MX Prison Breakout Means 200 More Serious Criminals on Street–Increase in Violence Expected

Close to 200 drug dealers, murderers, and human traffickers broke out of a Nuevo Laredo prison—probably with the help of guards who were bribed or threatened; members of the Zetas were behind the prison break. Intelligence analysts say that the breakout means that we should expect more violence in cities within the Zetas-dominated areas An intelligence analyst says there is a greater chance right now you could become a victim of a carjacking in Mexico. A former drug enforcement agency supervisor said the prison break in Nuevo Laredo is the reason why the threat of carjackings will go up.

“The Zetas were the ones that orchestrated their breakout to increase their number,” says Gary Hale. Hale is a former drug enforcement agency intelligence supervisor in the Houston field office. He now runs his own intelligence firm. He says the prison breakout means more violence against people traveling to Mexico.

Hale and his team built a map to show the four cities in Mexico that are fifty miles from the border where Zetas have recently carjacked people. He says it could happen in every Mexican state that borders the United States. The Zetas operate in all of them. Hale analyzed the Zetas in a new report he released this past weekend. He says the Zetas are expanding in Mexico. They are now in Sonora, across the border from Arizona. He says the Mexican government is still arresting Zeta operatives. Last week, a Zeta recruiter trying to enlist teenagers was arrested in Monterrey.

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Policeman possibly linked to Falcon Lake case beheaded

The head of a Mexican police commander presumed to be investigating the reported pirate attack against David Michael Hartley on Falcon Lake was delivered to Mexican military, sources said Tuesday. State Rep. Aaron Pena, said he was told that Rolando Flores’ head was delivered Tuesday in a suitcase. Ruben Rios, spokesman for the Tamaulipas state prosecutor’s office, told the Associated Press that Flores is the head of state investigators in the border city of Ciudad Miguel Alemán, a small city directly across the border from Roma, Texas. Lesley Lopez, a spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, said the head was delivered in the vicinity of Miguel Alemán.

The area is known to be under control of the Zeta drug cartel, which fiercely protects the remotely populated ranchland lining the Texas-Mexico border, as well as the Mexican side of the vast Falcon Lake reservoir. Rios also told the Associated Press that the killing was unrelated to Hartley’s investigation. Hartley has been missing since Sept. 30, when he and his wife took their personal watercraft into Mexican waters to photograph a partially submerged town. Investigators have been hampered on this side byby an inability to cross the border. Mexican investigators have meanwhile expressed fears of searching in Zeta turf.

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Why Mexican 'pirates' are targeting US tourists on Falcon Lake

The attack that allegedly killed the missing American tourist David Hartley on Sept. 30 while he was jet-skiing with his wife was not the first such incident on the 60-mile-long body of water straddling the United States and Mexico. According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, gunmen armed with AK-47s and AR-15 rifles have attacked US tourists on Lake Falcon in a string of robberies in recent months. Using Argos-type fishing boats, some attackers are dressed as Mexican police, while others have used crude duct-taped signs to disguise their boats as Texas Parks and Wildlife vessels, according to victims' reports.

Since April 30, five incidents of armed robberies or attempted theft have been reported on Falcon Lake: one in April, two in May, and one in August. The fifth ambush allegedly ended in gunfire last week with the possible death of Mr. Hartley. “This is a new situation where [drug-trafficking] groups feel they own public spaces,” says Humberto Palomares, a security expert at the Tamaulipas campus of the Colegio de Frontera Norte (COLEF). Targeting US tourists on an international reservoir is just another sign that the cartels feel more in control of swaths of Mexican territory and don’t have to hide in wait for moments to strike, Mr. Palomares says. Lurking in the night. So dangerous is Lake Falcon, in fact, that Mexican law enforcement refuses to patrol it at night.

Mexican authorities have been searching Falcon Lake since Thursday for the body of Mr. Hartley. Their search is hampered in part by the danger of the lake, says Juan Antonio Jara, a Tamaulipas state prosecutor in the Miguel Aleman municipality office. Once it starts getting dark, he says, police and investigators must return to shore because "it's a high risk area due to [lack of] security." Some report that the bandits attacking tourists and fishermen on Lake Falcon have been brandishing “Z” tattoos, for the ruthless Zetas drug-trafficking group. But questions have emerged over why a well-funded crime syndicate would bother harassing US fishermen for a few hundred dollars, and whether there is only one gang involved. While the Zetas are the most powerful drug cartel in Tamaulipas, the state bordering Falcon Lake, small organizations associated with the Zetas may also be engaging in acts of piracy.

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Mexican massacre investigator found dead

The body of an official investigating the massacre of 72 Central and South American migrants killed in a ranch in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas was found today dumped beside a nearby road alongside another unidentified victim, according to local media. Earlier, two cars exploded outside the studios of the national TV network Televisa in the state capital, Ciudad Victoria. There were no casualties, but the blasts added to a growing sense of fear in the aftermath of the worst single act of violence in the country's raging drug wars.

Meanwhile, investigators under armed guard continued the process of identifying the victims, with 20 named by midday on Friday, local officials said. The migrants, 14 of them women, came from at least four countries, including Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil and Ecuador. They were found bound and blindfolded by the wall of a barn after navy personnel stormed the ranch on Tuesday.

The massacre was discovered after an Ecuadorian migrant, who had been left for dead with a neck wound, escaped. Luis Freddy Lala Pomavilla, 18, found his way to a navy road checkpoint. He said the migrants had been kidnapped by armed men who identified themselves as belonging to the Zetas, one of the cartels fighting for supremacy in the state. He said the killing began after they refused offers to work for the cartel.

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Agents feared Mexican drug cartel attack on dam

An alleged plot by a Mexican drug cartel to blow up a dam along the Texas border — and unleash billions of gallons of water into a region with millions of civilians — sent American police, federal agents and disaster officials secretly scrambling last month to thwart such an attack, authorities confirmed Wednesday. Whether or not the cartel, which is known to have stolen bulk quantities of gunpowder and dynamite, could have taken down the 5-mile-long Falcon Dam may never be known since the attack never came to pass. It may have been derailed by a stepped-up presence by the Mexican military, which was acting in part on intelligence from the U.S. government, sources said.

The warning, which swung officials into action, was based on what the federal government contends were “serious and reliable sources” and prompted the Department of Homeland Security to sound the alarm to first responders along the South Texas-Mexico border. Mexico's Zeta cartel was planning to destroy the dam not to terrorize civilians, but to get back at its rival and former ally, the Gulf cartel, which controls smuggling routes from the reservoir to the Gulf of Mexico, said Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez, head of the Southwest Border Sheriff's Coalition, as did others familiar with the alleged plot.

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Treasury Announces Sanctions of Mexican Drug Lords

WASHINGTON – As part of an ongoing effort to apply financial measures against narcotics traffickers worldwide, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) today designated four drug cartel leaders as Specially Designated Narcotics Traffickers pursuant to the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (Kingpin Act). The four individuals designated today are leaders of the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas, groups that are responsible for much of the violence taking place in Mexico today.

"Following on the heels of the President's naming of Los Zetas as a drug kingpin organization in April, we are today targeting sanctions against four drug lords who are senior leaders in Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel," said OFAC Director Adam J. Szubin. "We remain committed to using all tools at our disposal to assist President Calderon in his courageous efforts against Mexico's deadly narcotics cartels."

OFAC designated the following two individuals, who are leaders of the Gulf Cartel:

• Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sanchez (alias "El Coss")
• Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen (alias "Tony Tormenta")

The following two individuals were also designated and are leaders of Los Zetas:

• Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano (alias "Lazca")
• Miguel Angel Trevino Morales (alias "Cuarenta")

Press Release, US Department of Treasury, 20 July 2009.

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Mexico: Economics and the Arms Trade

By Scott Stewart and Fred Burton
9 July 2009

On June 26, the small Mexican town of Apaseo el Alto, in Guanajuato state, was the scene of a deadly firefight between members of Los Zetas and federal and local security forces. The engagement began when a joint patrol of Mexican soldiers and police officers responded to a report of heavily armed men at a suspected drug safe house. When the patrol arrived, a 20-minute firefight erupted between the security forces and gunmen in the house as well as several suspects in two vehicles who threw fragmentation grenades as they tried to escape.

When the shooting ended, 12 gunmen lay dead, 12 had been taken into custody and several soldiers and police officers had been wounded. At least half of the detained suspects admitted to being members of Los Zetas, a highly trained Mexican cartel group known for its use of military weapons and tactics.

When authorities examined the safe house they discovered a mass grave that contained the remains of an undetermined number of people (perhaps 14 or 15) who are believed to have been executed and then burned beyond recognition by Los Zetas. The house also contained a large cache of weapons, including assault rifles and fragmentation grenades. Such military ordnance is frequently used by Los Zetas and the enforcers who work for their rival cartels.

STRATFOR has been closely following the cartel violence in Mexico for several years now, and the events that transpired in Apaseo el Alto are by no means unique. It is not uncommon for the Mexican authorities to engage in large firefights with cartel groups, encounter mass graves or recover large caches of arms. However, the recovery of the weapons in Apaseo el Alto does provide an opportunity to once again focus on the dynamics of Mexico’s arms trade.

To read the complete Stratfor article, please click here.

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