Mexican gangbangers throw grenade into Texas cop bar

Mexican street gangs deeply rooted on U.S. side of Mexico border

MCALLEN, Texas (Reuters) – Homeowner Cosme Liscano is fed up with the
gangs in his neighborhood in this Texas town near the Mexican border.


"This has been going on for three or four years now, they've been
selling drugs," Liscano, 55, told Reuters as he stood in front of his
house as members of the local gang enforcement unit frisked several
suspects.


As violence spirals across the border in Mexico, law enforcement
officials on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas
say
they have not seen significant spillover.


But while American border towns have not seen anything remotely
approaching the blood-stained carnage of some north Mexican cities
where rival drug cartels are in a high-stakes war that killed over
6,000 people last year, criminal street and prison gangs have long
been a way of life in south Texas.


And while the links they may have to the Mexican cartels are often
murky there are concerns that the drug lords to the south can tap
this
ready-made criminal infrastructure for a range of nefarious purposes.


In semi-rural Hidalgo County which lies to the north of the Rio
Grande
River separating Texas and Mexico, Sheriff Guadalupe Trevino reckons
that there are about two dozen hardcore gangs operating -- a
staggering number for a county with about 750,000 people.


"We have a serious gang problem here and have for a long time ... I
believe we have more gangs than any other county on the border,"
Trevino told Reuters.


The extent of the problem -- the gangs often keep their fighting
among
themselves -- is hard to comprehend driving past citrus orchards or
down the busy roads leading to the border. Some of the towns here are
among the safest in the country.


But driving in poor, run-down neighborhoods in an unmarked SUV,
heavily armed members of Trevino's elite gang enforcement unit point
out gang graffiti scrawled on the sides of ramshackle homes. "Brown
Pride" and "Tri-City Bombers" are among the many gangs competing for
local turf.


The unit pulls over one heavily tattooed and shabbily dressed young
man walking with a limp. It transpires that he has a small amount of
marijuana on him in violation of his parole and so he is arrested,
cuffed and put in the SUV. The limp is from an old gunshot wound.


"He says he's not a gang member but look at those tattoos," says one
member of the unit, who can read affiliation in the elaborate
tattoos.
The young man's occupation is listed as field worker, a low-wage and
physically hard job that probably makes gang work attractive.


Gangs and their culture of violence, drugs and crime are one of
America's pressing social ills. But in the borderlands the problem
has
an urgency that has federal investigators worried.


"In the United States the local gangs play a major role in the
distribution of the drugs brought in from Mexico. In southern
California there has been significant cooperation between the drug
cartels and the gangs there," said Matthew J. Desarno, acting unit
chief of the Safe Streets and Gang Unit at Federal Bureau of
Investigation headquarters.


"We believe that the gangs in Texas are following that (southern
California) model to establish links with the cartels to expand their
own business operations ... Gang members will do what is profitable,"
he told Reuters by phone.


In other small border towns such as Douglas in Arizona, hardened
gangs
from Los Angeles are carving out turf as part of a scramble to make
money from the tons of illegal drugs pouring north from Mexico each
month.


NO HONOR AMONG THIEVES


Investigators and police say cross-border links between the cartels
and gangs face one obstacle more formidable than the Rio Grande
River:
trust.


The cartels will deal with the U.S. gangs on some levels but there
are
clear lines in the sand. Business stays in the family.


"The gangs are a resource for them but not their primary resource.
I've been working this for 37 years and the Mexican drug dealer is a
very parochial individual. He will rather deal with a family member
than someone just entering the business," said Sheriff Trevino.


The FBI's Desarno says for example that the Mexican drug lords would
not entrust an American gang with the task of bringing large
quantities of cash -- the profits of their trade -- back to Mexico.


But there are worrying signs of cross-border cooperation.


A live hand grenade traced back to a Mexican cartel stash was tossed
onto the pool table of a bar frequented by off-duty police officers
in
January in the Hidalgo town of Pharr. The pin was left in it
apparently by mistake so it did not go off.


"That grenade shows there is some sort of association between one of
our local gangs and the Mexican cartels," said Sheriff Trevino --
though he said the extent remained unclear.


One thing that is also clear is that the cartels are running a lot of
drugs up through this neck of Texas.


At the Hidalgo County Sheriff's Annex building in the town of
Edinburg
roughly 4,000 pounds of seized marijuana and other drugs lie stacked
in tight bundles. They represent hauls from several different
operations and seizures and would have a street price of millions of
dollars.


"All of this is from Mexico," said Sargeant Aaron Moreno, the head of
the gang enforcement unit, as he pointed to the bundles which emitted
a heavy and pungent odor.