ACAPULCO FEARS IT'S BECOMING 'NARCAPULCO'

ACAPULCO, Mexico - Mayor Felix Salgado rides in a police car followed
by bodyguards and moves through checkpoints to get to City Hall. His
jocular manner has faded as he watches hundreds of federal agents and
army troops pour into Mexico's No. 2 resort, patrolling streets,
searching homes and investigating bomb threats.

Drug traffickers have shaken the mayor and his city, as the drug war
that began at the border heads south, bringing violence to a resort
visited by hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of
Mexicans every year. A shootout last week in downtown Acapulco left
four suspected drug gang members dead and four police officers
injured, sparking the increased security. Some fear that Acapulco,
which has been enjoying a rapid rebirth, is becoming "Narcapulco"
just as quickly.

At stake for the traffickers are the city's drug-trafficking routes,
nearby marijuana and poppy production and the booming local trade in
cocaine and other drugs.

"Enough. That's the right word. Enough of the violence in Acapulco.
Without surrendering, we want peace," Mr. Salgado said this week as
he completed two months in office.

While drug-ravaged Nuevo Laredo on the Mexico-Texas border is a
stronghold of the Gulf cartel that is now being challenged by the
Sinaloa cartel, Acapulco is just the opposite, Attorney General
Daniel Cabeza de Vaca said this week. "[Acapulco] has been a place
with strong presence ... by the Sinaloa cartel, and now there is an
attempt by an armed Gulf cartel group, the Zetas, to control the
territory," he said.

A 216-page federal court file obtained by The Dallas Morning News
shows how the Sinaloa drug cartel last year bought police protection
at three levels of government, run by three political parties, to
maintain its hold on Acapulco. Mr. Salgado said one of his priorities
as mayor was to clean up the police and get them out of the
narco-protection business. "There was a web of complicity within the
police. ... We need police that are going to serve the people," he said.

The court file also details how the Gulf cartel and its Zetas
enforcement arm have carried out attacks against Sinaloa rivals and
others, including assassinating the No. 2 state police official as he
left a popular restaurant along the tourist strip.

The federal government has included the Pacific paradise in its
Operation Safe Mexico program to attack cartel operations, along with
Nuevo Laredo, Tijuana and Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state.

Tourists still coming So far, tourists have not been scared off.
Representatives of the Hyatt, Fiesta Americana and Mayan Palace
hotels, all popular with Americans, said the violence has not
dissuaded visitors, yet.

"There are problems like anywhere else, but things are calm," said
Estela Vargas at the Fiesta Americana.

The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City has not issued a travel advisory,
although violence in Acapulco is now mentioned in its regular
consular information sheet posted on the Internet, a spokeswoman said.

But the bloody shootout on a sunny Friday, 1.5 miles from the beach,
has tourism officials worried that Acapulco's spring break season,
which is gaining in popularity and bringing in thousands of
Americans, could be jeopardized and that the millions of tourists who
come from Mexico City could start looking for more peaceful venues.

In the clash, Police Chief Genaro Garcia and his bodyguards exchanged
automatic-weapons fire with suspected Sinaloa cartel enforcers in
downtown Acapulco after a car chase. Four officers were injured, and
four alleged narcos died. Authorities evacuated City Hall and called
in the army as they braced for retaliation. Mr. Garcia resigned
suddenly. Photographs of dead and injured bodies littering the
streets brought the cartel turf war into homes in Mexico and around
the world, but the bloody confrontation was only the latest in a
steadily escalating battle for the Acapulco "plaza," as drug
traffickers call their territory. The court file obtained by The News
contains testimony from protected witnesses, relatives of alleged
traffickers, and people who worked with the Sinaloa cartel in
Acapulco, among others. It shows that the clash between the cartels
entered a deadly new phase last year. Local, state and federal police
invariably were involved.

Prosecutors' case The file represents federal prosecutors' case
against eight federal agents and two civilians for allegedly
collaborating with drug traffickers in Acapulco. According to
testimony: Agents from the Federal Investigative Agency, or AFI for
its initials in Spanish, were embedded with top operatives from the
Sinaloa cartel, traveling together in SUVs with tinted windows.
Acapulco gas station attendants who saw the men on a daily basis over
several months last year identified both the AFI agents and the
reputed traffickers from file photos. When the alleged traffickers
were confronted by local police for carrying illegal weapons and
blocking city streets with as many as 30 vehicles at a time, the
police quickly backed down, witnesses testified. The gas station
attendants described how caravans of SUVs carrying heavily armed
traffickers moved freely up and down the main tourist drag, just feet
from the beachfront sidewalk favored by tourists. One gas station
worker testified that she believed she saw cartel members chase a man
in a car late one night. After he was caught, shots rang out, and the
narcos fled. A Sinaloa cartel "lookout" testified that he was
stationed near the military base in the hotel zone, charged with
monitoring the movements of soldiers and others. The informant said
he was one of many who communicated to a central location using a
combination radio-cellphone. If the lookouts had any problem with
state or local police, it was quickly solved with a phone call.

A dozen or so members of the Nuevo Laredo-based Zetas planned to
abduct Sinaloa cartel members in Acapulco last May. Instead, at least
five of the Zetas were abducted, taken to a Sinaloa safe house in the
heart of the tourist zone and beaten. Authorities believe all five
are dead. Witnesses, including the gas station attendants and a
woman who spent 24 hours in a Sinaloa cartel safe house, place two
important cartel operatives in the city during several months last
year. They are Texas-born Edgar Valdez Villareal, known as "La
Barbie," and Arturo Beltran Leyva, known as "El Barbas."

In the first weeks of this year, a dozen people have been killed in
drug-related violence, including teenagers in "narco stores"
allegedly buying drugs when gunmen either opened fire or tossed
grenades into the stores. Javier Trujillo, a reporter for the
Acapulco weekly newspaper La Palabra, said there are an estimated 800
to 1,000 narco stores in the city of 1 million and that they are
increasingly becoming targets in the drug fight. Attacks against
stores that buy drugs from the Sinaloa cartel, for example, are
likely carried out by the Zetas trying to upset business. But
Friday's shootout adds a new dimension to the battle for Acapulco. In
the clash, Mr. Garcia, his second-in-command and several officers
chased three vehicles carrying heavily armed men. One vehicle got
away, and men from the other two confronted police at a downtown
intersection, said Mr. Trujillo, one of the first reporters on the scene.

The incident has caused confusion, Mr. Trujillo said, because there
is a widespread belief that local police have an "arrangement" with
the Sinaloa organization to leave cartel operatives alone.

"For the majority of my colleagues, the police are the heroes," Mr.
Trujillo said. "I think there will now be a series of killings
because [the narcos] are going to make them [police] pay for what they did."

ABOUT ACAPULCO Acapulco is the largest city in the Pacific Coast
state of Guerrero, with a population of about 1 million.

It is Mexico's No. 2 tourist destination, after Cancun. In 2004,
Acapulco had 5 million tourists, including 680,000 foreign tourists,
mostly Americans and Canadians.

The per-capita crime rate is fifth among Mexican cities. SOURCES:
Mexican Population Institute, Mexican Tourism Ministry, Mexico's
Citizen Institute on Security Studies