Pubdate: Sat, 12 Feb 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: Susana Hayward, Knight Ridder
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/mexico

GOOD GUYS TURN BAD IN MEXICO

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico - A car whipped across the street, cutting off
the taxicab. Six men, sporting military-style crew cuts and sunglasses
and toting AK-47 assault rifles and walkie-talkies, quickly emerged
and encircled the cab.

``What are you doing taking photos around here?'' one demanded. He
examined the photographer's press ID, which had been passed nervously
through the window. Then, as quickly as they'd appeared, they vanished
into the gloom as darkness approached.

The men were members of the Zetas, former Mexican elite commandos --
trained to combat drug traffickers -- who've switched sides. As the
government dispatches federal police and soldiers to cities along the
U.S. border in an effort to stanch a war between rival drug gangs, the
Zetas are the major challenge it faces.

Work along border

No one knows precisely how many former elite commandos are in the
employ of drug cartels. But their work is well known in the cities of
Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa and Matamoros, hard against the U.S. border,
where they control neighborhoods and watch for any outsiders who might
be government spies.

They're thought likely to have been responsible for the murder Jan. 20
of six prison employees near the federal maximum-security prison at
Matamoros. And it was fear that they were plotting to bust out jailed
drug traffickers that prompted a crackdown Jan. 15 at La Palma prison
in central Mexico, where one of the country's best-known drug bosses,
Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, was housed.

``There's no antecedent to this type of phenomenon,'' said Jorge
Chabat, a political analyst who studies the drug trade. ``The majority
of other criminals don't have this type of training. They move like
guerrillas, appear in one city and then another. They're not a
traditional army. . . . Their violence is sophisticated, and that
should worry the Mexican government.''

The attorney general's office for years dismissed the Zetas as
decimated. But officials now acknowledge that curbing them is a main
goal of the current crackdown, in which hundreds of federal agents
have been sent to border cities and dozens of inmates have been
transferred within the correction system to break up prison gangs.

Maximum-security prisons at La Palma, outside Toluca, and Matamoros
remain under virtual military occupation, and Cárdenas, for whom the
Zetas are thought to work, has been transferred to Matamoros. Another
major drug boss, Benjamin Arellano Félix, remains imprisoned in La
Palma.

Whether the government can beat the Zetas is an open question. Many
think the Zetas are better trained and better armed than their
government opponents.

When 100 soldiers encountered a reported eight drug traffickers Jan.
28 in the state of Sonora, the troops withdrew. News reports quoted
army commanders as saying, ``They have better weapons. We could do
little.''

In the beginning

The Zetas drew their name from the serial numbers they were given when
the commando unit they once were a part of was formed in the second
half of the 1980s, under the organized-crime unit of the attorney
general's office. Each number began with the letter ``Z.'' The unit's
training included air and sea assaults.

In the 1990s, drug dealers recruited former members of the force,
primarily as hit men, largely along the U.S. border.

Prosecutors say they now control nearly all illegal activity along the
border. They're accused of more than 200 slayings and are thought to
be responsible for drive-by slayings and kidnappings. They extort
money from small border businesses for protection, from used-car
dealers to beauty shops.

They have ranged far beyond their original home on the border. Last
May, Zetas dressed in military-type uniforms aboard pickups sprang two
dozen inmates, including five members of Cárdenas' Gulf Cartel, from
the Apatzingan prison in Michoacán state in central Mexico, a thousand
miles south of their first base of operations.

Fear of the Zetas is palpable along the border. ``Everyone's afraid,''
said a businessman from Laredo, on the U.S. side. ``Business is down
on both sides. You don't mention the Zetas or traffickers. Word gets
around.''

``You say one wrong thing to the wrong person and you and your family
end up dead in a ditch,'' one homemaker said.

Police keep low profile

Federal police agents, on patrol in Reynosa, south of Brownsville,
Texas, asked that they not be identified. ``We don't want to die,''
one said. But they also said they believed they would overcome the
Zetas eventually.

``Sooner or later, something's got to give. They'll have to come out
to resume their dealings. We call it the cockroach effect: They run,
but come back to the place where there's food,'' said an officer who
helped capture Cárdenas in Matamoros in 2003.

The Zetas are just one sign of the strength of Mexico's drug gangs
even from behind bars. The military takeover of La Palma found that
drug traffickers jailed there had set up a parallel administration
for the prison.

Knight Ridder correspondent Janet Schwartz contributed to this report.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin