Mexicans wielding military rifles and dressed in uniforms of police enforcement but actually part of drug cartel. Mexican home invasion in Phoenix last year carried out by Mexican attackers wielding military-style rifles and dressed in uniforms similar to a Phoenix police tactical unit. (Note ASU auto license)

Drug Violence Coming Into Arizona From Mexico

PHOENIX (By Randal C. Archibold, NYT) February 23, 2009 —  The raging drug war among cartels in Mexico and their push to expand operations in the United States has led to a wave of kidnappings, shootings and home invasions in Arizona, state and federal officials said at a legislative hearing on Monday.

The drug trade has long brought violence to the state, which serves as a hub as illicit drugs and illegal immigrants are smuggled to the rest of the nation.

Over all, in this city and surrounding Maricopa County, homicides and violent crime decreased last year. But the authorities are sounding an alarm over what they consider changing tactics in border-related crime that bear the marks of the violence in Mexico.

A home invasion here last year was carried out by attackers wielding military-style rifles and dressed in uniforms similar to a Phoenix police tactical unit. The discovery of grenades and other military-style weaponry bound for Mexico is becoming more routine, as is hostage-taking and kidnapping for ransom, law enforcement officials said.

The Phoenix police regularly receive reports involving a border-related kidnapping or hostage-taking in a home.

The Maricopa County attorney’s office said such cases rose to 241 last year from 48 in 2004, though investigators are not sure of the true number because they believe many crimes go unreported.

The violence in Mexico — where more than 6,000 people were killed in the last year in drug-related violence, double the number of the previous year — is “reaching into Arizona, and that is what is really alarming local and state law enforcement,” said Cmdr. Dan Allen of the State Department of Public Safety.

“We are finding home invasion and attacks involving people impersonating law enforcement officers,” Commander Allen told the State Senate Judiciary Committee, whose chairman, Jonathan Paton of the Tucson area, called the hearing. “They are very forceful and aggressive. They are heavily armed, and they threaten, assail, bind and sometimes kill victims.”

Chief David Denlinger of the State Department of Public Safety said while tactics like home invasions might not be new in the drug trade, “they are getting more prevalent.”

“Border crimes are not just on the border,” Chief Denlinger said, pointing to posters showing weapons, drugs and people who had been held hostage.

The hearing comes at a time of heightened anxiety in the United States brought on by the escalating violence in Mexico and a federal report in December that said the Mexican cartels “maintain drug distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors in at least 230 U.S. cities.”

The report from the National Drug Intelligence Center said the cartels posed “the greatest drug trafficking threat to the United States; they control most of the U.S. drug market and have established varied transportation routes, advanced communications capabilities and strong affiliations with gangs in the United States.”

The violence in Mexico has come from a government crackdown on the cartels and a war among them over turf and trading routes to the United States.

Still, federal authorities have said there is no sign that the pattern of beheadings and mutilations of victims and the regular killings of law enforcement officers that characterize the violence in Mexico has arrived in the United States.

In some cases, the connection to the cartels in American cities are tenuous or not fully understood, law enforcement officials have said.

But in this border state, the anxiety is acute and the ties to drug and human smuggling strong.

The police and federal agents regularly seize large loads of cocaine, marijuana and other drugs smuggled in vehicles and sometimes on the backs of couriers and illegal immigrants linked to drug organizations.

At the same time, the vast majority of the weapons used in Mexico’s drug-related killings come from the United States, and Arizona is a top exporter.

Terry Goddard, the Arizona attorney general, said his office had sought to clamp down on money wire transfers through the state that were believed to help finance the smuggling of drugs and people.

“They send us drugs and people, and we send them guns and cash,” Mr. Paton said in an interview.

Mr. Paton, a Republican who favors gun rights, said he was considering the possibility of introducing legislation intended to restrict “straw purchasers,” people who buy guns with legal documentation at shops and gun shows and then turn them over to drug traffickers.

Federal laws prohibit such purchases, but Mr. Paton said he believed adding state sanctions would provide more muscle in fighting the practice.

Mr. Paton said there were already bills pending in the Legislature focusing on border crime. Prompted by the discovery of a rash of so-called drop houses in and around Phoenix, where migrants have been held against their will, one bill would increase penalties for those caught smuggling people.