U.S. works closely with Mexico to curb power of cartels

weapons used in crimes, and training prosecutors, investigators, and police.

All U.S. agents living and working in Mexico get diplomatic status and are banned from carrying weapons. “They do not kick doors down or accompany guys who kick doors down and make arrests,” said a senior US Embassy official, speaking to the AP on condition of anonymity citing security concerns.

Instead, they track beacons secretly attached to cars, they trace cell phone calls, and they read e-mails and texts. Using images from drones, they study behavioral patterns of border incursions and follow smuggling routes. And they process massive amounts of data about dealers, enforcers, money launderers and bosses.

Some tracking devices are slapped on cars and phones in the U.S., with judicial permission, before the equipment heads south. Technology ignores borders and continues to show the location of suspects in Mexico.

Samuel Gonzalez, Mexico’s former top anti-drug prosecutor, said U.S. agents, who typically require judicial authority to eavesdrop in the U.S., are not restricted by those laws in Mexico, provided they are not on U.S. territory and those they are bugging are not American.

“Simply put, they can hear all the conversations they want without respecting the privacy of individuals, as long as they are not (listening to) Americans,” Gonzalez said.

The U.S. has also sent eight helicopters and 78 drug sniffing dogs, as well as 318 polygraph units to screen Mexico’s law enforcement applicants for corruption. U.S. agents taught their counterparts to use the machinery.

U.S. experts also have taught hundreds of attorneys to argue in open courtrooms, judges to hear cases, and more than 6,700 soldiers and police to use proper interrogation techniques and technology.

At the same time, more Mexican agents work with the FBI, DEA and other agencies in the U.S. And in an unusual move, the ATF recently invited Mexican investigators to attend a U.S. interrogation of suspected gun traffickers.

Among last year’s achievements, U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials claimed to have arrested or killed 14 cartel leaders on the most-wanted list (the most in a given year), seized roughly 55 percent less cocaine than the previous year due to better monitoring of Mexican seas and airspace, and extradited 94 suspected criminals to the United States, compared with just 12 a decade ago.

And yet, killings jumped to a record high last year and more heroin and marijuana are being produced in Mexico and smuggled into the U.S. The pressure in Mexico is squeezing the drug trade into Central America, where three times more cocaine is confiscated each year than in Mexico. Meanwhile, U.S. law enforcement manages to stop just a small fraction of the guns, bullets and cash heading south.

“We are aware that we are going through a very difficult time on security issues,” Calderon said at a meeting where the government presented a new data system to track drug-related crimes.

More than 61 Mexican law enforcement agents vetted and trained by U.S. partners were killed in Mexico between 2007 and 2009, according to a U.S. State Department cable revealed by WikiLeaks. But the U.S. Embassy official said he believed it was because they were in uniform and engaged in a risky fight against organized crime, rather than because of their affiliation with Americans.

As for the Beltran-Levya cartel, the operation against its boss hardly put the family out of business; it is blamed for hundreds of killings last year. But the pressure is constant. Beltran-Levya’s brother, who succeeded him, was arrested, and now police say the last brother, Hector, is in charge.

The U.S. State Department is offering $5 million for information leading to Hector Beltran-Leyva’s arrest. And U.S. agents on the ground in Mexico are hard at work to figure out exactly where he is.