Mexico to Try 13 Ex-Cops for Links to Drug Cartel

MEXICO CITY – Thirteen former police officers from the southern Mexican state of Tabasco will be tried for their alleged links to hitmen employed by the Gulf drug cartel, the Attorney General’s Office said.

The former officers, who were arrested on Feb. 28, face criminal conspiracy and drug charges, the AG’s office said.

The 13 men worked for the police department in the city of Paraiso and allegedly provided information to a criminal group called La Compañia, a cell of “Los Zetas.”

Los Zetas is a group of army special forces veterans and deserters who initially worked as hitmen for the Gulf cartel and took over the criminal organization when its leaders were arrested.

The former officers allegedly provided information to La Compañia about municipal, state and federal police operations “so that the criminal group would not be arrested and could freely carry out its drug trafficking activities,” the AG’s office said.

The suspects were on the payroll of the criminal organization, the AG’s office said.

Officials launched a purge of municipal and state police agencies across Mexico a year ago in response to reports that many officers were involved with organized crime groups.

In December, prosecutors put 24 other former Tabasco police officers, including 12 chiefs, on trial for offering protection to groups working for the Gulf cartel in exchange for large sums of money.

That same month, 11 other municipal police officers were arrested in Tabasco for having links to the cartel.

Armed groups linked to the cartels murdered around 2,700 people in 2007 and 1,500 in 2006, with the 2008 death toll soaring to 5,630, according to a tally by the Mexico City daily El Universal.

So far this year, more than 1,200 people have died in the violence in Mexico.

Experts say that Mexico’s most powerful drug trafficking organizations are the Tijuana cartel, the Gulf cartel and the Sinaloa cartel. Two other large drug trafficking organizations, the Juarez and Milenio cartels, also operate in the country.

The Sinaloa organization is the oldest cartel in Mexico and is led by Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman, who was arrested in Guatemala in 1993 and pulled off a Hollywood-style jailbreak when he escaped from the Puente Grande maximum-security prison in the western state of Jalisco on Jan. 19, 2001.

Guzman, considered extremely violent, is one of the most-wanted criminals in Mexico and the United States, where the Drug Enforcement Administration has offered a reward of $5 million for him.

Since taking office in December 2006, President Felipe Calderon has deployed more than 45,000 soldiers and 20,000 federal police officers across Mexico in a bid to stem the wave of violence unleashed by drug traffickers.

The anti-drug operation, however, has failed to put a dent in the violence due, according to experts, to drug cartels’ ability to buy off the police and even high-ranking prosecutors.

The AG’s office recently began investigating its own staff, particularly the SIEDO organized crime unit’s members and the Federal Investigations Agency, Mexico’s equivalent of the FBI.

As part of the probe, begun after a protected informant revealed links between drug cartel kingpins and police, a dozen high-ranking officials, including erstwhile drug czar Noe Ramirez, have been arrested.

The initial investigation concluded that Ramirez received $500,000 a month for sharing intelligence with drug lords. EFE