Sting Operation Nets 41 Officers Suspected of Selling Information to Drug Dealers

By Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
 

MEXICO CITY, April 11 -- The 41 policemen detained Wednesday in northwestern Mexico, including top officers from
Tijuana and Tecate, were snared in a sting operation that officials said today signaled the continuing disintegration of the violent
Tijuana drug cartel.

The police officers were being questioned for selling information to the cartel. Until recently, the cartel headed by the Arellano
Felix brothers operated with near impunity in and around Tijuana, moving billions of dollars of cocaine into the United States.

The detained officers include many of the highest-ranking police officers in Baja California state, including the commander of
daily operations in the Tijuana city police force, the police chief of Tecate and those in charge of homicide and kidnapping units.

Cartel members are believed to have killed hundreds of people since the 1980s, but rarely were their actions punished. Some
of the officers are believed to have been trained by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Mexican officials said tonight.

The detained officers were among about 200 from several northern Mexican cities lured to a state police academy in Tecate,
about 30 miles east of Tijuana, to attend what they thought was a training session. The officers were asked to leave their
weapons at the door. Dozens of helmeted soldiers and federal police entered the room, handcuffing many of them.

Forty-one officers were taken on military planes Wednesday night to Mexico City, where they remained locked up.

Jose Campos Murillo, spokesman for the federal attorney general's office, said the surprise action was "another strike" against
drug trafficking.

U.S. and Mexican federal anti-drug officials have long said that the Tijuana cartel could not have sustained itself for so many
years without state and local police being paid to look the other way, escorting cocaine shipments and sometimes acting as
bodyguards for traffickers.

According to several Mexican media, the police were fingered by a recently arrested top lieutenant in the Tijuana cartel. Some
of the officers are believed to have helped the cartel operate a recently discovered 1,200-foot tunnel into the United States.

The sting operation came a month after the arrest of Benjamin Arellano Felix, the cartel's presumed leader, and two months
after the death of his brother, Ramon Arellano Felix, the gang's feared enforcer, who was shot to death Feb. 10 in the Pacific
resort city of Mazatlan.

Several other top lieutenants have been arrested in recent weeks, and U.S. and Mexican officials said they expected more
arrests. They said they believed the cartel was spinning out of control now that the Arellano Felix brothers were out of the
picture.

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