Thread: Alleged cartel boss in Houston cell

Alleged cartel boss in Houston cell, but Mexico violence shows no letup
Experts contend extraditions spur more bloodshed
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle Mexico City Bureau
Dec. 25, 2008, 11:45PM

MEXICO CITY — Even as accused mob boss Osiel Cardenas awaits a federal trial in Houston next year, the criminal army he allegedly commanded with deadly resolve rampages across Mexico.

Cardenas, 41, has been imprisoned for six years — four in Mexico and two in the United States since his extradition to Houston. He faces federal charges of leading a drug syndicate, trafficking cocaine and marijuana, laundering money and threatening the lives of U.S. agents.

Though weakened by a crackdown, Cardenas' Gulf Cartel and the military-style gang of assassins it spawned, the Zetas, remain powerful and widely feared.

Their gunmen have spread violence deep into the Mexican heartland and Central America. Mexican officials blame the organization for many of this year's estimated 5,600 gangland murders.

Now, as President Felipe Calderon's war on Mexico's gangs enters its third year, the Gulf Cartel's resilience underscores the challenges facing Calderon. While he has approved more than 150 extraditions of alleged drug-syndicate bosses and gunmen, the cartel and other crime organizations have continued to threaten Mexico's stability and smuggle narcotics to U.S. users, Mexican and American officials acknowledge.

And, they admit, the extraditions have stoked the bloodshed rather than snuffed it.

While the offensive has been on multiple fronts, the Gulf Cartel arguably has been the Calderon government's principal target. Aside from Cardenas' extradition to Houston in January 2007, several other cartel leaders and hundreds of lesser hoods have been arrested.

Recent blows include the November capture of the Zetas' third-ranking commander and the seizure the same month of some 400 smuggled weapons on the Texas border. Those events followed the September dismantling of a major Gulf Cartel drug distribution network in the United States and Europe.

But, though bowed, the cartel and its gunmen hardly seem broken.

"If anything, the extradition of Cardenas has led to an even more virulent form of the Gulf Cartel," said Bruce Bagley, an expert on Latin American narcotics gangs at the University of Miami.


Zetas blamed for attacks
Mexican authorities blame the Zetas for the Sept. 15 grenade attack on a crowd celebrating Independence Day in the capital of central Michoacan state, killing nine. On the outskirts of Mexico City and in states along the Pacific coast, gunbattles involving the Zetas have killed scores — including dozens of police officers. And Guatemalan police say the Zetas orchestrated an attack that left at least 17 dead on that country's border with Mexico.

That continued strength has mocked the hopes of some who argued that Cardenas' extradition would shatter his cartel.

Gang warfare seems to have exploded in Mexico in 2008.

In Tijuana, more than 400 have been killed since late September in a struggle between the former underbosses of the Arellano Felix crime family.

In Ciudad Juarez, gang warfare has killed more than 1,500 people since January when gunmen from Sinaloa state moved in to eliminate the city's weakened criminal bosses. Still more blood has flowed in Sinaloa itself after former allies turned on one another.

"There is a benefit in cutting down large organizations into little cartels, because they don't threaten the state," said Bagley, who has studied the impact of Colombia's extradition of its gangland chiefs in the 1990s.

But, he said, "you leave a vacuum at the top, and you unleash more violence."

Cardenas rose to the top of his organization after the 1996 arrest of Gulf Cartel founder Juan Garcia Abrego, who was sent to the U.S. and convicted of narcotics-related charges in a Houston federal court. Garcia Abrego, once a lord of the border, is serving multiple life sentences in a U.S. federal prison.


2 U.S. agents threatened
By 1999, Cardenas was the undisputed head of the Gulf Cartel, which U.S. officials say was smuggling as much as 70 tons of cocaine a year into Texas.

His downfall began the same year, after Cardenas and more than a dozen gunmen accosted and threatened to kill two U.S. federal agents on a Matamoros street.

Alarmed by the gang's bravado, U.S. agencies launched a joint investigation into the cartel, which resulted in federal grand jury indictments of Cardenas and several lieutenants in 2002.

After his 2003 arrest in Matamoros, Cardenas was convicted of drug trafficking charges by a Mexican court, but never sentenced. His U.S. trial has been delayed and is scheduled to begin in September. He faces multiple life sentences if convicted of all counts.

While jailed in Mexico, Cardenas continued to direct his organization, Mexican officials say, in a war with rivals that included the 2004-'05 battles that killed more than 500 people in Nuevo Laredo, which borders Laredo.

An intelligence report from Mexico's public security minister identifies Zeta leader Heriberto Lazcano as the de facto head of the Gulf Cartel. U.S. and Mexican investigators believe Cardenas' brother, Ezequiel, remains one of the gang's leaders.

"Fear of extradition is definitely a factor in how people conduct themselves," said Thomas Schweich, until this year a ranking State Department official involved in anti-narcotics efforts for the Bush administration.

A gangland boss "sees the situation of his predecessor and doesn't want it to happen to him," he said. "If you are going to attack a major criminal organization, there is always an uptick in violence.

"That's exactly what's going on in Mexico right now."

Chronicle reporter Dane Schiller contributed reporting from Houston.
dudley.althaus@chron.com



DRUG WAR'S TOLL

• 30,000: Mexican soldiers and federal police deployed against the country's criminal gangs.
• $197 million: Value of first installment of Washington's projected $1.4 billion antidrug aid program to Mexico.

• 150 : Drug-gang suspects extradited by Mexico to the United States.

• 5,600 Estimated number of drug syndicate-related killings in Mexico since Jan. 1.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6181973.html

You know what, they didn't stop the drugs pouring out of Columbia they just made it worse by taking out Noriega. The kingpins multiplied.

Dixie

He will be first on Obama's list of pardons, amnesties and citizenship recipients.