Mexican drug war

A new drug war in Mexico is causing problems for the United States:

A new drug war is raging in Mexico, with a wave of prison killings and gang executions that has alarmed U.S. officials and sown fear from the resort town of Cancun to the Tijuana border.

The spike in violence prompted the U.S. State Department to issue a warning to travelers last week, and the U.S. ambassador to Mexico warned of a "chilling effect" on tourism and commerce along the border.

The Arizona border has been spared the worst of the violence. U.S. officials have warned travelers all along the border to avoid seedy districts in Mexican cities and to stay off the streets at night.

Mexican and U.S. officials say recent arrests of top smugglers have caused a power vacuum, leading to a battle for control of drug routes. Mexico says it has jailed 15 drug kingpins and 34,000 lesser suspects since President Vicente Fox took office four years ago.

Mexican Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha called the violence a "confrontation between cartels . . . who today are trying to occupy the spaces they occupied before, but with greater impunity."

The violence began months ago when, according to top drug prosecutor Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, the main drug-smuggling gangs in Tijuana and around the Gulf of Mexico formed an alliance to challenge the powerful Juarez Cartel.

The reputed head of the Gulf cartel, Osiel Cardenas, is serving time in the same prison as Benjamin Arellano Felix, one of the leaders of the Tijuana smuggling gang. Their nemesis is Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, a drug smuggler who escaped from prison in 2001.

The first stirrings of a new drug war came in November, when nine people, including two informers and three federal agents, were killed and their bodies dumped outside the resort town of Cancun.

Since then, drug-related killings have soared along the Mexican border with Texas and California, the main crossing points for drugs. In the first two weeks of 2005, 19 people were killed execution-style in Tijuana. Another 28 were killed in Tamaulipas state, on the Texas border, between Jan. 1 and Jan. 20.

On Dec. 31, a fellow prisoner killed Arturo Guzman Loera, Guzman's brother, as he sat in a visiting room in the La Palma prison, 50 miles west of Mexico City. The government launched a crackdown at the prison, searching cells and stationing army tanks outside the building because of fears of riots or a jailbreak.

Some prisoners were transferred to a penitentiary in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas. Soon afterward, six guards at the Matamoros prison were kidnapped as they left work, and were then blindfolded and shot.

The government sent 400 federal police and 50 agents from the Federal Investigation Agency to reinforce security at the Matamoros prison.

On Jan. 20, Arellano Felix's lawyer was found face down in a pool of blood in Toluca, 30 miles west of Mexico City, with five bullets in his chest.

U.S. officials say that the drug violence is adding to lawlessness on the border and that the crime wave is beginning to sweep up Americans as well. Twenty-one U.S. citizens have been kidnapped since mid-August around Nuevo Laredo, on the Texas border, and two have been killed, the American consul in Nuevo Laredo said this month. Nine were released and 10 still are missing.