PIEDRAS NEGRAS, Coahuila — While the Los Zetas cartel has been keeping a low profile in this region, the constant seizures of drugs and weapons in the area point to the entity continuing their operations under the radar.
In recent months, the Coahuila government has stepped up their operations against Los Zetas in an effort to target their trafficking routes and distribution lines. As Breitbart Texas has reported in the past, the move has been successful in finding airstrips and seizing large drug shipments.
Los Zetas is the same drug cartel responsible for the mass incineration of victims in the rural town of Allende and Piedras Negras. As Breitbart Texas reported earlier this year after a three-month expose, Los Zetas had felt betrayed by one of their own and went about torturing and murdering anyone that was related or had any connections with that person. The victims were then incinerated at the Piedras Negras state prison or in private ranches where Los Zetas used clandestine ovens or 55-gallon drums to reduce the bodies to ash.
Despite the apparent crackdown by authorities, the Los Zetas cartel continues to move drugs and illegal immigrants into the poorly guarded regions of the west Texas border.
Initially with a group called Los GATES and then with Fuerza Coahuila, the elite police forces have taken a hard stance against the various operations run by Los Zetas. The move has managed to push the fearsome drug cartel into the shadows, bringing a sense security to the average residents on the various border cities in Coahuila. While citizens are once again able to take to the streets at night, there is an underlying current of fear tied to the Zeta members in the shadows that could return at any moment.
The constant arrests of street-level drug dealers point to the ongoing flow of drugs into this city, which has seen narcotics that had not been seen in the past. Synthetic drugs, methamphetamines and other unknown drugs have become a way for the Los Zetas to continue funding their operations locally as well as in pushing their drugs north.
One of the activities that has helped keep the money flowing for the Los Zetas cartel deals with smuggling large number of illegal immigrants from Central America and Mexico. Some of the immigrants are kidnapped in order to extort more money from their families. Other illegal immigrants that have been deported told Mexican authorities that they have been forced by Los Zetas to carry large drug bundles on their back through rough terrain.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to the Mexican States of Tamaulipas, Coahuila and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish. This article was written by Coahuila’s “J.M. Martinez” and Breitbart Texas’ Ildefonso Ortiz.