TASK FORCE TARGETS CROSS-BORDER VIOLENCE

Federal, state and local law-enforcement agents have teamed up along
the Texas-Mexico border to target rising violence spreading into the
United States from a deadly turf war between drug cartels in Nuevo Laredo.

Since January, the Border Enforcement and Security Task Force (BEST)
has arrested 31 cartel members; seized dynamite, grenades and bombs
in Laredo, Texas; and taken possession of weapons, drugs and $1
million in cash.

"The BEST task force concept incorporates personnel from existing
intelligence groups -- involved in both collection and analysis -- to
help identify and disseminate information relating to violent
smuggling organizations," said Dean Boyd, a spokesman for U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Team members include agents from ICE; U.S. Customs and Border
Protection; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives;
the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration; the FBI, the U.S. Marshals
Service; the U.S. attorney's office; and key state and local
law-enforcement agencies.

Drug-related violence on the Texas-Mexico border has surged during
the past year, the result of intense competition between the Gulf
cartel, led by Osiel Cardenas-Guillen, and the Sinaloa cartel, also
known as the "Federation," run by Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman Loera and
Arturo Beltran Leyva.

Both gangs seek to control long-established drug-smuggling corridors
into Texas. Authorities estimate that more than $14 billion in
illicit narcotics pass annually through the Laredo area.

The bombs and other paraphernalia are thought to belong to or be
destined for the drug cartels in Nuevo Laredo, where a brutal war
over control of drug and alien smuggling routes rages. More than 200
people, including the police chief, a city council member and 13
police officers, have been killed in Nuevo Laredo in the past year as
part of the drug war.

Nuevo Laredo, across the Rio Grande from Laredo, is the most active
port of entry on the Mexican border, with 6,000 trucks crossing daily
into Texas carrying 40 percent of Mexico's exports.

The war since has spread to many parts of the Southwest, led, in
part, by a rogue band of Mexican military deserters known as the
"Zetas." Trained in the United States as an elite corps of anti-drug
soldiers, the Zetas have since signed on as Gulf cartel mercenaries.

In July, the Justice Department warned law-enforcement authorities in
Arizona and California to be on the lookout for Zeta members.

Members of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, a violent Salvadoran gang that
has spread into the United States, serve in a similar capacity for
the Federation, authorities said. The gang helped the Federation take
control of drug-smuggling routes into San Diego and El Paso, Texas.

The Federation was founded in the early 1970s by smugglers based in
Sinaloa state and is considered the most powerful drug threat along the border.