Drug cartels recruiting hit men in U.S.
^{Associated Press}
December 20, 2005 - kristv.com

MEXICO CITY -- Mexican drug cartels are recruiting hired killers in the United States, since many of their Mexican gunmen are now behind bars, Mexico's federal attorney general's office said Tuesday.

The country's anti-drug prosecutor, Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, said in a news release that "the grand majority" of gunmen for the Sinaloa cartel are U.S. citizens who live in the United States.

Vasconcelos said the Sinaloa cartel's gunmen have come primarily from a U.S. group of hired killers called "Los Lobos." He did not say where the group is based in the United States nor what led Mexican authorities to believe the gunmen are U.S. citizens.

The Sinaloa cartel, based out of the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa, is led by alleged drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who escaped from prison in 2001. He is one of Mexico's most-wanted fugitives and U.S. authorities have offered a $5 million reward for his capture.

Mexican police say Guzman has waged a bloody war with the Gulf cartel for control of the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo, across from Laredo, Texas. Nuevo Laredo has been besieged by violence with a record 175 executions so far this year.

Vasconcelos said while the Sinaloa cartel is looking north for recruits, the Gulf cartel is heading south.

"Las Zetas," a group of ex-elite Mexican soldiers who now work for Mexico's Gulf drug cartel, has been recruiting former kaibiles, former members of an elite Guatemalan paratrooper counterinsurgency unit known for its grueling jungle-survival training.

The anti-drug prosecutor said Las Zetas have been hit so hard by recent arrests "that these groups are trying to recover their death squads by recruiting" in Guatemala "because they no longer have the ability to respond to the violence that they are (confronting)."

Osiel Cardenas, the reputed lead of the Gulf cartel, was captured in March 2003 and remains in a maximum security prison outside Mexico City.

In October, Guatemalan police arrested seven alleged members of Las Zetas near the Mexican border. They were found with various weapons and cocaine. Three were later released.

According to Guatemalan police, the alleged Zetas had come to Guatemala to exact revenge for the killing of a Zeta who worked in Guatemala.

In a separate incident in Mexico in September, Mexican authorities detained seven Guatemalans, at least four of whom had been trained as kaibiles.