Mexico has welcomed a massive US operation targeting Mexican drug gangs that included the arrest of 303 people and the seizure of tonnes of narcotics over two days of raids.
The operation saw more than 3,000 federal agents and police officers deployed across 19 US states as part of the longer-running “Project Coronado,” which has netted nearly 1,200 suspects since 2005.
“This operation has dealt a significant blow to La Familia’s supply chain of illegal drugs, weapons and cash flowing between Mexico and the United States,” US Attorney General Eric Holder said.
Mexico’s attorney general’s office issued a statement welcoming the news.
“The government of Mexico recognizes and appreciates the efforts of the United States that resulted in the arrest, in US territory, of the 303 alleged members of La Familia,” it said.
US President Barack Obama and his Mexican counterpart, Felipe Calderon, have vowed to cooperate against deadly drug cartels.
But despite deploying 50,000 troops in a nationwide crackdown on drug gangs, Calderon has so far failed to stem Mexico’s spiraling drug violence, which has killed some 14,000 people since late 2006.
La Familia controls drug production and distribution in the southwestern Mexican state of Michoacan and from there ships vast quantities of cocaine and methamphetamine to the US, US officials say.
The pseudo-Christian, cult-like drug organization made a dramatic entrance in Mexico in 2006 when its members rolled five decapitated heads onto a dance floor at a nightclub.
“The sheer level and depravity of violence that this cartel has exhibited far exceeds what we unfortunately have become accustomed to from other cartels,” Holder said.
“By seizing their drugs and upending their supply chains, we have disrupted their business-as-usual state of operations,” he said.
Since Coronado began, US authorities have seized US$32 million in cash, more than 1,225kg of methamphetamine, nearly 2,000kg of cocaine, 13kg of heroin and about 7,300kg of marijuana.
Nearly 400 weapons were seized in the past two days alone.
“These are drugs that were headed for our streets, and weapons that often were headed for the streets of Mexico,” Holder said, adding that arrests were ongoing.
La Familia’s operations “reach far into the United States,” he said, calling the gang the “most violent” of the five main Mexican drug cartels.
“Today, we have all taken a step forward to disrupt a group that hides behind a shield of ideology while terrorizing communities in Mexico and peddling drugs in our neighborhoods here in the United States,” FBI chief Robert Mueller said.
Drug trafficking between the US and its southern neighbor “is not a one-country problem, and solving it will take more than a one country solution,” said Holder, who praised the Mexican government’s “heroic” effort to combat the violence.
Mexican police, meanwhile, announced they had arrested alleged La Familia hitmen Jose Roberto de la Sancha, alias “El Chivo” (the goat), and Juan Estrada, who goes by the name “Charmin.”
Mexico has complained that weapons from the US are helping fuel the brutal drug war and in a criminal complaint filed in Dallas, Texas, US federal investigators charged that La Familia operatives shipped hundreds of firearms from the US to Mexico in the past year.
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