Who is fighting the zetas

Early that morning, 49 corpses with their heads, hands and feet cut off were left on a highway east of Monterrey. A note signed with the Zetas name was found amidst the carnage. However, messages released in the following days denied the Zetas had ordered the massacre. Investigators say Elizondo, arrested a week later as the alleged mastermind of the massacre, may have disobeyed top leaders in carrying it out.

None of the victims have been identified. Police said they could have been foreign migrants traveling through Mexico to the United States. Zetas assassins have been effective in fighting rivals. In the last year, the Zetas have pushed the Gulf Cartel out of much of its historic turf along the South Texas border and challenged the Sinaloa Cartel close to their homeland in the Pacific. In a single ambush in the Pacific state of Nayarit in , Zetas slaughtered 29 alleged Sinaloa Cartel operatives when the Zetas attacked with mounted machine guns and grenades.

Even more brutally, Zetas prisoners in February stabbed and bludgeoned to death 44 alleged Gulf Cartel inmates in a jail on the edge of Monterrey. After the attack, which officials say involved the help of corrupt guards, 35 Zetas prisoners escaped. Several other major cartels have formed an alliance to hit back against the Zetas with their own paramilitary units, U.

Gunmen from this group dropped 35 corpses of suspected Zetas on a highway in Veracruz state in September. In a video released after the incident, men in ski masks claimed they were going after the Zetas because of the harm their extortion and kidnapping rackets inflicted on communities.

Since President Felipe Calderon took power in and sent 50, soldiers after the drug cartels, Mexican and U. The most spectacular takedowns include Arturo Beltran Leyva, a breakaway boss of the Sinaloa Cartel, who was shot dead by Mexican marines in , and La Familia boss Nazario Moreno, whom police killed in Lazcano and his top deputies have proved to be more elusive, thanks to their military-style organization.

Zetas leaders also escape detection by using encrypted radio and Skype instead of telephones, the U. Mexican soldiers say they came close to nabbing Lazcano in a house on the outskirts of Monterrey in , but that after scouts warned him of the raid, he escaped the neighborhood in a bulletproof Jeep Cherokee.

With Lazcano still at large, the Zetas will pose a challenge for the next Mexican president. Calderon is barred by law from seeking re-election in the July polls. It is merely publishing information that comes its way, hoping that some action will be taken. The differences between this current operation and the one in the fall of reveal the evolution of cyber war in the underworld.

An important question is why did an Anonymous group return to battle Los Zetas in cyberspace? An initial supposition in my original article was that there might be a type of mutually assured destruction that existed between Anonymous and Los Zetas that deterred each group from attacking each other in the future. The group also believes it has adequate safeguards in place. According to its blog:. That is why personal safety becomes a habit of life.

We train our group on how to stay anonymous while on the Internet being that Organized Crime as well as the Government have specialized teams whose sole duty it is to try to locate members of groups like ours since they afraid that their corruption will be brought to the light of truth.

So that only that person is the target of government, political parties and organized crime. Moreover, it is apparent that the Mexican government has not increased its capacity to reform and strengthen law enforcement to a level that would preclude the formation of an extralegal group like Anonymous FreeAcuna.

If the police in Acuna or in the state of Coahuila were up to the task, Los Zetas would have been unable to strengthen their grip on the town. Without strong law enforcement institutions, individuals in insecure areas will at times take matters into their own hands.

This sort of environment is ripe for the emergence of an Anonymous group. A group of students saw an injustice and then linked themselves to Anonymous. In one of its blog postings that identifies a ranch used by the cartel in Coahuila, there is the following preface,. This split may still exist, but little can be done to instill discipline among the membership. It would appear that as long as liberating information leads to human liberation as defined by the collective , any group can brand itself as Anonymous affiliate.

Vigilantes, however, still often pay a price for their activities. They have a reflexive need to control information about them. Aside from attacking them physically or undermining their finances, striking at their anonymity is acutely painful for the cartel. Los Zetas may now choose to carry through on their threat to kill ten innocent people or it may choose to issue another similar threat in an effort to coerce the new Anonymous group to cease its operations. A fear during the initial clash in was that Los Zetas would kill random people, place the symbol of Anonymous—Guy Fawkes masks—on the corpses and make it appear as though they had tracked down some members of the collective.

No matter how Los Zetas respond, it will yet another demonstration of the weakness of the Mexican government; it is once again sidelined in this sort of conflict. However, given the latest split within Los Zetas, the publication of information about the activities of Los Zetas in the town of Acuna may leave it vulnerable to attacks by the opposing faction or rival cartels.

Mexican Ministry of Defence in Spanish. Institute for Economics and Peace. Image source, Getty Images. Most of the violence is attributed to fighting between rival drug gangs. Who are the main players? Image source, AFP. Mexico's government hailed the arrest of Zetas leader Miguel Angel Trevino as a great success.

What do the cartels do? Cartels control much of the heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines and marijuana trades. Who is fighting whom? Vigilante groups have entered the fray in Mexico, arguing that federal forces cannot protect them. Operations were often capped off with an unprecedented act of barbarism. Military training was fundamental to Los Zetas early success. The presence of Los Zetas in the Mexican criminal system raised the bar on both professionalism and violence.

Rival groups would need to improve their recruiting and training, and they would have to match Los Zetas in both brutality and violence.

Early to late was an important window of time for Los Zetas, as the group passed through an evolutionary phase that altered the fundamental structure of the paramilitary operative organization. Arturo Guzman Z-1 died in a shootout with soldiers in Matamoros on November 21, Heriberto Lazcano oversaw the recruitment of elite Special Forces units from Guatemala, known as Kaibiles, to bolster the protection of his own high-level operatives and assist with training and recruitment.

Visionary or not, Lazcano knew that the strength of the organization under his command would be directly connected to its ability to earn and protect revenue. These decisions and more produced the net effect of establishing Los Zetas as an independent organization while distancing it from the Gulf Cartel. As the two organizations grew apart, El Coss steadily captured command of the Gulf Cartel, and in a snap decision ordered in early the kidnap and murder of a Los Zetas operator in Reynosa.