Cartels' violence spilling into US

U.S. authorities are reporting a spike in killings, kidnappings and home invasions connected to Mexico's murderous cartels. And to some policymakers' surprise, much of the violence is happening not in towns along the border, where it was assumed the bloodshed would spread, but a considerable distance away, in places such as Phoenix and Atlanta.

Investigators saythe violence could erupt elsewhere around the country because the Mexican cartels are believed to have set up drug-dealing operations all over the U.S., in such far-flung places as Boston, Anchorage, Alaska, and Sioux Falls, S.D.

"The violence follows the drugs," said David Cuthbertson, agent in charge of the FBI's office in El Paso.

The violence takes many forms: Drug customers who owe money are kidnapped until they pay up. Cartel employees who don't deliver the goods or turn over the profits are disciplined through beatings, kidnappings or worse. And drug smugglers kidnap illegal immigrants in clashes with human smugglers over the use of secret routes from Mexico.

So far, the violence is nowhere near as grisly as the mayhem in Mexico, which has witnessed beheadings, assassinations of police officers and soldiers, and mass killings in which the bodies were arranged to send a message. But law-enforcement officials say the violence on this side could escalate.

"They are capable of doing about anything," said Rusty Payne, a Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman in Washington. "When you are willing to chop heads off, put them in an ice chest and drop them off at a police precinct, or roll a head into a disco, put beheadings on YouTube as a warning," very little is off limits.

In an apartment near Birmingham, Ala., police found five men with their throats slit in August. They had apparently been tortured with electric shocks before being killed in a murder-for-hire orchestrated by a Mexican drug organization over a drug debt of about $400,000.

In Phoenix, police have reported a sharp increase in kidnappings and home invasions, with about 350 each year for the last two years, and say that most were committed at the behest of the Mexican drug gangs.

In June, heavily armed men stormed a Phoenix house and fired randomly, killing one person. Police believe it was the work of Mexican groups.

Tucson authorities have also seen an increase in home invasion tied to drug- or people- smugglers.

Authorities in Atlanta are also seeing an increase in drug-related kidnappings tied to Mexican cartels. Estimates of how many such crimes are being committed are hard to come by because many victims are connected to the cartels and unwilling to go to the police, said Rodney G. Benson, DEA agent in charge in Atlanta.

Agents said they have rarely seen such brutality in the U.S. since the "Miami Vice" years of the 1980s, when Colombian cartels had the corner on the cocaine market in Florida.

Last summer, Atlanta-area police found a Dominican man who had been beaten, bound, gagged and chained to a wall in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood in Lilburn, Ga. The 31-year-old Rhode Island resident owed $300,000 to Mexico's Gulf Cartel, Benson said. The Gulf Cartel, based in Matamoros just south of the Texas border, is one of the most ruthless of the Mexican organizations that deal drugs including cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin.

In July, Atlanta-area police shot and killed a man while he was trying to pick up a $2 million ransom owed to his cartel bosses, Benson said.

State and federal governments have sent millions of dollars to local law enforcement along the Mexican border to help fend off spillover drug crime. But investigators say Arizona and Atlanta are seeing the worst of the violence because they are major drug-distribution hubs because of their webs of interstate highways.

In fact, drug officials have dubbed Atlanta "the new Southwest border," said Jack Killorin, a former federal drug agent and director of the Atlanta region's High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force.

El Paso has seen open gunbattles and 1,700 murders in the last year. But El Paso remains one of America's safest cities, something Cuthbertson said is probably a result of the huge law enforcement presence in town, including thousands of Border Patrol and customs agents.

The cartels have established operations in at least 230 U.S. cities, according to the Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center.

And while some Americans may feel victimized by the spillover of violence, others are contributing to it. Americans provide 95 percent of the weapons used by the cartel, according to U.S. authorities. U.S. residents also are the cartels' best customers, sending an estimated $28.5 billion in drug-sale proceeds to Mexico each year.

LOCAL ANGLE

Violent home invasions pulled off by masked, armed drug dealers have spiked in the past year in Tucson, said Sgt. David Azuelo of the Tucson Police Department's Home Invasion Unit.

Of the 150 home invasions investigated by the unit in 2008, close to 70 percent were linked to drugs or illegal immigration, he said.

Two-thirds of the homes targeted belonged to people connected to drug smuggling and who owed either money or drugs, he said.

And while Tucson hasn't seen gruesome acts seen in Mexico such as beheadings, Azuelo said, gunfights or shots are common during the home invasions.

"The suspects are always armed — assault rifles, handguns, shotguns," Azuelo said. "We're seeing these guys breaking into homes four, five, six of them at a time, pointing guns at babies and children and using the threat of violence against the child or an infant to compel the homeowner or the parents to give up valuables, open their safe or give them their drugs if that's the case."

The four-detective unit, formed in April 2008 in response to the surge, has also seen an increase in violent kidnappings. Most involve illegal immigrants being held in drop houses, but some are of Mexicans with money or ties to the drug cartels, Azuelo said.

The unit doesn't always know how closely linked the suspects are to the Mexican drug cartels, but they did receive one report that members of the Zetas, the paramilitary enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel, were involved in a home invasion. No arrests were made, he said.

The Gulf and Sinaloa cartels are battling for control of the Sonora-Arizona corridor, the most valuable stretch of the U.S.-Mexican border.

Those battles contributed to one of the most violent years ever in Sonora, and specifically, Nogales. There were more than 100 premeditated killings in the border city in 2008, up from 52 in 2007 and 35 in 2006, figures from the Sonoran government show.

The bloodshed landed Nogales on the U.S. State Department's Mexico travel alert alongside notoriously dangerous border cities such as Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo.