Pubdate: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Copyright: 2005 San Jose Mercury News Contact: http://www.mercurynews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/390 Author: Ginger Thompson, NY Times MEXICO REBUKES U.S. FOR TRAVEL ALERT CANC=DAN, Mexico -- Mexican officials Thursday rebuked the United States for issuing a diplomatic alert about a wave of drug-related violence along the border in which a growing number of Americans have been kidnapped or killed. The State Department travel alert Wednesday said most Americans visit Mexico without mishap, but it warned of ``deteriorating security'' marked by a sharp increase in kidnappings and slayings that put Americans at greater risk. In a separate letter to Mexican officials, the U.S. ambassador, Tony Garza, expressed concern that state and local police on the Mexican side of the border had failed at ``coming to grips'' with the fighting among gangs struggling for control of the drug trade. And he wrote that violence could have a ``chilling effect on the cross-border exchange, tourism and commerce so vital to the region's prosperity.'' The letter stirred a storm in Mexico City, where the political classes remain extremely sensitive to any threat of U.S. intervention, about 150 years after the United States took over more than half of Mexico's territory. ``Mexico's fight against drug trafficking is firm,'' said a statement released Thursday by President Vicente Fox. ``The Mexican government does not admit judgment from any foreign government about political actions taken to confront its problems.'' High-level officials went on national television to defend Mexico's efforts to fight organized crime. Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez angrily dismissed Garza's letter as an exaggeration. And in an interview Thursday, Interior Minister Santiago Creel suggested that it had crossed diplomatic boundaries. Creel said that in recent years, Mexico and the United States had collaborated like never before to fight drug trafficking, and that Mexico had made unprecedented progress by putting some of this country's most wanted kingpins in jail. ``I'd like to see more kingpins in United States prisons,'' he said. But in recent weeks it has become clear that Mexican prisons have not confined the drug war as much as sheltered it. While new players have emerged along the border and begun a new fight for control, kingpins fight back from their prison cells, ordering assassinations and running their operations with the help of corrupt guards and prison administrators. Michael Yoder, the U.S. consul in Nuevo Laredo, warned last month that the number of Americans kidnapped and killed had risen from about three a year to more than 25 in the past six months. Then, shootings inside Mexico's toughest prison, La Palma, raised serious questions about Mexico's capacity to fight organized crime. Two weeks ago, federal authorities raided La Palma to take back control of the institution from incarcerated kingpins -- chiefly Benjamin Arellano F=E9lix, the head of the so-called Tijuana Cartel, and Osiel C=E1rdenas, the head of the Gulf Cartel. A week later, the bodies of six workers at a maximum-security prison in the city of Matamoros, just across the border from Brownsville, Texas, were found just outside the prison walls. They had been handcuffed, stuffed into a van and shot to death. Wednesday, about 650 federal agents stormed the Matamoros penitentiary and vowed to keep up their fight against organized crime. Meanwhile, in a press conference in Mexico City, the deputy secretary of public security, Miguel =C1ngel Yunes, said the government's worst enemy came from within. Searches of prison cells at La Palma, he said, made clear that kingpins had held complete control of the prison for most of the past three years. - --- MAP posted-by: SHeath(DPFFLorida)