Behind the red on red fighting of the drug gangs in Mexico

Houston Chronicle:

At least eight men were killed in related shootouts Tuesday as shifting alliances feed the already vicious rivalries among Mexico's criminal empires.

Initial press reports quoting town officials in western Durango state said the clashes between rival drug cartel gunmen killed as many as 19.

But a spokesman for the attorney general of Durango, where marijuana and heroin are produced and through which U.S.-bound cocaine flows, insisted that only eight men had died.

"This frightens us, because we aren't accustomed to this kind of thing here," said the spokesman, Ruben Lopez.

It was not immediately clear who the antagonists were this time. But the killings mirror others this year between criminal factions in which up to 15 people at a time have been slain.

The gangland competition for narcotics smuggling routes has been heightened by the Mexican government's success in dismantling or pressuring some of the factions that comprise the cartels, President Felipe Calderon said.

"The Mexican government has hit in a key way the financial and operating structures" of the cartels, Calderon told reporters. "This is forcing their realignment.

"A confrontation is occurring not only against public security but particularly — in a very, very intense way — between the cartels themselves."

A U.S. counternarcotics official characterized Calderon's campaign as "a muddy, bloody uphill climb."

"It's not over. It's going to get worse before it gets better," said the official, who spoke on condition that his name not be reported.

The U.S. House voted last week to approve the first annual installment of a three-year, $1.4 billion package of equipment and training for Mexican and Central American police fighting the drug war. But the first year's spending was trimmed by about $100 million to $400 million, all going to Mexican security forces.

The Merida Plan, proposed during a summit between Bush and Calderon in that Mexican city last year, must be approved by the Senate before it is implemented.

Durango is considered the territory of the so-called Federation, which includes criminal groups based in Chihuahua and Sinaloa states.

The Federation, whose nominal head is Sinaloa trafficker Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, has been rattled recently by the reported desertion of the Beltran Leyva clan, considered a major trafficking gang. It joined the Gulf Cartel, based in the Mexican cities bordering Texas' Lower Rio Grande Valley, the Mexico City newspaper El Universal reported, quoting Mexican officials.

Fighting between the Beltran Leyvas and the Gulf Cartel's gunmen, the Zetas, has caused much of the nation's violence, including the Nuevo Laredo and Acapulco areas.

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There is more. This is the best report I have seen recently on the background to the fighting. Certainly, the cartels are feeling a double stress of competition and law enforcement/military operations. The competition still seems strange to me. It is not like the market for drugs is not big enough to accommodate all they can deliver. But the red on red fighting is good for those fighting the cartel and their distribution network.