Cartels of Mexico

One of Mexico’s most violent drug Cartels “The Gulf Cartel” has turned against its former armed wing in the latest outburst of killings on the U.S. border to test President Felipe Calderon’s overstretched army crackdown.

Banners were hung across Reynosa on Wednesday telling the army to leave and vowing the Gulf cartel and its allies will defeat the Zetas.

“You fight poison with the same poison,” read the banners, signed “Cartels of Mexico United against the Zetas.”

At least five attacks took place in Nuevo Laredo and the state of Nuevo Leon over the weekend, led apparently by members of the Gulf cartel who allegedly drove from the Matamoros-Reynosa area in search of members of the Zetas, according to the U.S. intelligence official. Their convoy included 20 SUVs with the logo, “CdG [Gulf Cartel]” and “X” plastered on the backs of the vehicles to distinguish themselves from the Zetas. The vehicles carried an undetermined number of heavily armed men.

Using grenade launchers, they struck police installations that are known to be associated with the Zetas, according to accounts that couldn’t be independently confirmed by authorities in Mexico City.

http://www.mexico.vg/tag/mexicos-drug-cartels

In addition to drug trafficking, authorities say, the Zetas are involved in extortion, kidnapping, producing pirated CDs and DVDs, sales of alcohol and migrant smuggling.-

The gang has been locked in a bloody turf war

in western Mexico with a gang known as La Familia, which on Monday posted banners around the state of Michoacan calling on Mexicans to join its fight against the Zetas and help clean the streets from the dirty thugs.

La Familia Michoacana: Drug trafficking and protection.

unlike the zetas this drug cartel is not killing innocent people , furthermore it goes out of its way to tell people not to associate themselves with the zetas. La Familia Michoacana also helps communities by punishing thieves , rapist and extortionist.

The highway shootout was the latest outbreak of violence in Torreon, which is the center of a region known as the Laguna, a major milk producer.

Early Sunday, 10 people died and 13 were wounded when four gunmen in a convoy burst into a Torreon bar and opened fire with high-powered weapons. Bodies were strewn on the sidewalk outside and inside the bar.

On Tuesday, a written message surfaced on YouTube that referred to the Sunday slayings. It warned Torreon authorities and residents against having anything to do with the Zetas, including patronizing bars that it said the gang runs.

-www.latimes.com

Hoffman, according to records, would drive to a house on Houston’s Wallisville Road, where guys he knew only as “Guero” and “Gringo” would unload the pot.

But small-time was about to become big-time.

Through interviews, documents, and court testimony, the Houston Chronicle has reconstructed the origins of a tenacious syndicate which over 25 years rose from a borderland gang of pot smugglers and car thieves to a multibillion-dollar criminal empire known as The Gulf Cartel In MEXICO.

Hoffman’s own words, offered in testimony, provide a vivid street-level look at how — as Colombia’s mighty cocaine cartels had to abandon Miami and find a way to do business elsewhere in the United States

” the stage was set for explosive growth among Mexico’s drug gangsters who made Houston a national hub as they sought to infiltrate the United States.”

“As the heat came on in Miami in the early 1980s, they started to switch their routes,” recalled Peter Hanna, a senior FBI agent who made a career chasing the cartel.

“The Mexicans said, ‘Hey, no problem, we have been smuggling stuff into the United States for years.’ ”

Keeping a lower profile on U.S. soil than Colombians, who were as bold as they were extravagant, the Mexicans made money hand over fist.

Despite a quarter century of indictments and arrests of its leaders, and seizures of its drugs, cash and guns, the cartel has repeatedly reinvented itself to thrive at unprecedented levels.

As one federal intelligence agent put it, The Gulf Cartel has grown so quickly that it stands apart from other Mexican Drug  Cartels and has clearly graduated from door-greeter to superstore-owner, with its territory the swath of Texas border stretching from the Gulf of Mexico westward to Big Bend.

The cartel pumps dope through pipelines connecting Latin America to Houston, and on to Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, New York and elsewhere. And when drugs are being smoked, snorted or swallowed here, the Drug Enforcement Administration contends they have been sifted through the cartel’s fingers.

While there are four or five major Mexican cartels, the Gulf Cartel is consistently considered at the top of the industry. The National Drug Intelligence Center estimates Mexican and Colombian cartels “generate, remove and launder” between $18 billion and $39 billion in wholesale proceeds each year.

“Inside the family, people will be killed by their own, everyone who has balls and greed wants to be the boss,” said Carlos, who asked that his last name not be used.

Having already corrupted members of the very armed forces sent to catch him, Cardenas used a confidant in Mexico’s Special Forces to help launch the Zetas, a band of brutal enforcers, according to an unclassified DEA report. This private army known for military precision and terror, at least in Mexico, was to serve as a hit squad to kill rivals.

Cardenas went too far in 1999 when he and a gang of henchmen caught an FBI agent and a DEA agent driving through Matamoros with an informant in their car. An armed standoff ended with the agents and their snitch fleeing back to the United States.

Cardenas, who quickly landed on the FBI’s most wanted list, was arrested in 2003 by the Mexican military after a shootout. But even from inside a Mexican prison, Cardenas ran the cartel and directed a turf war that tore apart Nuevo Laredo, authorities say.

It wasn’t until 2007, when he was extradited to Houston, that he lost power.

Under heavy guard, his location being kept secret for his own safety, Cardenas is believed to be cooperating with prosecutors in exchange for leniency and other considerations.

Stratfor, an Austin-based global intelligence company, contends the cartel can hardly survive the pounding it has taken on all fronts, and that the feared Zetas have founded their own crime syndicate that works with the Gulf Cartel when it is convenient.

“After nearly three years of bearing the brunt of Mexican military and law enforcement efforts, the Gulf Cartel is now a shell of its former self,” contends the 16-page report.

But some federal agents have said that while the Zetas have emerged and are a great threat, the dope will continue to flow and the cartels will fight to persevere.

“They are not going to go away quietly into the night,” the DEA’s Campbell said. “They are going to try and establish themselves as permanent fixtures.”
read more @ chron.com

• Almanza Morales, killed in the attack, was accused of working for the Zetas, drug traffickers who also serve as enforcers for the Mexican Gulf cartel, and of killing army Brig. Gen. Juan Arturo Esparza and his four bodyguards in a November attack.

Esparza was killed shortly after he was named police chief in the Monterrey suburb of Garcia. Five Garcia police officers were among 10 people arrested in Esparza’s killing.

Nuevo Leon state Attorney General Alejandra Garza y Garza said in Monterrey that a second shootout that left five people dead ensued when gunmen in at least 10 Sport Utility Vehicles heading to the villa, presumably to rescue those detained, ran into a military convoy.

• During that shootout, one of the gunmen’s cars burst into flames. Three people inside died, Garza y Garza said. Television images showed three charred bodies, two of them with their hands tied behind their backs.

• Garza y Garza said the driver was a drug trafficker and the other two apparently were drug dealers who had been kidnapped. A fourth body was found about 165 feet (50 meters) from the burning vehicle. A woman who was driving near the shootout was killed by a stray bullet and two other bystanders were wounded, he said.

Seven people were arrested during the second clash, Garza y Garza said.

• Hours after the shootouts, gunmen suspected of working for the Zetas attacked a detention center in Monterrey suburb of Escobedo, killing two federal police officers guarding it and freeing 23 inmates, 15 of them members of a kidnapping gang working for the Zetas and the eight others were suspects detained in robbery investigations, he said.