Houston seen as hub for Zetas

Observer/Guardian:

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Zeta territory is markedly different from the notoriously violent Ciudad Juárez, where the cartel pyramids have collapsed and criminal anarchy prevails. There, newspapers can report the nightly atrocities. In Zeta country, killing is less common and daily life appears normal – but it is governed by fear.

Moreover, the Zetas are expanding. Determined to control a corridor of their own through Central America to the cocaine production fields of Colombia, Peru and Venezuela, the Zetas have fought for and won control of most of the Gulf coast – as shown by recent massacres in Veracruz and Cancún, where they murdered an army general – and are fighting an all-out guerrilla war against the Sinaloa Cartel's cocaine farms in Guatemala. They are contesting a rival cartel, La Familia of Michoacán, for lucrative markets of Mexico City's endless suburbs. In a reported alliance with a cartel called the Beltrán-Leyva brothers, they are fighting for smuggling routes into Arizona.

Crucially, the Zetas hold their terrain absolutely and its location in north-eastern Mexico affords access to Houston, which the FBI, briefing the Observer last week, called "the hub city" for alliances with local gangs – the old "Texas Syndicate" and loose-knit "Tango Blast".

Of all Mexico's cartels, the Zetas are the most internationally connected, allied to their counterparts in the Italian syndicates, the 'Ndrangheta of Calabria, with ambitions in the European and African markets.

A glimpse of the road leading to the ranch where Osiel Cárdenas Guillén was born and raised near Matamoros – a few ramshackle buses and a corrugated- iron shack selling beer on the corner – demonstrates the cartel's humble origins, without the political connections enjoyed by others, and defining what has become its insurgent nature, which is shared only by La Familia.

Uncontested Zeta territory is hard to define, but correlates with the tropical Rio Grande valley, beginning with the relatively peaceful cities of Ciudad Acuña and Piedras Negras. After them, as the river flows, come the twin cities of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. These are the prize, for the freight and rail running across the four road and one rail bridges into the US are the spinal cord of pan-American trade.

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The story does a good job of explaining the fight over the corridors into the US that I have explained before. The Houston as a hub theory is interesting and it could be that the Port of Houston which is one of the most active in the US may receive some of their goods from other countries.