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Worst Flashpoints in Mexico's Drug War
 Robin Emmott & Sean Mattson - Reuters
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June 29, 2010
An opposition candidate pegged to win a July 4 gubernatorial election in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas was killed by suspected drug hitmen on Monday in the worst sign so far of political intimidation by cartels.
Here are some facts about the main drug war flashpoints and the cartels behind the violence that has killed some 25,500 people since President Felipe Calderon came to power and declared war on the cartels in Dec. 2006.
TAMAULIPAS STATE
Tamaulipas state on the Gulf of Mexico coast across from Texas is one of the most fiercely disputed and lucrative drug trafficking routes into the United States. Once controlled by the Gulf cartel, violence has spiraled since the start of 2010 after its armed wing, the Zetas, broke away to form a rival cartel. The war between the Gulf gang and the Zetas, whose founders were U.S.-trained Mexican anti-drug forces, has killed more than 300 people in the state since the start of the year.
The candidate for Tamaulipas governor, Rodolfo Torre, was shot dead on Monday less than a week before he was expected to win the election for the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, currently in power in the state. Suspected drug hitmen also killed a candidate for mayor of a town in Tamaulipas for the National Action Party, or PAN, this year.
MONTERREY
The war between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas has also spread to the nearby wealthy industrial hub of Monterrey, threatening a city once lauded as a model for the developing world. Drug hitmen have blocked off major highways during rush hour to try to stop police and soldiers during anti-drug raids. Extortions and police killings are also rife.
CIUDAD JUAREZ
This manufacturing city across from El Paso, Texas, has become one of the world's deadliest cities as Mexico's top trafficker, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, fights smuggler Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, whose Juarez cartel has controlled the area for more than a decade. Ciudad Juarez is prized by drug gangs for its road and rail links deep into the United States, but Guzman has so far been unable to dislodge the Juarez cartel from the city. Drug killings are escalating to horrific levels with some 5,000 deaths in the city over the past two years.
TIJUANA
Once a freewheeling border city attracting U.S. tourists, Tijuana, across from San Diego, is being ravaged by Guzman's battle for control of smuggling corridors into California. Guzman is seeking to take over from the weakened Arellano Felix clan of smugglers that during the 1990s shipped tonnes of cocaine into the United States. But despite the arrests and killings of top leaders, the Arellano Felix gang can still rely on the loyalty of the city's corrupt police and legions of young hitmen, known as narco juniors, to fight Guzman.
AROUND MEXICO CITY
The Dec. 2009 killing of drug lord Arturo Beltran Leyva, the biggest strike yet in Calderon's war, has sparked fighting around the Mexican capital as factions within the Beltran Leyva cartel push for leadership. The battleground includes the marijuana and opium-producing state of Guerrero and the beach resort of Acapulco, a key transit point for South American cocaine. In Cuernavaca, a colonial tourist town outside Mexico City where Beltran Leyva was killed by elite navy troops, violence has surged in recent weeks with bodies hung from bridges and piled up on the side of roads. Traffickers also want control of Mexico City for its big local drug market and the capital's highway links northward to the U.S. border.
GOLDEN TRIANGLE
Mexico's so-called Golden Triangle, the mountainous, drug-producing region in the states of Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Durango, is one of the most strategic areas in the country.
The region is home to sprawling marijuana and opium poppy plantations. It is being fought over by Guzman's Sinaloa cartel, the Juarez cartel and the Gulf cartel in a battle that is terrorizing quiet rural towns near international mining companies working silver and gold pits in the area.
MICHOACAN
La Familia ("The Family") drug cartel in Calderon's home state of Michoacan in western Mexico is locked in a fight with the Zetas for control of the verdant hills that hide marijuana plantations and labs that make the methamphetamine party drug "Ice." La Familia, which mixes violence with pseudo-religion, says it is fighting the "destructive power" of the Zetas and offers to be a cartel that "helps families."
Intensely violent, La Familia dumped the bodies of 12 federal police in a heap by a remote highway in July 2009 in revenge for the capture of a gang leader. A film of the police being killed was posted briefly on YouTube, according to media reports. |
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