CBS5

SACATON, Ariz. (AP) ― The bus that rolled over on a busy interstate outside Phoenix, killing six people and leaving 16 others injured early Friday, was operating illegally, federal transportation officials said.

The operator of the bus — Van Nuys, Calif.-based Tierra Santa Inc. — was told in April and December not “to engage in the interstate transportation of passengers by commercial motor vehicle,” a Department of Transportation statement said.

The first notice, sent via certified mail, came just days after the company submitted a passenger carrier application to the department’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. The application was denied on Dec. 14. The department’s statement didn’t give a reason.

The bus in Friday’s accident was traveling from the central Mexican state of Zacatecas to Los Angeles.

It entered the United States at El Paso, Texas, and was traveling westbound on Interstate 10 with 22 passengers when it hit a pickup, veered onto the left shoulder of the road, then overcorrected in the opposite direction and rolled once before landing on its wheels. The roof of the bus was crushed and all of its windows were knocked out.

The crash occurred about 5:30 a.m. MST on the Gila River Indian Reservation near the community of Sacaton, some 25 miles south of downtown Phoenix. Two men and four women were thrown about 10 yards from the bus and killed.

Police said the rollover triggered a second accident when another pickup slowed and was hit by a sedan. One person from the car was taken to a hospital.

Arizona Department of Public Safety officials said their investigation will include whether the driver was fatigued, as well as the maintenance history of the bus.

Federal investigators were reviewing Tierra Santa’s safety operations at the company’s Van Nuys office.

A man who answered the phone Friday at Tierra Santa declined to identify himself, and said in Spanish that the company is meeting with authorities about the crash and he couldn’t comment. He declined to answer when asked about whether the company was operating illegally.

The company never had federal operating authority, Department of Transportation spokesman Duane DeBruyne said.

A random federal inspection of one of the company’s buses in Texas in August found that the vehicle was operating illegally and wasn’t allowed to continue its trip.

The inspection also found that the bus had multiple safety issues, including nonexistent or defective emergency exits, and that the driver didn’t have proper identification and didn’t speak English.

It wasn’t immediately known if that Tierra Santa bus was the same one involved in Friday’s accident.

Another random inspection conducted by state officials in Arizona July found that a driver didn’t speak English, and a state inspection in New Mexico in September found there was a lighting problem; the drivers were given citations, but neither inspection found that the buses were operating illegally, according to department records.

It’s unclear why the company was able to continue operating after the inspections.

“It’s so early in the investigation, there’s so many things we don’t know,” DeBruyne said.

Nine patients, including the driver, were in critical condition at Phoenix-area hospitals, some with injuries ranging from broken spines and pelvises to head injuries, according to the hospitals.

An 11-year-old boy was in guarded condition, and four people were in good condition. The condition of two more people at a local hospital was not released.

Alex Porras said his sister, Jasmine Porras, was coming back from a two-week vacation in Mexico. The 25-year-old had just graduated from Arizona State University with a nursing degree and was hoping to start working soon, he said. She was critically injured but her condition was upgraded to serious Friday evening.

“I was shocked when I got the call,” a red-eyed Porras told The Associated Press at Maricopa Medical Center. “We’re really worried.”

Both westbound lanes of I-10 were closed for several hours near the scene of the wreck, which quickly became a mass of police and rescue personnel as ambulances arrived.

Medics set up a triage area in the middle of the interstate, and medical helicopters landed on the road to airlift the most critically injured to area hospitals.

You know it’s bad when the Leftist open borders AP finally feels the need to even mention it.

SEQUOIA NATIONAL FOREST, Calif. (AP) — Not far from Yosemite’s waterfalls and in the middle of California’s redwood forests, Mexican drug gangs are quietly commandeering U.S. public land to grow millions of marijuana plants and using smuggled immigrants to cultivate them.

Pot has been grown on public lands for decades, but Mexican traffickers have taken it to a whole new level: using armed guards and trip wires to safeguard sprawling plots that in some cases contain tens of thousands of plants offering a potential yield of more than 30 tons of pot a year.

“Just like the Mexicans took over the methamphetamine trade, they’ve gone to mega, monster gardens,” said Brent Wood, a supervisor for the California Department of Justice’s Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement. He said Mexican traffickers have “supersized” the marijuana trade.

Interviews conducted by The Associated Press with law enforcement officials across the country showed that Mexican gangs are largely responsible for a spike in large-scale marijuana farms over the last several years.

Local, state and federal agents found about a million more pot plants each year between 2004 and 2008, and authorities say an estimated 75 percent to 90 percent of the new marijuana farms can be linked to Mexican gangs.

In 2008 alone, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, police across the country confiscated or destroyed 7.6 million plants from about 20,000 outdoor plots.

Growing marijuana in the U.S. saves traffickers the risk and expense of smuggling their product across the border and allows gangs to produce their crops closer to local markets.

Distribution also becomes less risky. Once the marijuana is harvested and dried on the hidden farms, drug gangs can drive it to major cities, where it is distributed to street dealers and sold along with pot that was grown in Mexico.

About the only risk to the Mexican growers, experts say, is that a stray hiker or hunter could stumble onto a hidden field.

The remote plots are nestled under the cover of thick forest canopies in places such as Sequoia National Park, or hidden high in the rugged-yet-fertile Sierra Nevada Mountains. Others are secretly planted on remote stretches of Texas ranch land.

All of the sites are far from the eyes of law enforcement, where growers can take the time needed to grow far more potent marijuana. Farmers of these fields use illegal fertilizers to help the plants along, and use cloned female plants to reduce the amount of seed in the bud that is dried and eventually sold.

Mexican gang plots can often be distinguished from those of domestic-based growers, who usually cultivate much smaller fields with perhaps 100 plants and no security measures.

Some of the fields tied to the drug gangs have as many as 75,000 plants, each of which can yield at least a pound of pot annually, according to federal data reviewed by the AP.

The Sequoia National Forest in central California is covered in a patchwork of pot fields, most of which are hidden along mountain creeks and streams, far from hiking trails. It’s the same situation in the nearby Yosemite, Sequoia and Redwood national parks.

Even if they had the manpower to police the vast wilderness, authorities say terrain and weather conditions often keep them from finding the farms, except accidentally.

Many of the plots are encircled with crude explosives and are patrolled by guards armed with AK-47s who survey the perimeter from the ground and from perches high in the trees.

The farms are growing in sophistication and are increasingly cultivated by illegal immigrants, many of whom have been brought to the U.S. from Michoacan.

Growers once slept among their plants, but many of them now have campsites up to a mile away equipped with separate living and cooking areas.

“It’s amazing how they have changed the way they do business,” Wood said. “It’s their domain.”

Drug gangs have also imported marijuana experts and unskilled labor to help find the best land or build irrigation systems, Wood said.

Moyses Mesa Barajas had just arrived in eastern Washington state from the Mexican state of Michoacan when he was approached to work in a pot field. He was taken almost immediately to a massive crop hidden in the Wenatchee National Forest, where he managed the watering of the plants.

He was arrested in 2008 in a raid and sentenced to more than six years in federal prison. Several other men wearing camouflage fled before police could stop them.

“I thought it would be easy,” he told the AP in a jailhouse interview. “I didn’t think it would be a big crime.”

Stewart said recruiters look for people who still have family in Mexico, so they can use them as leverage to keep the farmers working – and to keep them quiet.

“If they send Jose from the hometown and Jose rips them off, they are going to go after Jose’s family,” Stewart said. “It’s big money.”

When the harvest is complete, investigators say, pot farm workers haul the product in garbage bags to dropoff points that are usually the same places where they get resupplied with food and fuel.

Agents routinely find the discarded remnants of camp life when they discover marijuana fields. It’s not uncommon to discover pots and pans, playing cards and books, half-eaten bags of food, and empty beer cans and liquor bottles.

But the growers leave more than litter to worry about. They often use animal poisons that can pollute mountain streams and groundwater meant for legitimate farmers and ranchers.

Because of the tree cover, armed pot farmers can often take aim at law enforcement before agents ever see them.

“They know the terrain better than we do,” said Lt. Rick Ko, a drug investigator with the sheriff’s office in Fresno, Calif. “Before we even see them, they can shoot us.”

In Wisconsin, the number of confiscated plants grew sixfold between 2003 and 2008, to more than 32,000 found in 2008.

Wisconsin agents used to find a few dozen marijuana plants on national forest land. Now they discover hundreds or even thousands.

“If we are getting 40 to 50 percent (of fields), I think we are doing well,” said Michigan State Police 1st Lt. Dave Peltomaa. “I really don’t think we are close to 50 percent. We don’t have the resources.”

Vast amounts of pot are still smuggled into the U.S. from Mexico. Federal officials report nearly daily hauls of several hundred to several thousand pounds seized along the border. But drug agents say the boom in domestic growing is a sign of diversification by traffickers.

Officials say arrests of farmers are rare, though the sheriff’s office in Fresno did nab more than 100 suspects during two weeks of raids last summer. But when field hands are arrested, most only tell authorities about their specific job.

When asked who hired him, Mesa repeatedly told an AP reporter, “I can’t tell you.”

Washington State Patrol Lt. Richard Wiley said hired hands either do not know who the boss is or are too frightened to give details.

“They are fearful of what may happen to them if they were to snitch on these coyote people,” Wiley said of the recruiters and smugglers who bring marijuana farmers into the U.S. “That’s organized crime of a different fashion. There’s nothing to gain from (talking), but there’s a lot to lose.”

AZ Central

A person wearing scuba gear apparently tried to sneak two bundles of marijuana across the Mexican border through a sewer system on Friday, Border Patrol officials said.

Border Patrol agents operating infrared cameras noticed several individuals illegally crossing into the United States near a sewer outlet.

The Douglas Station’s bike patrol went to the sewer system and saw one person carrying two bundles that were suspected to be marijuana.

That person was wearing a wet suit and scuba gear and was wading through waist-high water with the bundles, officials said.

The person saw the agents, dropped the bundles and began wading back toward Mexico. Apparently the other people spotted by the Border Patrol also fled, officials said.

The marijuana weighed 55 pounds and was estimated to be worth $44,000.

The would-be smugglers were not found, according to Omar Candelaria, spokesperson for the Border Patrol.

Story

Wait! It gets better! His illegal alien wife/girlfriend, parents, brothers, sisters, and cousins are absolved of any and all their crimes because the POS wore a U.S. military uniform. No kidding. The family not only is awarded with amnesty, but military benefits as well.

In the mean time… 

You better wear a bicycle helmet when operating your bicycle on a U.S. military base because if the MP’s catch you in such a blatant disregard for base rules and regulations, you can be ticketed and fined and your bike confiscated.

Houston Chronicle

Behind locked doors and armed guards at the federal courthouse downtown, Gulf Cartel chieftain Osiel Cardenas Guillen – one of Mexico’s most feared capos – was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years in federal prison.

U.S. District Judge Hilda Tagle, who presided over the secret hearing, has apparently issued a gag order on the matter including keeping confidential how much time Cardenas was given.

Chief Defense Attorney Mike Ramsey said, “I can’t comment on anything that didn’t happen.”

Acting U.S. Attorney Jose Angel Moreno declined comment as he left the courtroom, but this afternoon issued a brief statement via email.

“The successful prosecution of Cardenas-Guillen underscores the joint resolve of the United States and Mexico to pursue and prosecute the leadership of the drug trafficking cartels, dismantle their organizations and end the violence and corruption they have spawned,” he said.

Cardenas was accused of drug and money laundering crimes, as well as was accused of threatening to kill an FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration agent during an armed standoff more than a decade ago after he caught them on the streets of his hometown, Matamoros, Mexico.

He is also said to have brought a new level of precision and brutality to Mexico’s underworld by creating the Zetas, a squad of specially trained former Mexican soldiers who tracked down and killed his enemies. Authorities have said he imported tons of cocaine into the United States and made millions of dollars. Court documents unsealed last week indicate Cardenas also has handed over at least $23 million in cash to federal authorities.

It remains to be seen how much of a sentence Cardenas will actually serve. He pleaded guilty rather than fight for his freedom at trial and he appears to have privately cooperated with federal authorities in exchange for leniency.

The Houston Chronicle was denied entry to the courtroom and is challenging Tagle’s ruling in order to inform the public of what has come of a multi-million dollar, years-long battle to bring Cardenas to justice.

“We strongly believe that the American justice system should operate in the light of day and not in secret,” said Jeff Cohen, editor of the Chronicle. “At a minimum, the public should be entitled to an explanation of why secrecy is being granted. That has not happened in the Cardenas case and it is wrong.”

The U.S. government had offered a $2 million reward for his capture. He was indicted nearly a decade ago and extradited to Houston three years ago.

Since then his whereabouts have been kept confidential for security reasons and much of the case has been kept sealed.

Reuters

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (Reuters) – Costa Rican police seized around a ton of cocaine and arrested two suspected Mexican traffickers on Friday in the latest sign Mexican gangs are stepping up their use of the country as a storage point.

Police found 2,139 pounds (969 kg) of cocaine stashed at a rural house near the Pacific coast northwest of San Jose, and arrested two Mexican nationals at the scene. They are believed to be members of Mexico’s Juarez cartel, the public security ministry said.

President-elect Laura Chinchilla, a former security minister who won a landslide election victory on Sunday, has said combating Mexican drug gangs operating in Costa Rica will be a priority when she takes power in May.

A three-year army crackdown on drug gangs in Mexico has encouraged some traffickers to push south into Central America, setting up bases in countries like Guatemala as they seek new routes to smuggle South American cocaine to the United States.

Costa Rican authorities have seized 93 ton of cocaine between 2006 and 2009 — nearly twice the amount the country captured in the preceding decade.

Costa Rica is known for being an oasis of stability, high living standards and low crime in a region scarred by Cold War-era civil wars and plagued by violent street gangs.

But it also sits halfway between the cocaine-producing Andes and Mexico, whose smuggling gangs earn some $40 billion a year smuggling the drug north using planes, boats and trucks.

Police raided the house in Costa Rica early on Friday following a tip-off from neighbors, the ministry said.

The two suspects are from the northern Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, one of the world’s most violent spots. One had a press credential from a Mexican newspaper, the ministry said.

Judicial Watch

An illegal immigrant convicted in the U.S. of two separate crimes has been spared deportation by a federal appellate court that determined the violations aren’t serious enough to send the man back to his native Mexico.

The ruling marks the second time in a week that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overrules both an immigration judge and the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals to rescue a criminally convicted thug from deportation. A few days ago the abhorrently liberal court ruled that a violent felon cannot be deported because tattooed criminals like him are often harassed by gangs and police in his native El Salvador.

An immigration judge and the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals, the nation’s highest administrative body for interpreting and applying immigration laws, had both denied that illegal alien’s ridiculous tattoo petition, citing his failure to prove that he faced torture in his native country.

This latest case involves a Mexican illegal immigrant (Victor Ocegueda Nunez) in California who was actually deported years ago but never the less remained in the U.S. He has twice been convicted of crimes— theft in 1995 and indecent exposure in 2003—and has three U.S.-born children (“anchor babies”). Although he has lived in the country illegally since 1993, Nunez appealed his deportation saying it would cause “extreme hardship” for his wife and three kids.

In reversing the immigration court and Justice Department’s removal orders, the 9th Circuit essentially determined that the illegal alien’s crimes aren’t serious enough to warrant deportation, even though he’s not even supposed to be in the U.S. to begin with.  

Indecent exposure, the latest crime Nunez was convicted of, does not constitute a crime of moral turpitude or vile offensiveness, the court determined in its 41-page ruling. Under California law indecent exposure “is not categorically a crime involving moral turpitude,” the justices wrote. “There is simply no overall agreement on many issues of morality in contemporary society,”

EL PASO — Customs and Border Protection officers seized over 30 pounds of marijuana hidden in framed pictures of Jesus Christ, CBP spokesman Roger Maier said.

Officers found the drugs just before 3 p.m. Tuesday at the Bridge of the Americas.

A 22-year-old Mexican woman in a 1998 Jeep Cherokee arrived from Juárez and said she had nothing to declare other than some framed art. As officers inspected the vehicle, a drug sniffing dog alerted them to three framed pictures of Jesus Christ, Maier said.

CBP officers removed the backing on one of the pictures and found bundles of marijuana. They found a total of 30 bundles in three framed pictures. The woman, a Juárez native, was turned over to the El Paso Police Department.

“This is not the first time we have seen smugglers attempt to use religious figures and articles of faith to further their criminal enterprise,” said William Molaski, port director for CBP in El Paso, in a news release.

“What some might find offensive or sacrilegious has unfortunately become a standard operating procedure for drug smugglers. This would include using religious symbols, children, and senior citizens in their attempts to defeat the CBP inspection process.”

By Chris Hawley
Republic Mexico City Bureau 

MEXICO CITY – For months, the leaders of Tancitaro had held firm against the drug lords battling for control of this central Mexican town.

Then one morning, after months of threats and violence from the traffickers, they finally surrendered.

Before dawn, gunmen kidnapped the elderly fathers of the town administrator and the secretary of the City Council. Within hours, both officials resigned along with the mayor, the entire seven-member City Council, two department heads, the police chief and all 60 police officers. Tancitaro had fallen to the enemy.

Across Mexico, the continuing ability of traffickers to topple governments like Tancitaro’s, intimidate police and keep drug shipments flowing is raising doubts about the Mexican government’s 3-year-old, U.S.-backed war on the drug cartels.

Far from eliminating the gangs, the battle has exposed criminal networks more ingrained than most Americans could imagine: Hidden economies that employ up to one-fifth of the people in some Mexican states. Business empires that include holdings as everyday as gyms and a day-care center.

And the death toll continues to mount: Mexico saw 6,587 drug-related murders in 2009, up from 5,207 in 2008 and 2,275 in 2007, according to an unofficial tally by the respected newspaper Reforma.

Cartels have multiplied, improved their armament and are perfecting simultaneous, terrorist-style attacks.

Some analysts are warning that Mexico is on the verge of becoming a "narco-state" like 1990s-era Colombia.

"We are approaching that red zone," said Edgardo Buscaglia, an expert on organized crime at the Autonomous Technological University of Mexico. "There are pockets of ungovernability in the country, and they will expand."

For the past decade, he said, parts of Mexico have been sliding toward the lawlessness that Colombia experienced, in which traffickers in league with left-wing rebels controlled small towns and large parts of the interior through drug-funded bribery and gun-barrel intimidation.

In the latest sign of the cartels’ grip, on Wednesday the National Action Party of President Felipe Calderón announced it was calling off primary elections in the northern state of Tamaulipas because drug traffickers had infiltrated politics.

And in Chihuahua, the government is redeploying troops from the embattled city of Juarez to the countryside because of fears that the cartels are cementing their control in smaller border towns.

Even Calderón, who a year ago angrily rebutted suggestions that Mexico was becoming a "failed state," is now describing his crackdown as a fight for territory and "the very authority of the state."

"The crime has stopped being a low-profile activity and has become defiant . . . . plainly visible and based on co-opting or intimidating the authorities," he told a group of Mexican ambassadors last month. "It’s the law of the ‘bribe or the bullet.’ "

Towns on the ropes

In places like Tancitaro, population 26,000, the battle already may be lost.

In the past year, gunmen killed seven police officers, murdered a top town administrator and kidnapped others, said Martin Urbina, a city official. The reasons were unclear – most of the town leaders are in hiding and could not be reached for comment – but the drug traffickers were apparently demanding the removal of certain police officers, Urbina said.

When the traffickers kidnapped the two officials’ fathers on Nov. 30, it was the last straw.

"If someone comes and puts a pistol to your head, what are you going to do?" said Gustavo Sánchez, who was appointed by the Michoacan state governor as interim mayor after the mass resignation. "It’s happening in all of the states, not just here."

In Vicente Guerrero, in Durango state, 34 of 38 police resigned after the police chief and four officers were kidnapped. The victims have not been found.

In the border town of Puerto Palomas, the police chief fled to the United States and asked for asylum in March, saying Mexican officials could not protect him. In October, traffickers killed the town administrator in Puerto Palomas.

In the northern town of Namiquipa, traffickers killed the mayor and two top town officials last year. Police there are woefully outgunned, police Chief Jesus Hinojosa said. There are only 15 weapons for 39 police officers.

Often the cartels target city officials they believe are cooperating with federal authorities, said Juan Manuel Bautista, the City Council secretary in the western town of Novolato, where traffickers have killed 25 police, two city councilmen and a town administrator in the past two years.

Other times, they are simply lashing back at the most convenient targets, he said.

"In these small-town governments, everyone knows your business and who you are," Bautista said. "If they want to take revenge on you, it’s easy."

Even when governments replace police chiefs, mayors and town councils, it’s often only a matter of time before the replacements are bribed, intimidated at the barrel of a gun or killed, and the scenario repeats itself, said Bernardo Gonzalez Arechiga, an expert on crime at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Advanced Studies.

In May, federal officials arrested 10 mayors in Michoacan state on charges of protecting smugglers.

In June, Mauricio Fernández, a mayoral candidate in the wealthy Monterrey suburb of San Pedro Garza Garcia, was recorded telling a meeting of supporters that he had negotiated a truce with the Beltrán Leyva gang as a way of guaranteeing security in the town. Fernández later denied any contact with the gang. He easily won the July 2 election.

Financial octopus

The attempt to dismantle the cartels has created a new appreciation for how deep their financial networks go, said Joel Kurtzman, a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, an economic think tank in Santa Monica, Calif

In many towns, smugglers pay for playgrounds and other things the government cannot afford. Bank loans are expensive and hard to get in Mexico, a lingering effect of the country’s bank crises during the 1990s, so traffickers have stepped in to provide small-business loans.

In many towns, smugglers pay for playgrounds and other things the government cannot afford. Bank loans are expensive and hard to get in Mexico, a lingering effect of the country’s bank crises during the 1990s, so traffickers have stepped in to provide small-business loans.

"What people did not recognize in Mexico was how deeply ingrained in both the economy and society the drug trade was," Kurtzman said. "So it’s not as if the drug traders are unpopular – they’re looked at in many cities like Robin Hoods."

Since 2006, the number of Mexican citizens and companies on the U.S. Treasury’s blacklist of suspected drug smugglers has nearly doubled, from 188 to 362.

They are as varied as a day-care center in Culiacan, a gym in Hermosillo and an electronics company in Tijuana. There are meat packing plants, horse stables, dairies, hotels, a mining company and gasoline stations.

Dozens of those companies are still operating because Mexican prosecutors lack few legal tools to shut them down, Buscaglia said.

In March, the financial magazine Forbes included Joaquín "Chapo" Guzmán in its list of the world’s billionaires for the first time. Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, was listed at No. 701 with a net worth of about $1 billion.

In fact, Guzmán’s cartel and other gangs probably bring in $3.8 billion just to Sinaloa state alone, said Guillermo Ibarra, an economist who used bank and government statistics to compile an estimate this year.

That is 20 percent of the state’s economy, twice as much as all of its factories put together. The drug trade employs about a fifth of the state’s 2.6 million population, either directly or indirectly, he said.

"It trickles down to construction, to car sales, you name it," Ibarra said. "Drug money ends up everywhere."

The cartels’ criminal activities also are becoming more diverse, Buscaglia said.

La Familia Michoacana, which produces methamphetamine at clandestine laboratories in Michoacan state, has broadened into prostitution, protection rackets and software piracy.

Street vendors in Mexico now sell music CDs and DVDs stamped with "FM," the gang’s logo.

Likewise, the Zetas, once the elite hit men of the Gulf Cartel, now run kidnapping-for-ransom rings in Mexico City and steal gasoline from government pipelines. Pemex, the state-run oil company, says it lost $747 million in stolen fuel in 2008.

Gangs going strong

The cartels also have found ways to defend their core drug business by moving marijuana farms to U.S. national parks, finding new smuggling routes through Africa and into Europe, and strengthening their supply lines in Central America.

Drug prices and purity in the United States, the main measure of trafficking, shows the crackdown is having only mixed results.

Cocaine prices in the United States jumped from $132 a gram to $182 a gram from September 2007 to September 2008, the latest date for which the Drug Enforcement Administration has released numbers.

But during the same period, methamphetamine got stronger and cheaper, dropping from $213 per gram to $184 per gram.

To offset tighter border security, Mexican traffickers are setting up marijuana farms on public lands in California, Washington and Oregon, a U.S. Department of Justice report said in July. The number of marijuana plants seized in the United States soared from 3.2 million in 2004 to 8 million in 2008.

Their product is also improving, the report said: Marijuana potency in 2008 was the highest it has ever been.

The cartels also are expanding into new territory.

Since 2008, Mexican drug smugglers have been arrested in Australia, New Zealand and the African nations of Sierra Leone and Togo. U.S. prosecutors say the Gulf Cartel has struck deals with the New York mob and the Ndrangheta Mafia of Italy to smuggle cocaine into Europe.

In the United States, cartel operatives have been detected in 195 cities, as distant as Anchorage, Alaska, and as small as Ponca City, Okla., a report by the U.S. Justice Department said.

In Arizona, the Sinaloa Cartel has operations in Phoenix, Tucson, Douglas, Glendale, Naco, Nogales, Peoria, Sasabe, Sierra Vista and Yuma. The Gulf Cartel also has some operatives in Nogales, and the Juarez Cartel has outposts in Phoenix, Tucson and Douglas, the report said.

Buscaglia said his research has turned up links to Mexican traffickers in 47 countries worldwide.

"Mexico has become an exporter of instability," he said.

At the same time, the cartels are acquiring weapons that are "increasingly more powerful and lethal," the U.S. Government and Accountability Office said in a June report.

Five rocket launchers, 271 grenades, 2,932 assault rifles, a submarine loaded with cocaine, and an anti-aircraft gun complete with blast shield were all seized by Mexican authorities between March 2008 and August 2009.

In September, traffickers fired an anti-tank rocket at soldiers while trying to free a comrade who had been detained.

The gangs also are getting better at carrying out coordinated, military-style operations.

On July 11 and 12, La Familia launched 15 attacks in eight cities on police stations and a police bus, killing 14 officers.

And on May 16, Gulf Cartel gunmen freed 53 prisoners in a commando-style raid on a prison in Zacatecas state.

Prolonged war

Calderón and the Obama administration insist that the Mexican government still has the upper hand against the cartels.

"We have a serious problem, but the good news is that we’re confronting it, and better yet, we’re making progress," Calderón told the ambassadors last month.

But in the past year, doubts have been growing.

A report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command warned in January 2009 that Mexico was ripe for a "rapid and sudden collapse" because of the drug cartels. And in a report to the West Point military academy, former U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey said the cartels could "overwhelm the institutions of the state and establish de facto control over broad regions of northern Mexico" within eight years.

Former President Ernesto Zedillo, writer Carlos Fuentes, former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda and the former chief of Calderón’s National Action Party have publicly questioned the president’s strategy.

In Colombia, the government was able to re-establish control in rural areas by eliminating a "demilitarized" zone that had been granted to the leftist guerrillas, renewing attacks on them and spraying coca fields with pesticides. The United States has helped with $5.8 billion in aid since 2000.

But in Mexico, the government needs to focus on the prosecution of crimes instead of flooding the streets with troops, Buscaglia said.

Only about half of detainees are ever convicted, and most are low-level thugs, not the money launderers, accountants and managers who keep the cartels running.

Of the more than 53,000 arrests since the crackdown began, only 941 are in Sinaloa, despite the fact that that state is the heart of one of the biggest smuggling empires, Buscaglia said.

The government also needs laws allowing authorities to shut down suspected money-laundering operations and seize their assets without going through a criminal trial, he said.

Only three things could change the balance, said Ray Walser, an expert on Latin America at the conservative Heritage Foundation: a massive increase in U.S. drug aid, a large addiction-treatment program in the United States or the legalization of drugs in the United States.

None of these measures seems to be on the horizon, Walser said.

"The problem that Calderón has in winning this war will be that he can’t offer the citizens courts, mayors and policemen that are safe and honest and not corrupt," Kurtzman said.

"As a result, this is likely to remain a stalemate with a lot of killing on both sides for a long time."