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| Caribbean-Latin America | |
| 18 Federales Under Narcotics Investigation | |
| 2011-02-04 | |
| by Chris Covert Way back in early July, 2010, a story was posted which detailed a major firefight between Command X, an armed group tied to the Sinaloa drug gang and a group of Los Zetas gunners that took place in the Altar desert near Tubutama, Sonora. The gun battle, which was really a Los Zetas buzzsaw Command X was probably duped into, cost the lives of 21 shooters. Then barely a month later, a less reported second firefight nearly as bloody also took place between drug gangs in El Saric, Sonora just a few kilometers away. In the intervening time, I read in comments in various Spanish language publications about how the area around El Saric, Tubutama and Caborca was a major communications hub operated by Los Zetas drug gang, complete with shortwave radios and other more sophisticated equipment. It seemed to be common knowledge in Sonora that Tubutama was a communications center. On October 15th, 2010, the Sonoran Procuradora General Justicia Estado, said that a joint counternarcotics sweep was taking place in the very area where the two firefights took place. The joint operation involved the Mexican Army and a detachment of the Mexican Policia Federal and totalled 400 armed effectives. My first reaction was, "Great! They're going to clean out that area with direct action." So I waited. And waited. And waited... Nothing. Usually when a massive operation such as counternarcotics sweeps takes place, unmolested, the Mexican Army is extremely effective. The bad guys suffer large numbers of dead, wounded and detained while the army barely breaks a fingernail. It did occur to me that such a massive operation in a remote sparsely populated area would turn up something. Even a report of nothing found would have been better than what was released. They couldn't even find such much as a dropped cell phone, or a spent shell casings. It was as if Los Zetas decided: "We've done enough killing; let's find something else to do." Not bloody likely. The national attorney general's office announced today that 18 Mexican Federal agents were placed in preventative detention pending an investigation of a purported nexus between these Policia Federal agents and La Linea, the armed wing of the Juarez drug gang.
Three agents had already confessed to the ties between top Policia Federal officials in Sonora and La Linea. I don't really know if actual ties exist between Los Zetas and the Juarez gang. Los Zetas tend to be a band of mercenaries. They have in the past conducted campaigns for Beltran-Leyva and they have helped La Familia Michoacana and, like the Juarez gang, they are mortal enemies of the Sinaloa drug gang. Paying off Policia Federal officials would explain the dearth of news, or the lack of results in the mid October sweep in Sonora. Proceso, the Mexican leftist weekly, published back in December a news feature which detailed the extent to which drug gangs suppress news about their operations, usually through threats of violence. I had at the time no doubt parts of it were true. I read tons of information about army counternarcotics operations in Nuevo Leon, next door, but very little about Tamaulipas, the state detailed in the December Proceso article. With the newly elected and seated state government in Tamaulipas, things have gotten better, much better in fact, but time will tell whether cartels will change that. At the moment, it appears the Secretaria Defensa Nacional (SEDENA) is mixing detachments from Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas, and that change appears to be helping with the news issues in Tamaulipas. There is little reason to doubt the Policia Federal officials may have ties to La Linea save for the fact that La Linea shooters want the media spotlight, especially if it involves their contract hits. A report I read last summer detailed a confession by a detained La Linea shooter who stated that La Linea assassins sometimes time their hits to local Juarez television news. Los Zetas, in the other hand, only want the attention they want and nothing more. Suppression of drug war news seems to be a signature of Los Zetas, but maybe now La Linea shooters are getting into the censorship swing of things. | |
| Posted by:badanov |