MEXICO CITY (AP) – Mexican federal law enforcement officials were investigating their own Cancun office Wednesday, saying they may be tied to last week’s slayings of nine people, including three federal agents.

Rival traffickers working for escaped drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and imprisoned capo Osiel Cardenas are both suspected in the Cancun killings, which appear aimed at returning the Caribbean coast region to the dark days of the 1990s when it was a major drug corridor.

Mexico’s top organized crime prosecutor, Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, depicted it as a struggle for the fate of this white-sand beach resort in the state of Quintana Roo.

“We could be witnessing a sort of struggle between these two gangs,” Santiago Vasconcelos said Tuesday, after the federal Attorney General’s office in Cancun was surrounded by soldiers and those inside questioned. “Remember that the coasts of Quintana Roo were for many years an ideal shipping point for drug shipments. We can’t allow that to happen again.”

Hitmen working for Cardenas and Guzman have fought bloody street battles in the border cities of Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros for over a year, in a dispute for control of that lucrative border drug route.

Guzman escaped from a federal prison in 2001, and Cardenas was arrested in 2003, but allegedly continues to run his gang from behind bars.

Santiago Vasconcelos said it appears the agents found shot in the head last week had information the traffickers wanted. He said it did not appear the officers had been working with drug gangs, as has often been the case in the past.

Santiago Vasconcelos arrived in Cancun shortly after the soldiers moved in on the offices. He entered the building briefly, then later told reporters that all federal employees there were under investigation.

Five corpses were found Nov. 25 with gunshot wounds to the head on a dirt road just south of Cancun, famous the world over for its white-sand beaches and night clubs. Authorities recovered an abandoned car nearby.

Three of the victims – Luis Octavio Guzman, Roberto Alcantara and Fernando Perez – were members of the elite Federal Agency of Investigation, the Mexican equivalent of the FBI.

Another four charred bodies were discovered in the trunk of a burned-out car parked in an illegal dump near the highway between Cancun and the city of Merida, about 6 miles from the Cancun airport.

A day later, two Federal Agency of Investigation agents were discovered with gunshot wounds to their legs before dawn outside Cancun.

Quintana Roo, which includes Cancun, was a major drug trafficking route throughout the 1990s, when Gov. Mario Villanueva allegedly helped Mexico’s Juarez cartel move tons of Colombian cocaine by boat, airplane and truck along the coast.

Facing drug allegations, Villanueva disappeared after leaving office in 1999 and spent two years on the run before being captured in Cancun in 2001.

Villanueva’s capture as well as the 2001 arrest of reputed kingpin Alcides Ramon Magana was supposed to have severely weakened the Cancun smuggling ring, but may have simply opened the door for the Gulf cartel to move into the area.

AP-ES-12-01-04 1232EST

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