MEXICO OFFICIALS WORRY ABOUT DRUG VIOLENCE

Cartel: Armed raid on police station raises fears of organized crime.

MATAMOROS, Mexico - The six state police officers handed over their
guns and laid down on the floor of their headquarters, obediently
following the orders of the masked assailants.

Another dozen heavily armed assailants stood outside the Tamaulipas
State Police Ministry as the late afternoon sun beat down on busy
Lauro Villar Boulevard, where people came and went from nearby stores
and traffic whizzed by only blocks from the Texas border.

As the group hurried into the getaway trucks, a frustrated officer
ran from the building and fired his gun. The group showered the
building with bullets.

Then they disappeared.

The dozen AK-47 toting men dressed in black and wearing bulletproof
vests had controlled the three-story police building within minutes
and rescued a man who was being questioned in connection with a
drug-related kidnapping.

"At first we thought it was a joke by the federal police," Officer
Ulises Rodriguez said. "But upon seeing their assault weapons we
obeyed their orders."

While authorities assured residents that Tuesday's assault was an
isolated incident, it gave a sobering peek at the strength of
organized crime in this border city, where such drug violence had
become rare since the fall of reputed kingpin Juan Garcia Abrego.

The Gulf Cartel - whose name comes from Mexico's northern Gulf coast,
where it is most active - was the strongest of the border-based
Mexican cartels until 1996, when Garcia Abrego was sentenced in
Houston to 11 life terms for drug smuggling.

The cartel was reportedly revived by drug lord Osiel Cardenas but has
stayed out of the public's eye until recently.

Police believe cartel members may be behind Tuesday's raid that freed
Juan Ramon Davila, 22. The soldier from Tijuana had told police he
was hired to kidnap businessman Ricardo Garcia Garcia and his wife
"to settle accounts," Officer Isidro Torres said.

Davila would not say who hired him to do the job, Torres said.
Authorities arrested two assailants late Wednesday and continued
searching for 20 others, including Davila and Garcia Garcia.

Mexico's state-run news agency, Notimex, quoted state police
commander Jaime Yanez as saying that the two held in custody
confessed to being members of the Gulf Cartel. Yanez did not return
repeated calls from The Associated Press seeking comment.

In April, the administration of President Vicente Fox captured the
cartel's lieutenant, Gilberto Garcia, and 19 of his subordinates,
scoring its biggest success in apprehending purported high-ranking
drug lords.

Some fear more violence is yet to come as the new administrations in
the United States and Mexico heighten the drug war and traffickers
fight for the openings left by the arrests.

Matamoros knows the wrath of drug traffickers well.

In 1984, gunmen ran down the hallways of a private hospital where a
rival drug smuggler was being treated, shooting into the rooms and
killing five people. In 1991, a drug ring organized inside a state
prison rioted, burning down the jail and killing 18.

"This is not new to us. It's part of the enormous power of the drug
traffickers, and I don't see any possibility of stopping them by the
way we are doing things," local historian Andres Cuellar said. "The
only results have been deaths, which number in the thousands each
year, in exchange for nothing. What are we winning? The drugs keep
going to the United States and people keep using them."

Cuellar believes the answer is to legalize certain drugs and launch
public service campaigns about their health dangers.

But for Torres, who was on duty but not in the building when the
group seized it, the only way is to match the drug traffickers'
force. Hundreds of federal police arrived in Matamoros this week to
back the state police. Dozens of soldiers were also sent to guard the
building.

"If they want war, bring it on," said Torres, standing outside the
police ministry surrounded by soldiers carrying assault rifles.
"We're ready to face them."