MEXICO CITY—A weekend of coordinated violence convulsed Mexico’s second-largest city and a famed beach resort town in the latest sign of the emergence of a powerful and aggressive drug cartel. Soldiers and police in Jalisco state searched on Sunday for three soldiers who have been missing since gunmen presumed to belong to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel shot down a Mexican army helicopter on Friday, killing three soldiers and injuring 12.
The chopper was shot down as soldiers, marines, and federal and state police began an operation to take down the Jalisco cartel, capture its leaders and improve security in the state, officials said.
“A new and military powerful cartel is appearing, and opening up a new front in the war against drugs in Guadalajara and Jalisco,” said Raul Benitez, a security analyst at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
The flare-up of violence in Guadalajara, a city of 1.5 million people in a metropolitan area of 4.5 million, and the resort town of Puerto Vallarta is the latest setback for the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto. The government has been determined to show that Mexico is a modern, emerging economy, but its inability to control areas where criminal gangs continue to exert control have frustrated these efforts.
“Guadalajara is not a little town in the middle of nowhere, and this shows the cartel has the logistics and power to paralyze a city,” said Jorge Chabat, a security analyst at the CIDE think tank in Mexico City.
The downing of the helicopter came as cartel gunmen seized buses and cars and set them on fire to block major highways and roads in 39 places across the state, including the capital Guadalajara.
Cartel gunmen set fire to 11 bank branches and five gasoline stations across the state. The cartel also blocked roads in three neighboring states. Seven people died in the day’s violence.
In the past two years, Jalisco has been relatively quiet as Mexico’s government dealt with security crises in states such as Guerrero, where 43 students were kidnapped and believed to have been killed, and in Michoacán, where thousands of troops were sent in after ranchers and farmers took up arms against the Knights Templar cartel.
The Mexican government’s relative success in capturing drug bosses and weakening or destroying rival organizations may have allowed the relatively small Jalisco cartel to grow unchecked, some analysts said.
Since Mr. Peña Nieto took power in 2012, his government has captured or killed many leading drug bosses, including Joaquin Guzman, the leader of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, who was captured last year. He is more commonly known as “El Chapo.”
The government has largely dismantled the Knights Templars cartel, which ruled neighboring Michoacán state almost as a parallel government. It has also broken up the Gulf Cartel and rival Zeta Cartel, whose turf war ravaged the northern border state of Tamaulipas.
Fragments of the two cartels continue to fight for dominance in Tamaulipas, where shootouts between gangs are common.
“The government’s operations have been successful,” said Mr. Benitez. “They have destroyed the Sinaloa cartel, the Knights Templars and the Zetas, but that leads to the birth of other very powerful organizations, which fill the vacuum of the organizations destroyed by the government.”
The Jalisco New Generation Cartel’s willingness to confront Mexico’s army and government means it will quickly become a priority target for the government.
“The criminal group responsible for today’s events will be dismantled, as has happened to other organized-crime groups,” Mr. Peña Nieto wrote on his authorized Twitter account on Friday.
The changing dynamics of Mexico’s drug war fanned the violence affecting Jalisco as well as cities near the Texas border, including Matamoros and Reynosa, said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, who studies Mexican security issues at the University of Texas at Brownsville.
“We are now seeing factions or smaller groups, which nevertheless have a great capacity to respond because they are very well armed,” she said.
The Jalisco cartel’s latest offensive follows another large-scale attack in April, in which presumed members firing grenade launchers and assault rifles killed 15 Jalisco state police officers and wounded another five in an ambush near Puerto Vallarta.
The cartel was formed in 2010 after federal forces killed Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel, a lieutenant in the Sinaloa cartel who controlled the Guadalajara area.
The areas the Jalisco cartel controls sit astride important transport and production centers for cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana.
In one of the most gruesome episodes of Mexico’s drug war, members of the Jalisco cartel claimed responsibility for killing 35 alleged members of the Zeta gang, whose bodies were dumped on a main avenue of the gulf port of Veracruz in 2011.
Mexico is a failed state and getting worse. Pretty soon we'll have full blown cartels running S. California, New Mexico, and Arizona. Bush43 and Obama have failed us completely. Reagan made a huge huge mistake on illegal immigration in the 80s... I only see things getting worse and worse.
But, it is 0bama's turn to destroy America now.
