Federal police present alleged members of the Mexican drug cartel "La Familia Michoacana," detained in a recent police operation, as they are presented to the press in Mexico City, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009. Suspects from from left to right are Rogelio Rivera, Orlando Tafoya, Juan Estrada Rodriguez, Jose Roberto de la Sancha, Juan Gabriel Cortez and Julio Enrique Aguilar.
Attorney General Eric Holder, second from left, speaks during a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009, to announce the largest single strike at a Mexican drug cartel operating in the U.S. _ the arrest of more than 300 people in a series of drug raids across the country. From left are, FBI Director Robert Mueller, Holder, Acting Drug Enforcement Administrator (DEA) Michele Leonhart and Acting Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) Director Kenneth Melson.
Map shows U.S. cities in which a series of drug raids resulted in the arrests of more than 300 people
Federal police escort handcuffed suspect Jose Roberto de la Sancha as he his presented to the press in Mexico City, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009. De la Sancha, detained along with five others in a recent police operation, is an alleged member of the Mexican drug cartel "La Familia Michoacana," according to police.
Federal police stand by handcuffed suspects Jose Roberto de la Sancha, right, and Juan Estrada Rodriguez as they are presented to the press in Mexico City, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009. De la Sancha and Rodriguez, detained along with four others in a recent police operation, are alleged members of the Mexican drug cartel "La Familia Michoacana," according to police.
U.S. authorities arrested 303 people Wednesday and Thursday in a nationwide sweep targeting the distribution network of La Familia, a fast-rising Mexican drug cartel known for its violence, messianic culture and control over the methamphetamine trade, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Thursday.
More than 3,000 federal, state and local agents participated in the U.S. law enforcement operation, the largest mounted against a Mexican cartel, Holder said.
The raids "dealt a significant blow to La Familia's supply chain," Holder said, netting cash, drugs, weapons and vehicles in 19 states. But U.S. officials did not say whether any cartel leaders were caught. "With the increases in cooperation between U.S. and Mexican authorities in recent years, we are taking the fight to our adversaries," Holder said.
Arrests took place in 38 cities, from Boston to Seattle, with 77 made in Dallas. The effort involved the Drug Enforcement Administration; the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Charges include drug and gun trafficking and money laundering.
Analysts said the operation appeared designed to allay skepticism among Mexico's political leaders about the U.S. government's commitment to Mexico's crackdown on cartels. The drug-related violence has taken about 15,000 lives since President Felipe Calderón entered office in 2006. Mexican authorities have arrested 80,000 drug suspects, and Washington has responded with $1.4 billion in aid under the Merida initiative, but some in Mexico have grown frustrated with the U.S. market's continuing demand for illegal drugs.
"Many Mexican leaders have viewed the Merida initiative as too little and too late," said George W. Grayson, a Mexico specialist at the College of William and Mary who has written about La Familia, "and so Washington is trying to make clear that we are good faith, genuine partners in the war against drugs."
La Familia, the newest of Mexico's five major cartels, has become entrenched in many U.S. cities after flourishing in Mexico through entrepreneurial zeal, brutality and promises to spin drug profits into "divine justice," or social benefits for its impoverished home state.
La Familia opposes the sale of methamphetamine to Mexicans, for example, but is responsible for the "vast majority" of the lucrative drug entering the United States from Mexico, said Michele M. Leonhart, acting DEA administrator.
The cartel, based in the southwestern Mexico state of Michoacan, has also benefited from a splintering of older cartels, and its effort to gain social legitimacy is combined with a savage program to kill, coerce and corrupt security and government personnel, Mexican analysts said.
In Washington, Holder said that U.S. authorities have targeted La Familia for 44 months. Under the effort, called Project Coronado, the federal government has arrested 1,186 people and seized $32.8 million, 2,710 pounds of methamphetamine, 1,999 kilograms of cocaine, 29 pounds of heroin, 16,390 pounds of marijuana, 389 weapons and 269 vehicles.
U.S. authorities indicted, but did not arrest, La Familia's operational chief, Servando Gomez-Martinez -- known as La Tuta.
In the largest single strike at Mexican drug operations in the U.S., authorities arrested more than 300 people in a sting that demonstrates an upstart cartel's vast reach north of the border.
The tentacles of "La Familia" extend coast to coast and deep into America's heartland, with arrests announced Thursday in 38 cities from Boston to Seattle and from St. Paul, Minn., to Raleigh, N.C.
Drug deals went down in Oklahoma parking lots, suppliers were advised to weld drugs into tire rims for transport, and in the Dallas and Seattle areas, dozens of children were removed from houses where authorities found drugs, guns or cash derived from drug sales.
Perhaps more than any other cartel, La Familia projects a Robin Hood image. The Drug Enforcement Administration said the group is "philosophically opposed to the sale of methamphetamine to Mexicans, and instead supports its export to the United States for consumption by Americans."
Mexican police say the gang uses religion and family morals to recruit. The gang has hung banners in towns saying they do not tolerate drug use, or attacks on women or children.
One of the gang's alleged recruiters, detained last spring, ran drug rehabilitation centers, helping addicts to recover and then forcing them to work for the drug gang or be killed, according to Mexico Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna.
La Familia is rarely mentioned in the same breath as the handful of other Mexican gangs that control the flow of drugs into the United States, fueled by Colombian cocaine suppliers. The Sinaloa, Juarez, Gulf and Tijuana cartels have roots that go back many years, even decades.
But in its short history, La Familia is believed to have emerged as the biggest supplier of methamphetamine to the United States and, increasingly, a peddler of cocaine, marijuana and other drugs.
Complaints that were unsealed across the country portray an organization that spread deep into Middle America, down to small-time sales.
In Colorado, authorities seized 8 kilograms of cocaine, 3 pounds of methamphetamine and $313,785.
A federal grand jury has indicted 11 members or associates of La Familia from the Western Slope in Colorado, and six of them have been arrested so far, prosecutors said.
In Oklahoma, authorities seized about 20 pounds of methamphetamine, two pounds of cocaine, six weapons and several thousand dollars. They identified Ruben Garcia, 29, as a major supplier in the northeast part of the state.
Agents spotted Garcia and his partners dealing drugs over several months at restaurants, grocery stores and Wal-Mart parking lots in the Tulsa area, according to court documents. In one tapped phone call Oct. 9, Garcia counseled a supplier in Mexico who helped arrange a shipment in McAllen, Texas, that the easiest way to smuggle drugs is welded inside tire rims of vehicles.
Court records do not list an attorney for Garcia.
In North Carolina, targeted cells operated from the Raleigh area to the eastern cities of Rocky Mount and Greenville, a region with a large Hispanic population to help the targets blend in and quick access to three interstate highways. They made four arrests Wednesday but totaled 49 arrests over the past year.
In Nashville, after more than a year of surveillance, agents converged on a home when two people arrived in a Toyota Camry from Atlanta Aug. 14, according to a complaint. A search of the vehicle discovered hidden compartments that "contained nine similarly wrapped packages, each of which were the size of a kilogram of cocaine." One package tested positive for cocaine.
Inside the home, agents found drug ledgers, a money counter and a loaded pistol. At another home, they found about 50 pounds of marijuana, several loaded handguns and two bulletproof vests.
Texas Child Protective Services removed 20 children from houses in the Dallas area when authorities executed 44 search warrants, said James Capra, the DEA's special agent in charge in Dallas. All the homes where children were found had drugs, guns or cash derived from drug sales.
The sting reached into small towns hundreds of miles from Mexico.
Nine arrests were made in Monroe, Wash., with a population of about 16,000 and home to the state's largest prison about 25 miles northeast of Seattle. None seemed to be doing any retail drug dealing, Monroe police Cmdr. Steve Clopp said.
"I would say that they were well-integrated members of the community," Clopp said. "A lot of them keep up the everyday appearance of work and family."
In the Inland Empire, a cluster of east Los Angeles suburbs where 25 people were arrested and 156 pounds of methamphetamine seized, most suspects are illegal immigrants from Mexico who came to the United States to work for La Familia, said Stephen Azzam, DEA assistant special agent in charge in Riverside, Calif.
Methamphetamine was shipped from the Inland Empire, an area with three interstate highways, to cities including Atlanta and Chicago, Azzam said.
La Familia is known as unusually violent, even by Mexico's standards.
After the arrest of one of its leaders in July in Mexico, the cartel launched an offensive against federal forces, killing 18 police officers and two soldiers over a weekend. In the worst attack, 12 federal agents were slain and their tortured bodies piled along a roadside as a warning for all to see.
"They are one of the most violent, if not the most violent, cartel in Mexico right now," said Michael Braun, who retired as the DEA's chief of operations last year.
La Familia operates methamphetamine "superlabs" in Mexico that produce up to 100 pounds of the drug in eight hours, a sharp contrast to small-time labs in the United States that have supplied American addicts, said Braun.
The organization was founded around 2004 and really took off in 2006, Braun said.
The arrests in places such as Atlanta, Dallas and Los Angeles suggest that its U.S. distribution network is sophisticated, said Scott Stewart, an analyst at the Stratfor consultancy in Austin, Texas, who follows the Mexican drug trade.
"Those are beautiful interstate (highway) hubs," Stewart said. "It's looking they have ramped up very quickly."
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