's office they were on their way to a Zetas training camp in the northern Mexican state of San Luis Potosí.
On May 19, at least three Guatemalans were among a group of eight gunmen who attacked Mexican marines patrolling near San Carlos, a town hundreds of miles north of Guatemala, according to the Mexican navy.
In Guatemala, police found a Zetas training camp complete with an arsenal of assault rifles and a stash of 500 grenades last year, according to the Guatemala Ministry of Defense.
Another Zetas weapons stash found near Guatemala City included 3,800 bullets and 560 grenades with markings indicating they had come from the Guatemalan military, the ministry said.
"There's been so much focus on the U.S.-Mexico border that people forget about the back door," said Fred Burton, vice president of Stratfor, an Austin-based global intelligence firm.
The drug cartels are getting help from the countries they target. Guatemalan authorities in March arrested the national police chief on charges of leaking information to the Zetas. In April, the chief of anti-drug operations in Guatemala's Petén region was arrested on similar charges.
"Entire regions of Guatemala are now essentially under the control of (drug trafficking organizations), the most visible of which is the Mexican group known as the 'Zetas,' " a U.S. State Department report said in March.
The Zetas broke off from the once-powerful Gulf Cartel and now control most of the drug routes through eastern Mexico.
Other gangs are consolidating their power in Central America, too. On April 27, the U.S. Treasury Department froze the assets of Waldemar Lorenzana Lima of Guatemala and his family, saying they were working with Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada and Joaquin "Chapo" Guzmán, the alleged leaders of Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel. The Sinaloa Cartel controls routes through western Mexico.
Mexican traffickers are also strengthening their grips on Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador, the U.S. State Department says.
Honduran drug czar Julian González issued a warning in December about the growing presence of the Zetas, the Sinaloa Cartel and La Familia Michoacana, another Mexican drug gang. He was gunned down soon afterward.
The Mexican presence reflects a major change in the way drugs are smuggled, said Mauricio Cárdenas, a Latin America expert at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington.
Until the early 2000s, Colombian producers moved most of their cocaine through the Caribbean on boats or aircraft, and they controlled the entire route. But better aerial radars and more naval presence have forced drug shipments to go through Central America and Mexico.
That has increased the importance of the Mexican cartels, Cárdenas said.
They are moving quickly to take over the entire route, co-opting Central American gang members known as maras and using them as foot soldiers for the Mexican drug lords.
In Guatemala, street gangs that once used homemade weapons now wield assault rifles provided by the Mexican cartels, Mack said.
"The Mexican cartels are not just about crossing the U.S. border — they're about developing a multinational operation," Cárdenas said. |
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