Cartels setting up camps in Central America

Reuters:

Central America is struggling to contain rising violence as powerful Mexican drug cartels, facing an escalating government crackdown at home, expand southward and intensify operations in neighboring nations.

For years Central America has been a transit route for cocaine trafficked north from the Andes, but analysts and officials say Mexican cartels are now buying up land, storing arms and drugs, and hiring members of local criminal networks in Central America to help them move and sell drugs.

The southward push comes as Mexican President Felipe Calderon vows to push ahead with his military campaign against drugs and as turf wars between Mexican cartels turn bloody. More than 28,000 people have died in drug violence in Mexico since late 2006.

It is also driven by the sheer profitability of a business believed to bring Mexican cartels up to $40 billion a year.

A report released in May by the Woodrow Wilson Center, a U.S. thinktank, and the University of San Diego showed that the Zetas, a brutal spinoff group of Mexico's Gulf cartel, were recruiting in Central America and training new members in camps in remote areas of Guatemala near the Mexican border.

The report said members of the Sinaloa cartel, another major Mexican gang, were operating along Guatemala's Pacific coast and western border with Mexico, while the Zetas had set up bases along the Caribbean coast of Honduras and Guatemala.

"They've subcontracted existing networks who are already involved in other kinds of trafficking -- of contraband, pirated DVDs and clothing," said report editor Eric Olson.

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There is much more.

The cartels are looking for sanctuary as things get more difficult for them in Mexico. They continue to act like an armed insurgency even as they move south into Central America. Their actions in Mexico become ever more grotesque and uninhibited.