Mexican army elite form drug gang

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico - Members of an elite Mexican army unit have deserted and formed a drug gang, using their military training to launch a violent battle for control of this border city, Mexico's top antidrug prosecutor said.

The war for Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas, is unlike other recent drug conflicts: It's a turf war involving most of Mexico's major cartels in broad alliances not seen in a decade. It has the Mexican army fighting an organized unit of former comrades and it has cost American lives.

"They are extremely violent, and they are very much feared in the region because of the bloodshed they unleash," said Jose Santiago Vasconcelos, Mexico's top antidrug prosecutor.

The battles have taken 87 lives since 2002 and have involved unprecedented alliances among Mexico's drug cartels, said Nuevo Laredo police commander Martin Landa Herrera.

"I don't think anything like this has happened before in Mexico," he said. "I have never heard of this many cartels fighting for one piece of territory."

Known as the "Zetas" or "Z's", the new drug gang, which appears to have won control of the city, is led by former members of an elite paratroop and intelligence battalion that was posted to the border state of Tamaulipas in the 1990s to fight drug traffickers.

Vasconcelos said about 31 of the estimated 350 members of the Special Air Mobile Force Group had deserted and joined the drug turf war.

"They have high-powered weapons, training and intelligence capabilities," Landa Herrera said of the Zetas, whose name comes from the radio code word designating a police commander. "They have even tapped our radio communications. They listen in on us."

The skirmishing began in 2001 as a dispute among local drug gangs that operated with the permission of reputed drug cartel leader Osiel Cardenas. By early 2002, the battle had heated up enough that the Zetas appeared, working as hit men for Cardenas in a bid to restore order.

But Cardenas' arrest March 14 during a shootout in the nearby border city of Matamoros opened the floodgates for a wider conflict. With Cardenas in jail, cartels across Mexico - Michoacan, Ciudad Juarez, Sinaloa and possibly Tijuana - sensed weakness and tried to move in on the territory.

An all-out war between multiple cartels hasn't been seen since the wars between Mexican gangs in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Nobody has to tell Houston resident Noe Villarreal how vicious the war has become. On Sept. 27, a commando unit of at least 30 masked men carrying assault rifles kidnapped his brother - Hayward, Calif., businessman Juan Villarreal Garcia - from his Mexico home in Sabinas Hidalgo, a town south of Nuevo Laredo.

Six other hostages were released soon afterward, but Villarreal is missing and is presumed dead.

"I don't know if it was the Zetas," said Noe Villarreal, "because the Zetas have never released anyone alive. That's not their style."

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