Mexico/US: Border war coming? Mex Spec Forces renegades carve out own principality at border, drugs cartel

The US may soon be forced into a border war with Mexico where a drug-cartel Army has taken control of the Mexican sister city of Loredo, Texas. Nuevo Loredo is the headquarters of a renegade army drawn from Mexican Special Forces. They're called the Zetas. They've modelled themselves after the terrorist Zapatistas in Mexico's south who have for a time set up socialist communes to make demands on the Mex Fed govt. What's little reported about the Zapatista is how they have exacerbated religious differences in the small towns, because the growing numbers of Evangelicals who introduce a new work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit in the towns are hated by the local dependency-culture which shuns the Evangelicals at the instigation of anti-ecumenical Catholic activists, apparently with the complicity of local priests. The intertwinement of these forces in a common anti-Evangelcal alliance is little reported by the mainsteam press in North America. But the gains of the Zapatistas have had a great impact and provided a precedent for the Zeta drug-backed principality in the Free Trade Zone on the Mexican side.

The Zetas rule with fear, threatening police and city officials and extorting money from businesses, including restaurants, car dealerships and junkyards.

"They came and intimidated anyone who had influence or power in this city," said a businessman who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals. "They made it clear they owned the city."

They sometimes set up roadblocks to stop motorists when they suspected rivals were in the area, the businessman said.

Nuevo Laredo is the busiest trade area along the U.S.-Mexico border, with an average of 6,000 cargo trucks crossing daily into Texas carrying 40 percent of Mexico's exports.

This is what an unsigned report in CNN online tells us. It barely mentions how the Zetas have taken control of the steady flow of illegals across the same border all up and down the Rio Grande, the shallow river that serves as a natural but ineffective boundary. The Zetas control the smugglers, determining who can make what crossings with what number of souls. To maintain a human-smuggling business, or to start up a new one, the entrepreneur must petition the Zetas and pay a fee.

But the problem is not only one entity in one area, however hydra-headed in its facets as cartel, Zetas, and human-smugglers.

"In actuality, law enforcement in Mexico is all too often part of the problem rather than part of the solution," Anthony Placido, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's intelligence unit, told a congressional committee last week.

Citizens of the border states of Arizon, New Mexico, and Texas, as well as Southern California are getting quite critical of the United States Federal government. The impact of the stream of illegals is extremely costly on local economies thru-out the region. Groups, call them self-defense border patrols or vigilantes or patriotic Minutemen, have attempted to grab illegals and their importers, detain them and turn them over to the Immigration Officials who don't want to be bothered, or haven't the money to do so. The President's plan for a re-structuring of the presence of illegals in the country has suffered because of the increase of illegals backed by the new private army that Mexico has neither the wit nor the will to stop cold in its tracks. This situation grows more grievous week by week except where the unofficial border patrols are active. Calls are now arising in Congress to send regular US army troops to defend the border against the Mexican Zetas and the torpor of Mexico's government - which cannot govern this sector of its own territory.

Anti-Illegal view. Plus: Link