TRAFFICKING Drug war turns deadly in Mexico as police, informants turn up dead

Widespread corruption is blamed for the thriving, dangerous drug trade.
CANCUN, Mexico (AP) -- Behind the glitzy playgrounds of Cancun is a growing drug war, fueled by widespread police corruption, the partial disruption of once-popular trafficking routes through Haiti and a sudden turf battle between two of the country's main drug gangs.
Three years after authorities thought they broke up the cocaine trade here, nine people have turned up dead, revealing a smuggling ring involving corruption at all levels of government and that took even federal investigators by surprise.
The discovery brings back memories of the dark days of the 1990s, when one gang -- the Juarez cartel -- moved huge amounts of cocaine along Mexico's Caribbean coast, allegedly with the protection of the state's former governor, Mario Villanueva, arrested in 2001 on drug charges.
But now, a shadowy chain of events involving several gangs has led to the killing of three federal agents and two police informants, the kidnapping and wounding of two federal investigators, and the discovery of four as yet unidentified bodies in the trunk of a burned car.
More than a dozen local and federal police agents have been arrested -- including the wounded pair -- adding to mounting evidence that police, business and local power figures are linked to the drug trade.
"It's like a little game to see who can get the drugs first" between the army, the navy, or traffickers in speed boats, said Donald Morgan, a fisherman and tour guide who moved to the coast from Washington state in 1976.
Describing shipments of drugs dumped from passing aircraft into the sea, he said: "It goes on all the time."
Bound for America
The drugs are destined for the United States, not the millions of Americans who visit Cancun annually. U.S. officials say there have been no reports so far of U.S. tourists caught up in the wholesale Gulf Coast drug trade and accompanying violence.
The trade here revolves around plastic-wrapped bales of Colombian cocaine tossed from small planes to waiting speedboats. Once ashore, the cocaine is put aboard trucks or airplanes for the trip north.
Mainly the victims and players have been Mexican police and police informants -- though exactly why they were killed remains unclear.
Federal prosecutors say only that "the drug traffickers reacted violently, and began looking for something they thought the federal agents had."
Local officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said traffickers thought police had stolen a shipment of 11 pounds of heroin during a Nov. 9 raid on a house in Cancun.
A local columnist, Renan Castro, said the drug gangs wanted a computer disk police seized during the raid that allegedly contained the names of businessmen who launder money for the cartels. Prosecutors say they have no evidence such a list exists.
The two wounded agents said they were kidnapped -- and apparently interrogated -- by traffickers looking for whatever they had lost. But Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha said prosecutors have found inconsistencies between the two accounts.
'Cartelitos'
Similar crackdowns in the past apparently shifted trafficking patterns only temporarily. Mexico's top organized crime prosecutor, Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, said that following Villanueva's arrest in 2001, traffickers began running cocaine through Haiti, as they had in the 1970s.
Perhaps 10 percent to 15 percent of shipments went to the Caribbean nation until political upheavals and a devastating tropical storm forced some of those shipments back to Mexico this year.
Bruce Bagley, professor of International Studies at the University of Miami, said the defeat of Mexico's ruling party in national elections four years ago also broke up old, well-established lines of corruption.
The new groups are seeking protection at the state and municipal level, Bagley noted.