NEW ADVERSARY IN U.S. DRUG WAR: CONTRACT KILLERS FOR MEXICAN CARTELS

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO -- A cross-border drug gang born in the prison
cells of Texas has evolved into a sophisticated paramilitary killing
machine that U.S. and Mexican officials suspect is responsible for
thousands of assassinations here, including the recent ambush and
slaying of three people linked to the U.S. consulate.

The heavily tattooed Barrio Azteca gang members have long operated
across the border in El Paso, dealing drugs and stealing cars. But in
Ciudad Juarez, the organization now specializes in contract killing
for the Juarez drug cartel. According to U.S. law enforcement
officers, it may have been involved in as many as half of the 2,660
killings in the city in the past year.

Officials on both sides of the border have watched as the Aztecas
honed their ability to locate targets, stalk them and finally strike
in brazen ambushes involving multiple chase cars, coded radio
communications, coordinated blocking maneuvers and disciplined
firepower by masked gunmen in body armor. Afterward, the assassins
vanish, back to safe houses in the Juarez barrios or across the
bridge to El Paso.

"Within their business of killing, they have surveillance people,
intel people and shooters. They have a degree of specialization,"
said David Cuthbertson, special agent in charge of the FBI's El Paso
division. "They work day in and day out, with a list of people to
kill, and they get proficient at it."

The special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA) in El Paso, Joseph Arabit, said, "Our intelligence indicates
that they kill frequently for a hundred dollars."

The mayor of Juarez, Jose Reyes Ferriz, said that the city is
honeycombed with safe houses, armories and garages with stolen cars
for the assassins' use. The mayor received a death threat recently in
a note left beside a pig's head in the city.

Arabit said investigators have no evidence to suggest the Barrio
Azteca gang includes former military personnel or police. It is,
however, working for the Juarez cartel, which includes La Linea, an
enforcement element composed in part of former Juarez police
officers, according to Mexican officials.

"There has to be some form of training going on," said an anti-gang
detective with the El Paso sheriff's department, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity because of the nature of his work. "I don't
know who, and I don't know where. But how else would you explain how
they operate?"

On March 13, Lesley Enriquez Redelfs, 35, who worked for the U.S.
Consulate in Juarez, and her husband, Arthur Redelfs, 34, a deputy in
the El Paso sheriff's department and a detention officer at the
county jail, were returning home to El Paso from a children's party
sponsored by the U.S. consul in Juarez. As their white sport-utility
vehicle neared the international bridge that sunny Saturday
afternoon, they were attacked by gunmen in at least two chase cars.
When police arrived, they found the couple dead in their vehicle and
their infant daughter wailing in her car seat. The intersection was
littered with casings from AK-47 assault rifles and 9mm guns.

Ten minutes before the Redelfs were killed, Jorge Alberto Ceniceros
Salcido, 37, a supervisor at a Juarez assembly plant whose wife,
Hilda Antillon Jimenez, also works for the U.S. Consulate, was
attacked and slain in similar style. He had just left the same party
and was also driving a white SUV, with his children in the car.

According to intelligence gathered in Juarez and El Paso, U.S.
investigators were quick to suspect the Barrio Azteca gang in
connection with what President Obama has called the "brutal murders."
What was unclear, they said, was the motive. U.S. diplomats and
agents have declined to describe the killings as a targeted
confrontation with the U.S. government, which had been pushing to
place U.S. drug intelligence officers in a Juarez police headquarters
to more quickly pass along leads.

Five days after the consulate killings, the DEA unleashed in El Paso
a multiagency "gang sweep" called Operation Knockdown to gather
intelligence from Barrio Azteca members. Over four days, officers
questioned 363 people, including about 200 gang members or their
associates, and made 26 felony arrests.

Soon after, the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning that
the Barrio Azteca gang had given "a green light" to the retaliatory
killing of U.S. law enforcement officers.

Authorities were especially interested in Eduardo Ravelo, a captain
of the Barrio Azteca enterprise allegedly responsible for operations
in Juarez. In October, the FBI had placed Ravelo and his mug shot on
its 10-most-wanted list, though they warned that Ravelo may have had
plastic surgery and altered his fingerprints. Ravelo is still at large.

DEA agents say that 27 Barrio Azteca members were detained as they
tried to cross from El Paso to Juarez during Operation Knockdown,
evidence of gang members' fluid movement between the two countries.

This week, authorities announced that Mexican soldiers, using
information from the FBI and other sources, had arrested Ricardo
Valles de la Rosa, an Azteca sergeant, in Juarez.

Valles's confession was obtained at a military base where he was
allegedly beaten, according to his attorney, a public defender. He
has not been charged in the consulate killings, though he is charged
with killing rival gang members, including members of an enterprise
known as the Artistic Assassins, or "Double A's," who operate as
contract killers for the Sinaloa cartel. Sinaloa is vying for control
of billion dollar drug-trafficking routes through the Juarez-El Paso corridor.

In his statements, Valles said he was told through a chain of letters
and phone calls from Barrio Azteca leaders in the El Paso county jail
and their associates that gang leaders wanted Redelfs, the El Paso
sheriff's deputy, killed because of his treatment of Azteca members
in jail and his alleged threats against them.

Valles said he tracked down Redelfs at the children's party and then
handed off the hit to others. He said the killing of the factory
supervisor was a mistake because he was driving a white SUV similar
to Redelfs's.

El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles said in a statement that Valles
was a career criminal and denied that Redelfs had mistreated inmates.
Wiles stressed that the motives remain unknown.

Fred Burton, a former State Department special agent and now a
security adviser for the Texas government, said he is suspicious of
attempts to underplay the killings. "These were targeted hits done by
sophisticated operators," he said. "But it is not politically
expedient for either side to say that criminal organizations were
behind this. That is a nightmare scenario for them."

Mexican officials say that Valles, 45, was born in Juarez but grew up
in El Paso, where he lived for 30 years. Nicknamed "Chino," he was a
member of the Los Fatherless street gang in El Paso. In 1995, he was
convicted of distributing drugs and spent 12 years in eight U.S.
federal prisons, where he met an Azteca gang leader. After his
release, he was deported to Mexico and began working with the Aztecas
in Juarez.

The theory that the carnage in Juarez is being stoked by rival gangs
of contract killers -- the Barrio Aztecas and the Artistic Assassins
- -- each working for rival drug cartels makes sense to many observers.

The gangs are a binational phenomenon whose members exploit the
mistrust between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement, said Howard
Campbell, a professor at the University of Texas in El Paso and an
expert on the drug trade.

"They use the border to their advantage," Campbell said.