Powerful Drug Lords Meet in Mexican Border Town

The picture of powerful drug leaders holding a meeting to re-organize key territories of control in an apparent challenge to a rival cartel is one that conjures up images normally associated with a Hollywood gangster film.

However, according to reports stemming from intelligence documents originating from both sides of the border and obtained by the Mexico City-based daily newspaper Reforma that is precisely what happened this past June in the border town of Piedras Negras.  

This small town is located in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila right accross an even smaller Eagle Pass, Texas, which has a population under 50,000. 

The drug traffickers summit meeting featured the presence of many powerful leaders, who were there to divvy up two thirds of the Mexican territory, according to the binational intelligence reports.

The documents explain that the "capos" or drug leaders were traced back to their territories or, as they call them in Mexico, "plazas." It was concluded that Sonora, Sinaloa, Durango, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Zacatecas, the State of Mexico, Hidalgo, Veracruz and Jalisco were at stake during the high-level meeting, according to Mexican federal officials.

Reportedly among the attendees of renown capos included were the brother of presumptously dead Amado "Lord of the Skies" Carrillo Fuentes, Vicente "El Viceroy",  who now heads the Juarez cartel. While one of the Treviño Morales family members, Alejandro or Omar "El Z42" has undoubtedly vested interest in having been there.

The list goes on with Ruben o Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, aka “El Mencho,” of the Jalisco New Generation. And of course Hector Beltran Leyva was one of the few prominent drug kingpins absent in the meeting, although he sent a known and trusted confidant of his, Fausto Isidro Meza, “El Chapo Isidro” as his proxy. 

Drug policy expert Sanho Tree, who undertakes research for the D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies, told TeleSUR that, "it would be natural to find some sort of equilibrium in terms of plaza control as this reflects the desires of cartels to avoid turf wars." This is because turf wars run costly tolls which cut  into the profits of cartels and result in many fatal losses. 

“From a citizen's point of view, it is better to have a couple of big players and alliances rather than a checker board of a bunch of smaller cartels fighting amongst each other. The only thing worse than organized crime is disorganized crime,” Tree explained.

While Tree's reaction to the possibility of drug cartels attempting to further cooperation between each other was a lack of surprise, official reactions from Mexico to the reported meeting varied widely, including those who were alarmed and others who expressed renewed confidence of current Mexican security policies. 

Officials from drug-war-torn Tamaulipas, who requested anonymity, expressed concerns to Reforma that the re-organization discussed during the meeting would portend, “a new chaos,” that would not allow sufficient time for a “re-oriented security strategy.” 

Meanwhile, officials from the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), pointed to the meeting as an assuring sign that the current administration policies were working.  PRI Senator Omar Fayad told Reforma that the meeting reflected a sign of weakness resulting from action by federal security officials.

Since the four cartels principally attending the meeting have long aimed to challenge the dominance which the Sinaloa cartel currently maintains in Mexico, some news media reports have speculated that it could have marked the start of a new anti-Sinaloa cartel alliance. Most drug-policy experts consider the Sinaloa cartel to be the largest and most powerful drug trafficking organization in the world.

For a number of years, U.S. intelligence has reportedly considered the Sinaloa cartel to have been the victor of a bloody turf war which took place in Ciudad Juarez over control of the key border corridor and entryway into El Paso, Texas. Many experts consider the Juarez – El Paso border crossing to be the largest of its kind in the world. It is not known, however, if the Summer meeting also specifically aimed to challenge control over that key plaza.