At least 11 people were confirmed killed, including five federal police officers and an 8-month-old.
Government security spokesman Alejandro Poire said officials had received information that La Familia founder Nazario Moreno Gonzalez — a.k.a. "El Mas Loco" (the craziest) — was killed in the shooting.
He acknowledged, however, that La Familia gunmen carried away their dead and injured as they retreated, making an exact accounting of who and how many died impossible.
Still, Poire said the group had been "significantly weakened."
"This is the moment to intensify pressure on this organization in order to diminish criminal activity in the region efficiently and permanently," he said.
Moreno's death would be a significant blow to the cartel, which is among the newest in Mexico and one of the most brutal.
La Familia first gained national attention by tossing five severed heads onto the floor of a dance hall in September 2006. Two months later, Calderon sent troops into Michoacan for the first time to take on traffickers. Nevertheless, La Familia swiftly rose to a spot on the short list of dangerous cartels, dominating the methamphetamine trade and steadily diversifying into counterfeiting, extortion and kidnapping.
Based in Michoacan, where it has infiltrated police ranks and city halls, the group has spread into neighboring Guerrero and Mexico states, as well as at least 30 U.S. towns and cities, including the Los Angeles area.
Moreno gave La Familia a patina of pseudo-religious, cultlike mystique. He carried a self-published "bible," recruited members at drug rehab centers and insisted that the group's traffickers and hit men lead lives free of drug or alcohol consumption. He cast himself and the cartel as protectors of Michoacan.
Moreno also had a bounty on his head of about $2 million, placed by the Mexican government. The charges listed on his wanted poster include drug trafficking in Mexico and the U.S., kidnapping and homicide. He was considered one of the two top leaders of La Familia.
The heaviest fighting this week in Michoacan took place around the town of Apatzingan, a La Familia stronghold, where Mexican marines and army troops backed by helicopters fanned out across the countryside, according to witnesses, and were pushing the offensive as late as Friday afternoon. If Moreno was indeed killed, La Familia could retaliate, a prospect that has set residents on edge.
"The situation is very critical," Apatzingan Mayor Genaro Guizar said by telephone. "There is hardly anyone on the streets, and traffic has stopped."
He sent city hall employees home early and told them to stay inside.
In the state capital, Morelia, businesses were shuttered Friday and parents kept their children home from school. On Thursday, gunmen forced motorists from their vehicles and set cars, trucks and buses on fire to block all roads leading into the capital. Parts of Morelia, a picturesque, colonial-era city once popular with tourists, were ringed with black smoke.
La Familia recently used banners and fliers to offer a truce and say it was ready to disband. The government ignored the offer, saying it showed the group was battered and in decline. But others in Michoacan viewed the offer as a ploy that foreshadowed a new offensive by the cartel.
"What we have witnessed in the last few days is the demonstration of a criminal organization repudiated by the public and that has found itself significantly weakened," Poire said. "That has been proved by its false calls for a truce."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-drug-lord-20101211,0,6005257,print.story
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Here's another related article:
'Mexico supplies the drugs. We supply the users'
December 10, 2010
"Over the border and through the cartels to Abuelita's casa we go," begins a recent commentary on the Mexican drug war, published Monday in the Kansas City Star (and also syndicated by Tribune Media Services).
The line by columnist Mary Sanchez refers to the brutal drug-trafficking organizations currently spreading fear and violence across the country, and -- of course -- to the stereotypical sweet grandmother figure that draws so many Mexican Americans back to the country of their ancestors during the Christmas season.
This season, Mexico warned, visitors from the United States should travel in convoys to help avoid the kidnappings and shoot-outs. Feliz Navidad ?
Sanchez writes that looking at the drug war in Mexico as merely a south-of-the-border problem ignores half of the equation. The violence, she says, is rooted in competition over which groups get to supply the lucrative demand for narcotics in the United States, the largest drug market in the world, and which groups the Mexican government is attempting to dismantle. The writer argues:
It's easy to cluck our tongues about the gruesome violence "over there," but to do so is to absolve ourselves of the role our country plays in this bloody import/export business. Let's be honest: This is a trade relationship. Mexico supplies the drugs. We supply the users.
Read the entire column here.
The states of Tamaulipas and Michoacan, along with Ciudad Juarez in the state of Chihuahua, are currently bearing the brunt of what that "import/export business" can produce when attempts are made to stop it. See recent related La Plaza posts here and here.
On Thursday and Friday, much of Michoacan was on lock-down as the major local cartel, the cult-like La Familia, battled federal forces. The 36-hour siege gripped a dozen municipalities in the state and paralyzed the capital, Morelia, as gunmen yanked random citizens from their cars and trucks and set fire to vehicles to block the five roads that provide access to the city.
Eight people died in Thursday's fighting, including an 8-month-old who was struck by a stray bullet in the town of Apatzingan (link in Spanish). This is where the heaviest gun battles took place as federal police chased a top figure in La Familia, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez. The capo, known as "El Chayo," is believed to have been killed, the government said Friday.
At least 30,000 people have died in four years of fighting in Mexico. Every day, as Michoacan demonstrated this week, that number grows.
So what do you think, La Plaza readers? Are the debates over the Mexican drug war -- the question of whether the violence is "spilling over" -- inherently asymmetrical, as Sanchez argues? Is the United States government doing its part, doing enough to recognize the war as a binational crisis? How about the American news coverage?
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2010/12/commentary-mexico-drug-war-supply-trade-demand.html |
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