TENTACLES OF MEXICAN DRUG MOBS EXTEND TO SPAIN, ITALY

BARCELONA -- Mexico's powerful drug cartels have already established
footholds in European countries such as Spain and Italy, respected
Mexican journalist Luz Sosa said.

Sosa was in Spain's second city to receive the 6th Vazquez Montalban
Cultural and Political Journalism Prize for her work as a crime
reporter for a newspaper in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's murder capital.

Organized crime groups have capitalized on the government's
"ineffectiveness" and the international support they have received
to grow their operations and extend their reach beyond Mexico, she
said in an interview with Efe.

Widespread crime has turned Ciudad Juarez, located across the Rio
Grande from El Paso, Texas, into one of the most dangerous cities on
the planet, with the number of homicides soaring to more than 2,700 this year.

"You hear talk of femicide because many women have been killed, but
we could also talk about juvenicide because most of the (victims) are
young people," said Sosa, who added that "the root of the problem is
organized crime, drug trafficking and, above all, impunity."

The Mexican government is not "doing its job" because violence is
continuing to grow and President Felipe Calderon's crime-fighting
strategy "has failed."

"Calderon has militarized the cities and based (criminal
investigations) on torture and confession," with the result that
"there are people in prison convicted of hundreds of murders who
probably didn't commit all the crimes they confessed to," Sosa said.

"The president appears in the news media saying that a bunch of drug
traffickers were arrested, but the police investigations never touch
the financial structure or the highest levels" of the organizations,
she added.

Sosa said U.S. President Barack Obama "backs Calderon's new strategy
and international governments applaud his measures" as though
"nothing were happening in Mexico," even though Mexicans know very
well that a great deal is happening.

According to the reporter, the lack of political will to get to the
root of the problem is enabling "organized crime in Mexico to
grow" and even spread its tentacles to Europe, Sosa said.

Juarez first gained notoriety in the early 1990s when young women
began to disappear in the area; more than 500 women have been killed
in that border city since 1993, with the majority of the cases going unsolved.

Ciudad Juarez, with 191 homicides per 100,000 residents, was the most
violent city in the world in 2009, registering a higher murder rate
than San Pedro Sula, San Salvador, Caracas and Guatemala City, two
Mexican non-governmental organizations said in a report released
earlier this year.

Nationwide, some 28,000 people have died in drug-related violence
since Calderon took office in December 2006 and deployed tens of
thousands of federal police and army soldiers to drug-war hotspots.

Mexico's most powerful drug trafficking organizations, according to
experts, are the Sinaloa, Tijuana, Gulf, Juarez, Los Zetas, Beltran
Leyva and La Familia Michoacana cartels.

The cartels have expanded their presence into Nicaragua and other
Central American countries in recent years, using that region as a
base for distributing cocaine from Colombia to other countries, officials say.