BORDER VIOLENCE PUSHES NORTH

Drug Cartels Extend Their Reach into Texas and Arizona. Citizens and
Immigrants Alike Are Victimized.

Violent crime along the U.S.-Mexico border, which has long plagued
the scrubby, often desolate stretch, is increasingly spilling
northward into the cities of the American Southwest.

In Phoenix, deputies are working the unsolved case of 13 border
crossers who were kidnapped and executed in the desert. In Dallas,
nearly two dozen high school students have died in the last two years
from overdoses of a $2-a-hit Mexican fad drug called "cheese heroin."

The crime surge, most acute in Texas and Arizona, is fueled by a
gritty drug war in Mexico that includes hostages being held in stash
houses, daylight gun battles claiming innocent lives, and teenage hit
men for the Mexican cartels. Shipments of narcotics and vans carrying
illegal workers on U.S. highways are being hijacked by rival cartels
fighting over the lucrative smuggling routes. Fires are being set in
national forests to divert police.

In Laredo, Texas, a teenager who had been driving around the United
States in a $70,000 luxury sedan confessed to becoming a Mexican
cartel hitman when he was just 13. In Nogales, Ariz., an 82-year-old
man was caught with 79 kilograms of cocaine in his Chevrolet Impala.
The youth was sentenced to 40 years in prison in one slaying case and
is awaiting trial in another; the old man received 10 years.

In Southern California, Border Patrol agents routinely encounter
smugglers driving immigrant-laden cars who try to escape by driving
the wrong way on busy freeways. And stash houses packed with dozens
of illegal immigrants have been discovered in Los Angeles.

But a huge U.S. law enforcement buildup along the border that started
a decade ago has helped stabilize border-related crime rates on the
California side; a recent wave of kidnappings in Tijuana has been
largely contained south of the border.

The sprawling border has been crisscrossed for years by the poor
seeking work and by drug dealers in the hunt for U.S. dollars. For
decades neither the United States nor Mexico has managed to halt the
immigrants and narcotics pushing north. But with the Mexican
government's newly pledged war on the cartels, and an explosion of
violence among rival networks, a new crime dynamic is emerging: The
violence that has hit Mexican border towns is spreading deeper into
the United States.

U.S. officials are promising more Border Patrol and federal firearms
officers, more fences and more surveillance towers along the desert
stretches where the two nations meet.

But law enforcement officials are wary of how this new burst in
violence will play out, especially because the enemy is better armed
and more sophisticated than ever. Among their concerns are budget
cutbacks in some agencies -- including a hiring freeze in the Drug
Enforcement Administration -- and community opposition to the
surveillance towers.

Johnny Sutton, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, said
he would need at least 20,000 new Border Patrol agents in El Paso
alone to hold back the tide. But that is the total number of agents
that Washington hopes to have along the whole border by the end of 2009.

In six years, Sutton's office has tried 33,000 defendants, about 90%
of them on drug and immigration violations. "We're body-slamming them
the best we can," he said.

In Phoenix, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said there were 10,000
inmates in his jail and overflow tents; 2,000 of them are "criminal
aliens" from the border, he said. His deputies are investigating the
deaths of 13 people executed in the desert.

Jennifer Allen, director of Border Action Network, a Tucson nonprofit
that supports immigrants' rights, said Washington and Mexico City
need fresh approaches. "The smugglers are no longer mom-and-pop
organizations. Now it's an industry," she said. "So the violence
increases. That's incredibly predictable."

Raul Benitez, an international relations professor in Mexico City who
also taught at American University in Washington, blames both
countries for the crime wave. As long as Americans crave drugs and
the cartels want money, Benitez said, "security in both directions is
jeopardized."

Nestor Rodriguez, a University of Houston sociologist, said people on
both sides of the Rio Grande viewed themselves as one community.

"People say, 'The river doesn't divide us,; it unites us,' " he said.
"When you're at ground zero at the border, you see yourselves as one
community -- for good or bad."

Rodriguez knows. His first cousin, Juan Garza, born in the United
States but trained by criminals in Mexico, ran his own
murder-and-drug enterprise out of Brownsville, Texas. He was executed
in 2001 by the United States.

"Of course there is a spillover of violence into this country," Rodriguez said.

"It's pouring across our border, and anybody can get caught up in it."

The small town of Sierra Vista, Ariz., learned firsthand of the
rising violence in 2004, when police chased a pickup carrying 24
illegal immigrants on the border town's main drag, Buffalo Soldier
Trail. Speeds reached up to 100 mph. The truck went airborne, hit
half a dozen cars and killed a recently married elderly couple
waiting at a stoplight.

"It was just the worst kind of tragedy," said Cochise County Atty. Ed
Rheinheimer. "The coyotes [smugglers] are just more willing to either
shoot at the police, fight with the police, or to try to flee."

Even more brazen have been several kidnappings of 50 to 100
immigrants by rival cartels, which hide them in stash houses in and
around Phoenix until families pay a ransom. One captive's face was
burned with a cigarette, another person nearly suffocated in a
plastic bag. A woman was raped. Fingers have been sliced off and sent
back to families with demands for money.

The border-crime issue became so urgent in Arizona that top officials
met in Tucson in June with their counterparts from Sonora, Mexico.
Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano agreed to help train Sonoran police to
track wire payments to smugglers. Sonoran Gov. Eduardo Bours agreed
to improve police communications with U.S. authorities.

In the first nine months of the fiscal year, Tucson officials have
surpassed last year's record of 4,559 arrests over migrant smuggling.

And so far this year, in tiny Douglas, Ariz., the Mexican consulate
has identified the bodies of five Mexican nationals who died under
suspicious circumstances while crossing into the United States, and
he is awaiting the identification of another five he presumes were
Mexicans as well. There were only seven such deaths last year.

Statewide the picture is equally bleak. Homicides of illegal crossers
is up 21% over last year.

Another visible effect of the cross-border crime wave is the flood of
drugs into the country.

Anthony J. Coulson, assistant special agent in charge of the DEA in
Arizona, said records indicated that cocaine and heroin seizures may
end up twice as high as last year. Marijuana seizures are increasing
25%. Nine months into the current fiscal year, he said, his team had
already seized more pot than all of last year. "And 2006 was a record
year," he said.

In the Tucson sector alone there has been a 71% increase in marijuana
seizures over the last fiscal year, with the Border Patrol reporting
648,000 pounds confiscated since October.

In the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale, Arpaio said, a cartel operative
was openly selling heroin to high school students. "He was getting
150 calls a day on his cellphone," the sheriff said.

The DEA believes 80% of the methamphetamine in the United States is
coming from labs in Mexico, which were set up after police raids shut
down many of the labs in the U.S.

In Dallas, police are dealing with the deaths of 21 high school
students from "cheese heroin," a mixture of Mexican heroin and
over-the-counter cold medicine. A hit sells for $2 to $5. Several
arrests of dealers have been made; now officials are bracing for the
coming school season.

"It's a small packet," said Lt. Tom Moorman of the Dallas Police
Department. "They can carry it in a pack of gum. Very, very small."

Antonio Oscar "Tony" Garza Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, has
issued repeated notes to the Mexican government. Last year he sent an
advisory to American tourists that "drug cartels, aided by corrupt
officials [in Mexico], reign unchecked in many towns along our common border."

A House subcommittee on domestic security has investigated the
"triple threat" of drug smuggling, illegal border crossings and
rising violence, and it found that "very little" passes the border
without the cartels' knowledge.

The panel found that cartels send smugglers into the United States
fully armored with equipment -- much of it imported to Mexico from
the United States -- including high-powered binoculars and encrypted
radios, bazookas, military-style grenades, assault rifles and
silencers, sniper scopes and bulletproof vests. Some wear fake police
uniforms to confuse authorities as well as Mexican bandits who might
ambush them.

The panel's report cited numerous recent crimes. In McAllen, Texas,
"two smuggled women from Central America were found on the side of a
road badly beaten and without clothing. Their captors intimidated the
victims by shooting weapons into the walls and ceiling as they were
raped." In Laredo, Texas, Webb County sheriff's deputies came upon 56
illegal immigrants locked in a refrigerator trailer; 11 were women,
two children. After six hours, "many were near death by the time they
were rescued."

It was in Laredo last summer where police encountered Rosalio Reta,
then 17, a Houston native who fell under the spell of the Gulf Cartel
across the river. Known as Bart, the youth was 13 when he started
visiting Mexico.

"They walk across the bridge," said Laredo Det. Robert Garcia, who
investigated a murder that involved Reta. "They see all the
nightclubs with no age limit. They see the guys their age spending
money, throwing money around, paying for everything. They like the
lure, the women, the fancy cars. They start moving weapons and guns
and pretty soon they start asking for money for hits."

Garcia said Reta told him how he helped break a cartel leader out of
a Mexican prison. From there he moved up to become a hit man and
returned to Texas behind the wheel of a $70,000 Mercedes Benz, Garcia said.

Then last year a Laredo man, Noe Flores, was killed in front of his
home, shot by mistake because the cartel thought Flores was his half-brother.

In a written statement to police, Reta admitted to driving the car
with two accomplices. One of them, identified by Reta as Gabriel
Cardona, jumped out and "shot two rounds at first," he wrote.

"That was when he fell to the floor and then shot em 13 more rounds
and that was when Jesus Gonzales [the other alleged accomplice]
started shooting from the rear windows.

"Then we left the sene of the crime and we left the car like 3 blocks
away. The work was done for the Gulf Cartel of Mexico."

At trial last month, a witness said Reta and the accomplices were
paid a total of $15,000 for the hit. But the case ended abruptly when
Reta pleaded guilty in return for a 40-year sentence; he had faced 99 years.

Webb County Judge Joe Lopez told the youth: "It's a young life. Come
to terms with your God and your faith, or whatever it may be."

Cardona also pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 80 years. Gonzales
was arrested but made bail, and he disappeared back into Mexico.

Reta awaits trial in a second case, involving the ambush slaying in
December 2005 of Moises Garcia, shot in his car in a Laredo
restaurant parking lot as his pregnant wife and family watched helplessly.