MEXICO CITY — Mexico will send more troops and federal police to try to control drug violence that has spiraled into warfare in parts of the northeast along the U.S. border, the government said Wednesday.
The goal of “Coordinated Operation Northeast” is to reinforce government authority in the two states most heavily affected by a surge in violence following a split between the Gulf and Zetas drug gangs, federal police spokesman Alejandro Poire said.
The effort aims to keep the cartels from regrouping after the takedown of key leaders, he said. But in a media briefing with all federal security officials and governors of Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas, the affected states, Poire provided no details and answered no questions.
Cartel violence has plagued the industrial city of Monterrey in Nuevo Leon and all of Tamaulipas, where cartel firefights and violence this month sent residents fleeing the once-picturesque tourist town of Ciudad Mier and where 72 migrants were found slaughtered in an incident this year.
Tamaulipas shares 560 miles of Texas border, with some of the busiest border crossings in the world — Nuevo Laredo across from Laredo, Reynosa across from McAllen and Matamoros across from Brownsville.
Gov. Eugenio Hernandez said his state has been a major transit corridor for organized crime since Prohibition, when the U.S. outlawed alcohol in the 1920s and early ’30s. “But the situation has recently become much more complicated,” Hernandez said.
The government already has operations elsewhere, including Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez sits across from El Paso.
