Word: sinaloa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...police and army officers. One entire unit of army special forces deserted in the late 1990s to form a paramilitary group called the Zetas, who worked as bloody enforcers to help the Gulf Cartel get the edge over its rivals. The Zetas' paramilitary tactics were imitated by the rival Sinaloa cartel, which trained thousands of up-and-coming thugs in weapons and communications. After years of mutual beheadings and massacres, the two cartels recently made a truce, deciding the bloodshed was bad for business, Mexican and U.S. law officials say. The wrath of both cartels is now turned...
...affluent places like San Pedro, where police salaries are double those of most local and state cops in the rest of Mexico, drug kingpins can be attractive employers. Some San Pedro officers have been spotted moonlighting as security guards at Zetas' homes, police sources say. A rival cartel, the Sinaloa mafia, has countered by recruiting members of San Pedro's SWAT unit. More than 200 police officers in Monterrey and Nuevo León have been either arrested or investigated for involvement in organized crime this year. "We never imagined the penetration of drug trafficking in our society was this vast...
...Mexican officials confirm that Mexico's major rival drug-trafficking organizations, the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels, "may be trying to negotiate a truce" and come to some agreement over control of territory, says a knowledgeable U.S. official. The two mafias could be coming to the table for two key reasons. First, "the violence has drawn too much attention and has really begun to hurt [their drug-trafficking] business," says Steven Robertson, a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). And second, Mexican President Felipe Calderon's popular but oft-questioned strategy of throwing the military at the cartels - some...
...both countries, rightly, remain as skeptical as they are optimistic. That's because Mexico's narco-terror isn't just about the Sinaloa-Gulf feud. It's also a struggle between opposing mind-sets in each cartel: the more pragmatic businessmen, who are worried that all the blood has begun to hamper the efficiency of their cocaine distribution "plazas" in Mexico and along the U.S. border; and the more violent enforcers, who tend to see trafficking competition as a zero-sum game. The latter have enjoyed the upper hand ever since Mexico's traditional cartel structures began to disintegrate about...
...move in. In their heyday in the 1980s and '90s, Mexico's biggest kingpins ran networks that employed thousands of people; now gangs like the Zetas, whose members number at most in the low hundreds, are waging vicious battles against one another--and against remnants of cartels like the Sinaloa Mafia--to gain a foothold in the trade. Officials in the U.S. and Mexico believe those turf fights are behind a surge in murders, kidnappings and criminal extortion in several towns along the U.S.-Mexico border. The border city of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, never known for drug violence until...