McALLEN, Texas – An already tense situation along the border worsened Saturday amid an internal FBI memo warning that a ruthless Mexican drug cartel could be plotting to kidnap and murder U.S. federal law enforcement agents.
Although the plot specifically targets two unidentified agents of the FBI, the bulletin warns that “due to the nature of this immediate threat, all law enforcement personnel are being cautioned to ensure appropriate measures are taken as well as to keep a high degree of vigilance,” the bulletin stated.
The threats originate from members of the Osiel Cardenas-Guillen cartel, the bulletin said, “an extremely violent Mexican drug trafficking organization commonly referred to as the Gulf Cartel. This cartel is alleged to have recently assembled over 250 armed men near the Mexican border town of Matamoros, Tamaulipas” across from Brownsville, Texas.
The gulf cartel has a presence in 13 Mexican states, operating with a paramilitary arm, integrated from ex-members of the Mexican armed forces known as the Zetas, who remain loyal to Cardenas, one of the country’s most powerful cartel bosses jailed in a Mexican federal prison.
A “contingent of this group,” the bulletin continued, “are believed to have valid visas and passports, allowing them legal entry into the United States. It is further implied that once kidnapped in the U.S., these two agents will be returned to Mexico where they will be killed.”
The consequences of this and other recent warnings were evident along the 2,000-mile U.S. border with Mexico, as shoppers again stayed away from popular border destinations, from Ciudad Juarez to Reynosa.
In Brownsville, a group of Texas lawmakers who had been scheduled to meet with the Tamaulipas governor and mayors, rearranged their agenda so that their Mexican counterparts could instead meet them on the U.S. side.
“Any threat from the cartels, or splinter groups has to be taken seriously by law enforcement,” said Phil Jordan, former director of the El Paso Intelligence Center. “These organizations operate at almost at the level of terrorist. Their ruthlessness is only second to terrorists.”
The warning comes following a crackdown by the Mexican government on the Gulf Cartel, which calls home this region stretching from Nuevo Laredo to Reynosa and Matamoros.
Two weeks ago, federal authorities raided La Palma prison in the state of Mexico to take back control of the institution from jailed kingpins – chiefly Benjamin Arellano Felix, the head of the so-called Tijuana Cartel, and Cardenas, the head of the Gulf Cartel.
A week later, the bodies of six workers at a maximum-security prison in the city of Matamoros were found just outside the prison walls, their bullet-ridden bodies stuffed into a van and killed by what Mexican authorities believe were members of the Zetas.
Last Sunday, about 650 federal agents and 30 tanks stormed the Matamoros penitentiary. They now patrol Matamoros and Reynosa, just across from McAllen.
The extreme violence along the border, plus rash of kidnapping of U.S. citizens – 25 in the last six months in Nuevo Laredo alone – led to a travel alert by the State Department, accompanied by a letter from U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza.
On Saturday, Garza had breakfast with Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez, at which the two sides tried to defuse the incident sparked by the U.S. travel warning.
In a joint statement, Garza said he originally sought to “clarify” the state department’s alert by trying to “highlight the fact that the wave of border violence is a result of the successful efforts of President Fox’s administration in the fight against organized crime.”
The two sides also agreed that “most urban violence in the border region is caused by fighting among gangs, mainly drug traffickers, struggling for control of the narcotics trade, as ever more leaders of major criminal organizations have been arrested by Mexican law enforcement officials.”
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(c) 2005, The Dallas Morning News.
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AP-NY-01-29-05 1815EST
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