MEXICAN DRUG CARTEL SURVIVES 'BEHEADING'

MEXICO CITY -- Despite a series of defeats that included a sting operation
across the United States last week, the feared Arellano drug cartel is
still operating with strength along the U.S. border and has been involved
in several bloody shootings, prosecutors in Mexico say.

Officials said several multiple killings in Sinaloa state were the work of
younger Arellano operatives trying to make names for themselves as the
brutal cartel begins to reorganize after the capture of its leader,
Benjamin Arellano, and the death of its chief enforcer, Ramon Arellano.

One of Mexico's drug cartels, possibly the Arellanos group, also is
suspected in the murder of a federal drug prosecutor on Thursday night. The
body of the prosecutor, Humberto del Aguila, was dumped near Mexico City's
airport with several gunshot wounds and a crushed skull.

"It's not like before, but although their structure and functioning has
been heavily damaged, the Arellanos continue operating," said Estuardo
Mario Bermudez, Mexico's special prosecutor for drug crimes. "It's still
too early to see what's going to be the stamp of the other Arellano brothers."

Bermudez's assessment coincided with that of Mexico's attorney general,
Rafael Macedo de la Concha, who told an assembly of prosecutors in Tijuana
last Tuesday that the Arellano organization remains strong despite the
arrest of 2,000 of its members in a campaign stretching through last year.

Business as usual

Macedo said that the organization's business holdings appear intact and
that investigators are still trying to identify many of the syndicate's
money-laundering operations. Authorities say the cartel is responsible for
some 300 drug-related murders and for moving billions of dollars worth of
cocaine, marijuana and other drugs through Tijuana to U.S. consumers.

"The work continues because these organizations tend to bounce back,"
Macedo said.

In the latest operation against the Arellanos, more than 400 federal, state
and local officers carried out stings against the cartel's operatives in 30
locations across the United States, mostly in southern California but also
in New York, Arizona, Minnesota and Connecticut.

Four Los Angeles cells were the primary targets. Thirty-six people were
arrested, including two alleged kingpins of the Los Angeles operations,
named as Juan Ramon Camacho and Rosario Uriarte. Officials said 38 other
people were being hunted. An estimated $360,000 worth of drugs was confiscated.

"A poison that is affecting our children has been removed from the
streets," said Los Angeles Police Chief Martin Pomeroy at a joint news
conference Thursday announcing the raids.

In March, Mexican authorities said the "legend" of the Tijuana-based cartel
had been effectively snuffed out when a special army unit tracked down and
arrested its leader, Benjamin Arellano. A few weeks earlier, the brother
considered behind the gang's violent streak, Ramon, was gunned down in a
street in Mazatlan by police who may have been working for a rival gang.

Americans still happy

U.S. officials see the victories against the Arellanos as prime evidence of
a new era in the drug war in which U.S. and Mexican agents are working
closely together and scoring unprecedented victories against drug lords.
Unlike in the past, U.S. officials say they have more trust in passing
along sensitive information to two specially trained units of Mexican
investigators.

In an interview, Bermudez offered more details on how the military was able
to corner Benjamin Arellano, who had eluded the law for a decade despite a
$2 million reward on his head. He was arrested March 9 in Puebla, living in
a plain house with apparently only one bodyguard.

He was found after army trackers followed a money courier to his house. But
Bermudez said investigators had already been zeroing in on him by finding
his children attending schools under false names, first in Monterrey and
then Puebla. One of the children was spotted because of a facial deformity,
Bermudez said.

After the "beheading" of the Arellano gang, officials said they expected a
turf war to erupt around Tijuana as other cartels vied for the Arellanos'
lucrative trafficking routes. But officials said it appears that the first
bloodshed has occurred to the south, in Sinaloa state, which many of the
top drug traffickers call home originally.

In the bloodiest mayhem, 23 men in ski masks burst into a Mother's Day
party in the village of La Ajoya and gunned down 12 people with assault
rifles. Among the victims were four police officers, a 6-year-old girl and
a 70-year-old woman.

In another attack, gunmen executed five ranchers after loading them into a
pickup truck and driving them to a remote site near the Sinaloa mountain
village of Bastantita. Eight other people were killed in another incident
that officials blame on the Arellano organization.

Revenge killings

Bermudez said the slayings were part of more local disputes by "lower
levels" of the Arellano gang against the rival gang of Ismael "Mayo"
Zambada. They had two main motivations, he said: revenge for Ramon
Arellano's death and a desire by the gunmen to rise in the ranks of the
unsettled cartel.

"These are youths fighting to be seen and taken into account," Bermudez
said. "And it could be because there are vacancies in the organization. The
chief of the hit men, the famous 'Frog,' is in jail. And there are many who
desire to be the chief of the hit men."