MEXICO CITY - Three Mexican cartels have joined forces to destroy a gang of hit men that has grown into a feared drug-trafficking outfit with reach into Central America, Mexican and U.S. officials said Monday. The shift in allegiances is fueling bloody battles along the Texas border.
Intelligence reports indicate the Gulf cartel has recruited its former rival, La Familia, to crush the Zetas gang in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas, said Ramon Pequeno, the head of the anti-narcotics division of Mexico's federal police.
An official with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said the Sinaloa cartel, Mexico's most powerful drug-trafficking organization, has also joined the alliance against the Zetas, whose rise to power has come to threaten all three of the cartels.
"It's an issue of a common enemy," said Will Glaspy, head of the DEA's office in the border town of McAllen, Texas.
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The pact followed a break between the Gulf cartel and the Zetas, which started as a group of hit men for the Gulf but quickly began rivaling its creator. Tamaulipas has long been the stronghold of the Gulf cartel, but the Zetas have begun taking over.
It was the first official confirmation of the pact, which has been rumored since banners appeared throughout the region earlier this year announcing the campaign by "the cartels of Mexico united against the Zetas."
One banner even urged President Felipe Calderón to withdraw the army and let the new alliance exterminate the Zetas. Videos and e-mails were sent around warning families to stay home, saying the conflict would get worse.
The campaign to wipe out the Zetas has raised fears of open warfare in Tamaulipas, with armed men throwing up roadblocks around army garrisons and ambushing military patrols - brazen tactics that experts say are meant to get soldiers out of the way of the turf war.
Calderón has deployed more than 40,000 soldiers to the border and other regions to combat drug-trafficking groups, an effort backed by U.S. intelligence work and aid.
In an indication that Washington expects the battles along the border to continue, the State Department extended until May 12 the authorized departure of relatives of U.S. government employees from consulates in Nuevo Laredo and five other northern cities, including Nogales, Sonora.
The decision came two days after a grenade attack against the U.S. consulate in Nuevo Laredo, a city across the border from Laredo, Texas. Nobody was hurt.
The Zetas - who gained a reputation for brutality by starting the practice of beheading rivals - have since evolved into a drug-trafficking force of their own and have branched out into extortion, migrant smuggling and kidnapping, said George Grayson, a professor at the College of William & Mary in Virginia and author of "Mexico: Narco Violence and a Failed State?"
