TOP MEXICAN DRUGS LORD KILLED IN FIERCE GUNBATTLE WITH MILITARY

'Storm Tony', High-Profile Leader of the Gulf Cartel, and Four of His
Gunmen Die in Attacks by Navy Special Forces and Helicopters

Mexican authorities have killed one of the country's most wanted drug
lords following hours of ferocious gun battles close to the US border.
Antonio Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen, otherwise known as Tony Tormenta or
Storm Tony, was the highest-profile leader of the Gulf cartel, one of
the country's most important trafficking organisations.

As news of his demise spread across the northeastern state of
Tamaulipas yesterday, so did fear of a backlash. A reporter in the
border city of Reynosa said gunmen immediately took over the main road
along the Mexican side of the Rio Bravo. "It is going to be a bloody
weekend," she wrote.

The apprehension befitted a man who, during his lifetime, earned a
reputation for extreme violence and whose arrest was so desired by
the US authorities that they had offered a $5m (UKP3m) reward for
information leading to the detention. The Mexican authorities had
promised 30m pesos (about UKP1.5m).

On Friday, President Felipe Calderon announced the capo's death on his
Twitter account. Later that evening, presidential security spokesman
Alejandro Poire described it as "another meaningful step toward the
dismantling of criminal groups that do so much damage to our country".

The day's shooting that culminated in Tormenta's death also claimed
the lives of at least four of his gunmen, three marines and a soldier.
A local reporter called Carlos Guajardo was caught in the crossfire
and died.

The gun battles began on Friday morning in an upscale area of the city
of Matamoros, just across the frontier from Brownsville, Texas, and
lasted until late afternoon. Terrified locals hid in their homes and
offices waiting for things to calm down, some furiously tweeting
warnings to stay away from the area. A final battle started around
3.30pm after the authorities tracked the capo down to one of his many
safe houses, according to a navy statement. It lasted for over two
hours and involved navy special forces, three helicopters, 17 vehicles
and 660 support troops.

In one YouTube video, SUVs filled with gunmen and pickup trucks filled
with marines were seen racing around the streets. While not much
actual fighting was visible, the intensity of the conflict was clear
from the background noise from continuous automatic gunfire and
explosions, presumably from grenades.

Tormenta, 48, began his drug trafficking career alongside his brother
Osiel Cardenas Guillen, starting out as a low-level dealer working out
of a mechanics workshop in Matamoros. Reputedly more daring, ruthless
and irrepressibly ambitious, Osiel became the undisputed leader of the
Gulf cartel at the end of the 1990s but his reign was cut short by
arrest in 2003.

This left Tormenta in charge, with Osiel's right-hand man Eduardo
Costilla, otherwise known as El Coss. Relations between the two
leaders were reputedly tense at times, but they were united by their
shared rivalry with the leaders of the cartel's paramilitary wing,
known as the Zetas. Osiel had formed the Zetas from a group of
military deserters.

Burgeoning tension between the cartel's old guard and the increasingly
autonomous Zetas exploded into open warfare in early 2010. Since then
cities, towns and rural roads have been the regular scenes of roaming
gun battles between commandos of Gulf cartel gunmen, Zeta gunmen and
convoys of soldiers or navy special forces.

At first the commandos even indulged in public identification,
reputedly aimed more at avoiding friendly fire than self-promotion.
There were numerous sightings of convoys of cars with CDG stencilled
on their doors, standing for Cartel del Golfo. Gunmen wore
bullet-proof jackets with CDG emblazoned across their chests. More
recently uniforms appear to have become more subtle, such as all
members of a commando wearing the same coloured tennis shoes.

The violence has been so intense residents now wryly refer to their
state as Taca..taca..taca..maulipas.

The battle for Tamaulipas is the most warlike of all the fronts in the
country's drug wars that have killed around 30,000 since Calderon
launched a major anti-cartel offensive four years ago in an attempt to
rein in the less intense turf battles of the time.

Rather than intimidate the traffickers into toning things down, the
military-led crackdown helped to fuel the inter-cartel conflict which
has spiralled out of control in several parts of the country.

Some, including the US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, now
describe the cartels as a kind of narco-insurgency that is directly
challenging the authority of the state. Government strategists argue
that, on the contrary, the increased violence is a sign that the
cartels are entering a period of self-destruction as the offensive
closes in on their leaders.

Over the past year four important kingpins have fallen, three of them
since July. The first was Arturo Beltran Leyva, leader of the Beltran
Leyva cartel, killed after another long gun battle that began when a
navy operation tracked him down to a luxury apartment complex in the
city of Cuernavaca, an hour's drive from the capital, on 16 December
2009.

His death unleashed a particularly bloody internal power struggle
marked by savage executions and torture concentrated in Cuernavaca and
in and around the Pacific resort city of Acapulco.

Two of the three major figures in that conflict were arrested in
August and September this year.

Edgar Valdez Villarreal, a blue-eyed Texan-born trafficker nicknamed
La Barbie, was the first to fall, taken in by federal police. One of
his main rivals, Sergio Villarreal Barragan, otherwise known as La
Grande, was detained two weeks later by marines.

Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel was killed in July when the army stormed a
safe house where he was having a massage in the central city of
Guadalajara. His death was by far the biggest blow yet to the Sinaloa
cartel, which is headed by the country's most infamous trafficker,
Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

Succession Battle Is Bound to Bring Another Wave of
Violence

The Mexican government can claim the death of Antonio Cardenas Guillen
as a major victory - especially as it is the latest in a series of
important scalps claimed by the armed forces since that of cartel
leader Arturo Beltran Leyva last Christmas.

But the deaths of Mexico's drugs cartel leaders rapidly produce a
battle for succession. And there is the further question of why
Antonio was famous and powerful in the first place - his brother.
Antonio was very much the lieutenant to Osiel Cardenas Guillen, who is
arguably the most important criminal boss on the planet, and certainly
the most violently innovative.

Osiel was jailed earlier this year in Houston after extradition and a
trial held entirely in secret, and is believed to be still running -
or trying to run - the Gulf cartel from prison in Texas. Osiel was
founder and commander of the Zetas paramilitary force which operated
as the Gulf cartel's military wing before taking over the organisation
and becoming a cartel in its own right, forging a whole new insurgent
style of armed criminal syndicate.

These drug shock troops are mainly recruited from special service
units within the Mexican military and are estimated by US intelligence
to number about 4,000.

The Zetas, of which Antonio was nominal head after his brother was
jailed, hail from the family's home state of Tamaulipas, to which they
are fiercely loyal. And insofar as the violence tearing Mexico apart
remains a battle between cartels - which only partially accounts for
28,000 deaths since 2006 - that battle is one between the Zetas/Gulf
cartel against the Sinaloa cartel run by Joaquin Guzman, known as El
Chapo, or Shorty.

Fighting between the two sides rages across Mexico, and has begun to
engulf even the country's most modern and richest city of Monterrey,
state capital of Nuevo Leon - the commercial and industrial engine of
the border country.

But it is the Gulf cartel and Zetas who are emerging as the syndicate
with closest international connections to Europe, and control of the
Central American corridors to the cocaine-producing nations of South
America. Law enforcement agencies in Texas have uncovered Zeta
influence in the legal economy, and southbound gun-running from
Houston, a counter-flow to the drugs smuggled north.

Antonio's death has the potential to further intensify violence along
the eastern stretch of Mexico's border with the US, as a result of
internecine fighting within the Gulf cartel. Some of the worst
violence in Tamaupilas this year has been between the Zetas and an old
guard within the cartel brought to heel by Osiel and his brother - who
themselves came to power by murdering associates they saw as rivals.