MEXICO CITY ? So many gangsters, so little time.
Though President Felipe Calderon's five-year campaign has nailed dozens of crime bosses, many of Mexico's kingpins remain at large. Despite 50,000 dead and tens of thousands of arrests the resilient gangs seem as capable of havoc as ever.
Calderon leaves office in 11 months. The crackdown he couches as crucial to Mexico most certainly will be left unfinished. Most of the leading candidates to succeed him promise strategy changes, but their proposals remain vague.
"What worries me is that you don't have anybody getting to the heart of the matter," said analyst Alejandro Hope, until recently a senior official in Mexico's equivalent of the CIA. "What are we going to ask of the Americans? Is the intelligence interchange going to continue, an aggressive policy of extradition?"
Nearly 30,000 alleged gangsters have been arrested this year alone, though most will likely never be convicted of a crime. Security forces in three years have killed or arrested 22 of the 37 Mexico's most wanted gangsters.
They've included household names like Arturo Beltran Leyva, a leader of the Sinaloa Cartel arrested in December 2009, and Nazario Moreno, head of Michoacan state's La Familia, who security forces shot dead a year ago.
Like cockroaches
Still, kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, Mexico's most wanted gangster who walked out of a maximum security prison 11 years ago, remains on the lam. He continues to wield control, or at least some, over the Sinaloa Cartel, a loose federation of drug smugglers based in that Pacific Coast state.
Going after the most senior mobsters has been a policy of both U.S. and Mexican governments. But taking out lesser bosses - the ligaments that bind the criminal muscles - may prove far more effective, officials and analysts say.
"It's more difficult now because there are fewer capos," said analyst Hope. "Except for a few big bosses, the capture of a kingpin doesn't have much publicity impact."
Mexican federal police on Tuesday arrested Luis "Whitey" Rodriguez Olivera, 39, who U.S. officials accuse of trafficking tons of cocaine and methamphetamine into the U.S. Though unknown outside law enforcement circles, Rodriguez worked closely with the Sinaloa and Zetas gangs and had a $5 million U.S. reward on his head.
"What's needed is to clean, rebuild, heal and truly put the house in order once again," Calderon told Mexican naval officers in a speech in which he compared the hooligans to cockroaches infesting a home. "We weren't going to, nor will we ever, leave Mexican families to their fate."
The fever of bloodshed in Ciudad Juarez, the city bordering El Paso were nearly 10,000 people have been killed in four years, has begun to cool. Murders this year are off by a more than a third from last. Officials say that's because security forces have arrested key bosses of assassination teams from both the Juarez and Sinaloa gangs warring for control of the city.
Underlings, not bosses
And while many of their key lieutenants have been killed or captured, the two leaders of the Zetas - the violent gang based in the Mexican cities bordering south Texas - remain standing. U.S. officials contend the arrests of key underlings have weakened bosses Miguel Trevino, known as Z-40, and Heriberto Lazcano, El Lazca.
Officials point to Jesus Enrique Rejon, a soft-spoken alleged killer known as Mamito, and Raul Lucio Hernandez, "El Lucky" - both of whom were arrested this year and are described as linchpins directly under Trevino and Lazcano.
"When you get guys like Mamito or Lucky you have impact," a senior U.S. law enforcement official in Mexico said of the Zetas. "They're under tremendous pressure."
Banners hung on streets of border cities in December, presumably signed by Trevino, disavowed earlier messages attributed to him that challenged the U.S. and Mexican governments, claiming the Zetas are the only power that matters in the lands they control.
"We focus on our work," complained the banners, referring to the Zetas' murder, extortion and drug rackets. "The last thing we want is to have a problem with any government, either Mexican or much less American."
Yet the Zetas "work" has involved most of Mexico's many massacres this year. Investigators in April pulled nearly 200 bodies, most of them of passengers hijacked on inter-city buses, from mass graves in a town 90 miles south of the border at Brownsville. Several dozens alleged Zetas, as well as the town's entire police force, were arrested for the crimes.
Gunmen from the Sinaloa Cartel slaughtered nearly 50 alleged Zetas in the port of Veracruz in September. The Zetas responded by killing dozens of accused Sinaloa gang members in Guadalajara and elsewhere last month.
The carnage continued through Christmas weekend with gunmen, likely Zetas, killing 11 civilians on Dec. 23 near the Gulf port of Tampico. Ten more bodies were dumped in a small town south of Tampico on Christmas Eve, followed by 13 others left in a parked truck on Christmas Day.
Return of the PRI
Many Mexicans hope the next president will be able to negotiate a peaceful end to the violence. Polls suggest presidential candidate Enrique Pena Nieto will return the Institutional Revolutionary Party to power, a party that ruled Mexico most of the past century. Gangster violence was largely contained under the PRI's rule through deal making or more effective enforcement.
But analysts believe Calderon's successor will find it difficult to put the demons back in their box.
"I don't see that being possible in a macro sense," said Eric Olson, of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. "If you start from the assumption that there are a lot of differences between these trafficking gangs, it might be difficult to sit down and negotiate with them."
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dudley.althaus@chron.com
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