U.S. cops hard at work in Mexico via clandestine informant network

The New York Times reports his morning that "American law enforcement agencies have significantly built up networks of Mexican informants that have allowed them to secretly infiltrate some of that country’s most powerful and dangerous criminal organizations." The Times says the informants "have helped Mexican authorities capture or kill about two dozen high-ranking and mid-level drug traffickers, and sometimes have given American counter-narcotics agents access to the top leaders of the cartels they are trying to dismantle."

Many of the informants have, or have had, connections to drug trafficking or other criminal enterprises. Often they are recruited as informants under the threat of pending or impending criminal charges in the United States. The U.S. has extradited and prosecuted many Mexican drug operatives.

According to today's article, Mexican officials and law enforcement agents are often "kept in the dark" about informant operations, "partly because of concerns about corruption among the Mexican police, and partly because of laws prohibiting American security forces from operating on Mexican soil." One U.S. expert quoted by the Times said "the Mexicans sort of roll their eyes" when they get the details.

A source interviewed by the Times justified the use of informants on strategic and pragmatic grounds. "Mexican organized crime groups have morphed from drug trafficking organizations into something new and far more dangerous. The Zetas now are active in extortion, human trafficking, money laundering, and increasingly, anything a violent criminal organization can do to make money, whether in Mexico, Guatemala or, it appears, the U.S,” he said.

Another official told the Times that "a DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agent’s job, first and foremost, is to get inside the body of those criminal organizations he or she is investigating. Nothing provides that microscopic view more than a host (informant) that opens the door.”

Footnotes:
Two weeks ago the U.S. Justice Dept. announced the breakup of an Iranian plot to murder foreign ambassadors in Washington, D.C. One of the arrested conspirators had contacted a Mexican sicario (hit man) to carry out the murders, and had wired him a down payment of $100,000 USD. The hit man was a DEA operative. Read the details here: http://mexicogulfreporter.blogspot.com/2011/10/us-busts-iranian-plot-to-assassinate.html.

The DEA said recently that despite continuing record levels of violence in Mexico, the Calderón anti-cartel offensive launched in December 2006 is having measurable positive impact in the United States: http://mexicogulfreporter-supplement.blogspot.com/2011/11/calderon-strategy-against-drug-cartels.html.