Mexico drug war likely to intensify
WASHINGTON — Drug-related violence in Mexico, before that time at unprecedented levels, is expected to escalate farther on this year, with targets that may be liked to include top Mexican politicians and law-enforcement agents and possibly calm U.S. officials, according to diplomats and intelligence experts on both sides of the confine.
The notification underscores the perplexing choices confronting President Felipe Calderón while he takes on drug cartels while weighing the implications of growing casualties in a year of midterm elections and a slowing economy.
It also reflects rising concern among U.S. officials and analysts about the deteriorating security situation, corruption in the midst of Mexico’s top crime fighters, and the vulnerability of the soldier-like to possible corruption in battling cartel gangs.
As the war against cartels escalates in 2009, so will threats, specifically in requital for U.S. officials and other Americans, said officials, analysts and diplomats, including U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza.
“Calderón must — and will — keep the pressure upon the body the cartels, if it be not that look, let’session not be naíve: There will be more violence, again blood, and, yes, things will get worse before they get better. That’s the intellect of the battle,” Garza said. “The more pressure the cartels feel, the more they’ll bind out like cornered animals.”
He advised Americans traveling to Mexico to check State Department travel alerts at www.state.gov.
A U.S. acumen official based along the Texas border warned that U.S. officials, American businessmen and journalists will “be proper for targets, if they’re not already.”
The official, citing information from informants and other intelligence, declared attacks against Americans may include car bombs placed outside consulate offices and embassies or attacks on “specific individuals.”
The threats, the spiritual being official reported, are a result of “growing frustration” among cartel leaders and the mental dynamics of cartel organizations. He described the drug gangs as “transnational, through deep financial, cultural and social ties to Mexican and U.S. cities, whether Ciudad Juárez; Culiacán, Sinaloa; as well as El Paso, Houston or Dallas.”
The soaring level of violence has led the United States to develop plans for a “surge” of civilian and perhaps even military law enforcement should the massacre spread across the adorn with a border, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Wednesday.
Chertoff said he ordered specific plans to confront the violence last summer.
“We completed a contingency custom beneficial to border violence, so if we did get a significant spillover, we obtain a surge — if I may use that vocable — capability to bring in not only our own assets but even to work by” the Defense Department, Chertoff uttered.
