Teens help Zetas police cartel turf on I35 corridor

NY Times:

When he was finally caught, Rosalio Reta told detectives here that he had felt a thrill each time he killed. It was like being Superman or James Bond, he said.

“I like what I do,” he told the police in a videotaped confession. “I don’t deny it.”

Mr. Reta was 13 when he was recruited by the Zetas, the infamous assassins of the Gulf Cartel, law enforcement officials say. He was one of a group of American teenagers from the impoverished streets of Laredo who was lured into the drug wars across the Rio Grande in Mexico with promises of high pay, fancy cars and sexy women.

After a short apprenticeship, the young men lived in an expensive house in Texas, available to kill whenever called on. The Gulf Cartel was engaged in a turf war with the Sinaloa Cartel over the Interstate 35 corridor, the north-south highway that connects Laredo to Dallas and beyond, and is, according to law enforcement officials, one of the most important arteries for drug smuggling in the Americas.

The young men all paid a heavy price. Jesus Gonzalez III was beaten and knifed to death in a Mexican jail at 23. Mr. Reta, now 19, and his boyhood friend, Gabriel Cardona, 22, are serving what amounts to life sentences in prisons in the United States.

Other young Americans in their circle who the police say worked for the Zetas have also ended up in prison, have fled into hiding in Mexico or have disappeared in the permanent way that people wrapped up in the Mexican drug trade tend to go missing.

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The article gives some insight in how the battle is shaped by the Gulf Cartel and its Sinaloa competitors for logistic routes for shipping drugs into the US. Often stories are just about the killing and do not explore what the driving forces are. This story attempts to define those forces as something besides mindless violence. If we can understand what they are fighting for, we can get a better grasp on what we need to do to defeat them.

Most of the the major confrontations in Mexico are about the logistic routes. Tijuana is about the I5 corridor. Juarez is about the I10 corridor, and Laredo is about I35. The cities and the off shoots along these corridors are the prize being fought over. The other major battle ground in Mexico is the Sinaloa area, but that is just an attempt to push the gateway battle back onto the home turf of the cartel that is disputing the control of the gateways.

One of the obvious answers is to make these gateways less attractive on this side of the border. That means more checkpoints and tighter scrutiny of the traffice out of and into Mexico at these gateway cities.