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Despite setbacks, Tiajuana cartel remains a force
http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/4889978.html
Chris Kraul
July 25, 2004
TIJUANA, MEXICO -- Despite the arrests of key figures in the Arellano Felix drug cartel and the encroachment of rival gangs, Tijuana's dominant
narcotics traffickers are as dangerous as ever -- if not more so, U.S. law enforcement officials say.
Evidence of the mayhem wrought by the so-called Tijuana cartel is plentiful and appalling. Last month, Francisco J. Ortiz Franco, an editor at the
crusading Zeta newsweekly, which had recently detailed alleged dealings by the gang, was gunned down in front of two of his children.
U.S. law enforcement officials believe the cartel has been weakened by the arrest of a dozen top members, including leader Benjamin Arellano Felix in
2002 and, more recently, lieutenants Efrain Perez and Jorge Aureliano Felix last month.
But some U.S. authorities' recent assertions that the cartel is in ruins are now viewed as having been made prematurely. Although the arrests have
loosened the group's once-ironclad grip on heroin and cocaine smuggling along the western U.S.-Mexico border, the gang has moved into kidnapping and
the production and export of methamphetamine, said Special Agent John Blake of the FBI's San Diego office.
"The guys who were arrested were the ones doing the cocaine deals with the Colombians, the ones who made things go smoothly, key operatives in a
well-oiled machine. Those connections don't exist anymore," Blake said.
Although the cartel is not the major trafficking organization it was, its capacity for brutality is undiminished, he added.
Drug-related violence is as common now as at any time since the mid-1980s, when the Sinaloa-born Arellano Felix clan took over the world's busiest and
most lucrative drug-smuggling corridor.
In one recent case, a Tijuana police officer was found tortured and killed, one of the half a dozen homicides a month in Baja California that local
authorities attribute to the drug cartel. Over the years, the Arellano Felix gang has been blamed for the killing of two Tijuana police chiefs, many
federal and state prosecutors and scores of police officers. In the weeks leading up to journalist Ortiz Franco's death, Zeta published articles that
detailed an assortment of crimes allegedly committed by the gang, articles that editor Jesus Blancornelas believes provoked his colleague's killing.
Those stories included the cartel's purchase of fake police credentials from crooked officials, the engineering of the escape of several operatives
from a Tijuana prison, as well as the contracting of Delgado's murder. The week before he was killed, Ortiz Franco laid out the hierarchy of the
cartel from top to bottom and named names.
"Zeta publishes the information, and that bothers the narcos," Blancornelas said.
Blake, the FBI agent, theorized that violence has risen as the Tijuana cartel desperately tries to hang on to its diminishing turf. Much of the
cocaine and heroin business has been siphoned off by a rival Sinaloa mob led by Ismae (El Mayo) Zambada. He is believed to have wrested control of the
Mexicali and possibly Tecate smuggling corridors located, respectively 40 miles and 120 miles east of Tijuana in Baja California state, from the
Arellano Felix gang, U.S officials say.
The Arellano Felix syndicate also has lost control of Mazatlan, a busy Pacific port state in Sinaloa state as a transshipment port for Colombian
cocaine to Zambada, Blake said.
Jack Hook, assistant special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's San Diego office, said he believes the cartel has replaced
much of the lost cash flow with methamphetamine revenue and kidnapping ransoms.
"The Arellano Felix organization has suffered losses, but it is still functioning," Hook said. "We won't consider it dismantled until we have all the
top leaders off the street."
The cartel is now believed to be headed by two remaining Arellano Felix brothers, Eduardo and Javier.
The cartel's tentacles still reach deep into Baja California's political, business and social spheres and won't be easily cut, said Victor Clark
Alfaro, director of the Binational Commission on Human Rights and a visiting professor at California State University, San Diego.
"I thought when they captured Benjamin and killed Ramon that the cartel was near its end. But it has a tremendous power to regenerate itself," Clark
said. He attributed much of that to payoffs to complicit politicians, police and businessmen that were once estimated at $1 million a day.
Despite the steady pace of violence in this sprawling rough-and-tumble border city of 2 million, the murder of the Zeta editor still came as a shock.
After giving his bodyguards the day off, Ortiz Franco, a father of three, was shot four times as he sat in the driver's seat of his car after a midday
appointment at his physical therapist. Two of his children, who were sitting in the back seat and who witnessed the shooting, were unhurt. Two days
later, after a raging gun battle, agents of Mexico's Federal Investigation Agency arrested top Arellano Felix enforcer Mario Garcia Simental, whom
prosecutors believe may have ordered the killings of Ortiz, Delgado Neri and others.
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Top Mexican drug cartels join forces
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=world...
23 July, 2004
By Kieran Murray
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Two of Mexico's top cartels have joined forces to fight for control of drug smuggling into the United States in a pact forged
by their leaders in prison, the government says.
Mexico's top organised crime prosecutor, Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, said the cartels based in Tijuana and along the Gulf coast were now working
together to rebuild a network of gunmen and defend their territories.
"For us, it is dangerous. We don't see it as something at all good," he told reporters on Thursday, although he said both cartels had been seriously
weakened in recent years and his agents were continuing to strike against them.
The Tijuana-based cartel, which smuggles drugs across the western end of the U.S. border, is led by the notorious Arellano Felix family but it has
been ravaged by a series of arrests over the last three years.
The Gulf Cartel is run out of the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, across the border from Texas, and its leader Osiel Card##as was arrested last
year.
Santiago Vasconcelos said a group of ruthless gunmen known as the "Zetas", led by former army commanders and linked to the Gulf Cartel, recently sent
representatives to Tijuana to help the Arellano Felix cartel rebuild its network of hitmen.
The alliance was forged in prison last year by Card##as and Benjamin Arellano Felix, the mastermind of his family's cartel who was arrested two years
ago.
Experts had warned the two gangs might be working together but this is the first time the government has confirmed it.
Apart from training new groups of "sicarios", as hired gunmen are known in Mexico, the two cartels have apparently agreed to do business together.
Mexico's cartels move massive amounts of cocaine, heroin and marijuana across the U.S. border. They are ruthless in wiping out rivals or police
informants and have traditionally bought the protection of officials in Mexico's police forces, the army and all levels of government.
President Vicente Fox pledged to crack down on the cartels when he took office in 2000 and has had some success.
Analysts often compare the war on drugs to squeezing a balloon -- press down in one point, and it expands somewhere else -- and the flow of drugs has
continued with smaller outfits emerging as big cartels come under pressure.
But Santiago Vasconcelos said the new cooperation between the Tijuana and Gulf cartels was a reflection of their weakness and that even the Zetas,
feared because of their army training and discipline, were losing their clout.
"No single organisation can now sustain its territories by itself," he said.
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