October 24, 2009
More than 300 held in largest sting
Oklahoma City : In the largest single strike at Mexican drug operations in the US, authorities arrested more than 300 people in a sting that demonstrates an upstart cartel's vast reach north of the border.
The tentacles of "La Familia" extend coast to coast and deep into America's heartland, with arrests announced on Thursday in 38 cities from Boston to Seattle and from St Paul, Minnesota, to Raleigh, North Carolina.
Drug deals went down in Oklahoma parking lots, suppliers were advised to weld drugs into tyre rims for transport, and in the Dallas and Seattle areas, dozens of children were removed from houses where authorities found drugs, guns or cash derived from drug sales.
Perhaps more than any other cartel, La Familia projects a Robin Hood image. The Drug Enforcement Administration said the group is "philosophically opposed to the sale of methamphetamine to Mexicans, and instead supports its export to the US for consumption by Americans."
Mexican police say the gang uses religion and family morals to recruit. The gang has hung banners in towns saying they do not tolerate drug use, or attacks on women or children.
One of the gang's alleged recruiters, detained last spring, ran drug rehabilitation centres, helping addicts to recover and then forcing them to work for the drug gang or be killed, according to Mexico Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna.
La Familia is rarely mentioned in the same breath as the handful of other Mexican gangs that control the flow of drugs into the US fuelled by Colombian cocaine suppliers. The Sinaloa, Juarez, Gulf and Tijuana cartels have roots that go back many years, even decades.
But in its short history, La Familia is believed to have emerged as the biggest supplier of methamphetamine to the US and, increasingly, a peddler of cocaine, marijuana and other drugs.
Mode of operation
Complaints that were unsealed across the country portray an organisation that spread deep into Middle America, down to small-time sales.
In Oklahoma, authorities seized about nine kilograms of methamphetmaine, 0.9 kilograms of cocaine, six weapons and several thousand dollars.
In North Carolina, targeted cells operated from the Raleigh area to the eastern cities of Rocky Mount and Greenville. In Nashville, after more than a year of surveillance, agents converged on a home when two people arrived in a Toyota Camry from Atlanta August 14, according to a complaint. A search of the vehicle discovered hidden compartments that "contained nine similarly wrapped packages, each of which were the size of a kilogram of cocaine." One package tested positive for cocaine.
Inside the home, agents found drug ledgers, a money counter and a loaded pistol. At another home, they found about 22.7 kilograms) of marijuana, several loaded handguns and two bulletproof vests.
Texas Child Protective Services removed 20 children from houses in the Dallas area when authorities executed 44 search warrants, said James Capra, the DEA's special agent in charge in Dallas. All the homes where children were found had drugs, guns or cash derived from drug sales.
The sting reached into small towns hundreds of miles from Mexico.
Nine arrests were made in Monroe, Washington, with a population of about 16,000.
In the Inland Empire, a cluster of east Los Angeles suburbs where 25 people were arrested and 71 kilograms of methamphtamine seized, most suspects are illegal immigrants from Mexico who came to the US to work for La Familia, said Stephen Azzam, DEA assistant special agent in charge in Riverside, California.
Grim claim
Mexican city is ‘murder capital of the world'
A Mexican city gripped by a war between drug cartels has laid claim to the title "murder capital of the world".
The number of killings in Ciudad Juarez so far this year has passed 2,000. The city of 1.5 million people just across the border from El Paso, Texas, had 1,600 murders last year, but in 2009 that total was exceeded by late summer. Latest figures from the attorney general's office in the Chihuahua state showed that there were 195 this month alone. The annual murder rate has reached 133 per 100,000 inhabitants, surpassing Caracas, Venezuela.
— The Telegraph Group Ltd, London 2009
