Mexico's violent northeastern corner near the U.S. border will get a boost in troops and federal police as the government tries to wrest back control of an area that has become a battleground for two rival drug cartels. 
 
 In this photo taken Nov. 19, 2010 Mexican army soldiers patrol the streets in Ciudad Mier, Tamaulipas State, Mexico. Mexico will send more troops and federal police in an operation called "Coordinated... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this Nov. 19, 2010 Mexican Navy marines stand next to a wall painted with portraits of Mexican Revolution heroes Emiliano Zapata, right, and Francisco I. Madero at the entrance to the city of Ciudad... (Associated Press) 
 
 Nuevo Leon Governor Rodrigo Medina de la Cruz, left, talks to Mexico's Interior Secretary Jose Francisco Blake during a press conference in Mexico City, Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2010. Mexico will send more... (Associated Press) 
 
 The new mission, "Coordinated Operation Northeast," aims to reinforce government authority in Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon _ the two states under the heaviest attack since the formerly allied Gulf and Zetas gangs split. 
 
 The government also wants to keep the cartels from regrouping after the loss of key leaders, federal police spokesman Alejandro Poire said Wednesday. 
 
 But Poire gave no details on the operation, saying only that there will be a "significant" increase in forces. He answered no questions at a media briefing with Mexico security officials and the two state governors, and the government later said it would not provide numbers for its forces now in the area or the level after the reinforcements because of security reasons. 
 
 Intense cartel violence has gripped Nuevo Leon in and around the industrial, high-tech hub of Monterrey, once one of Mexico's safest large cities. Bloodshed also is high across all of Tamaulipas, which shares a 560-mile (900-kilometer) border with Texas and some of the busiest border crossings in the world opposite the U.S cities of Laredo, McAllen and Brownsville. 
 
 "These are geographic factors that have made the area a coveted route for organized crime in the trafficking of drugs and people and in receiving illegal money and arms coming into Mexico," Poire said. 
 
 Since the falling out between the Gulf cartel and the Zetas, its former arm of assassins, Nuevo Leon has seen regular gang roadblocks on city streets, assassinations of local politicians and shootouts and grenade attacks that have killed innocent civilians. 
 
 In Tamaulipas, where mayors and a gubernatorial candidate have also been killed, gang violence has closed schools, made roads unsafe for travel and blocked some government oil workers from reaching installations. 
 
 Earlier this month, residents fleeing gunbattles in the state's once-picturesque town of Ciudad Mier ended up in Mexico's first drug-war refugee shelter. In another part of Tamaulipas, 72 migrants trying to reach the United States were found slaughtered earlier in the year. 
 
 Residents have accused the federal and state government of being conspicuously absent, leaving them in the crossfire of military-strength weaponry wielded by drug gunmen. 
 
 Local media has been intimidated or co-opted out of covering the drug war, leaving Tamaulipas cities such as Reynosa to warn residents during outbreaks of violence via Twitter and Facebook. 
 
 Poire said government forces are present and touted recent military and police blows against the two cartels: the killing earlier this month of Gulf cartel leader Antonio "Tony Tormenta" Cardenas Guillen, the 2008 capture of a founding member of the Zetas, Jaime "The Hummer" Gonzalez Duran, and the arrest of eight presumed Zeta members in the killing of the migrants. 
 
 Katherine Cesinger, spokeswoman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry, praised the buildup. 
 
 "We are encouraged by these reports that Mexico is increasing the patrol presence along their border in an effort to shutdown the ruthless drug cartels," she said. "We share the common goal of keeping our communities safe." 
 
 The Mexican government has similar operations in other parts of country, including Chihuahua state, where the border city of Ciudad Juarez across from El Paso, Texas, is considered one of the most violent cities in the world. Such efforts so far have failed to quell drug violence, which has killed 28,000 people since President Felipe Calderon launched his offensive on organized crime in late 2006. 
 
 An opinion poll released this week said 49 percent of Mexicans believe the government's drug war has been a failure, compared to 33 percent who said it has been a success. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Associated Press writer Terry Wallace contributed to this report from Dallas, Texas. ||||| Share Print Share 
 
 His assassins had already snatched two of Garcia's officers; they drove the three 10 miles away to a dirt road near a natural gas well and shot them down. 
 
 “He was never involved in things, so we never thought this could happen,” Alberto Lopez, the mayor of this village of just 2,500, said of the 62-year-old Garcia's killing last week. “We don't have gangsters in these towns, we don't have people involved in drugs. So people are very afraid.” 
 
 After four years of relative calm, Mexico's gangland battles have exploded anew in the industrial cities and ranch lands along the lower Rio Grande. Dozens have been killed in the past seven weeks throughout the triangle defined by the river's mouth, the cities of Laredo and metropolitan Monterrey. The skirmishes here reflect a bitter and presumably lasting split between the so-called Gulf Cartel drug smuggling organization and its vicious former enforcers, known as the Zetas. 
 
 Dispute over towns 
 
 Much of Monterrey and the towns between it and the border at Laredo and Reynosa have long been considered Zeta land. Mexican officials say the Gulf Cartel's bosses, now allied with the La Familia criminal organization from central Michoacan state, are taking that territory back. 
 
 “A large number of La Familia members are deployed in towns controlled by the Gulf Cartel,” Ramon Pequeno, head of the federal police's anti-narcotics units, told reporters Monday. “The same towns that are being disputed with the Zetas.” 
 
 An official with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said the Sinaloa Cartel, Mexico's most powerful drug trafficking organization, has also joined the alliance against the Zetas, whose rise to power has come to threaten all three of the cartels. 
 
 “It's an issue of a common enemy,” said Will Glaspy, head of the DEA's office in the border town of McAllen. 
 
 Rival gangsters have clashed frequently with each other and police and federal troops in Reynosa across from McAllen, in upriver towns, and in villages along and between the expressways leading from the border to Monterrey. 
 
 Eight suspected gangsters were killed early Sunday when one band attacked another at a bar in Los Guerra, a Rio Grande village about 50 miles upriver from McAllen. Killers massacred seven other people Easter weekend in another bar in Tampico, the Gulf port city 200 miles south of Brownsville. 
 
 “They are on top of us and while they are fighting, a stray bullet can catch some innocents,” said a Roman Catholic priest in one of the besieged towns. “You are entering the wolf's mouth.” 
 
 Thousands have died 
 
 Local media have been terrorized into near silence about the killings. So citizens and local officials alike find themselves largely clueless observers, and sometime hapless victims, in the latest front of many-sided warfare that has killed 18,000 people in scarcely three years. 
 
 “They kill a person faster than killing a cockroach,” Juan Triana, a senior city official in Reynosa, said of the dangers. “Because killing a cockroach dirties their boots.” 
 
 The fighting started in late February, about the time former Gulf Cartel boss and Zeta patron Osiel Cardenas was sentenced to 25 years in prison by a Houston federal court. 
 
 The light sentence was presumably in exchange for Cardenas' cooperation with prosecutors and U.S. law enforcement. 
 
 With the traditional media gagged by gangster threats and officials' desire to downplay events, common citizens have largely taken to reporting on the violence on their own though You Tube, Twitter and blog postings. 
 
 State and local officials first blamed such “social networks” for fueling unfounded fear. 
 
 But Reynosa officials started twittering in late February about gunbattles and other “risky situations.” And the official Web site of Tamaulipas state, of which Reynosa is the largest city, has begun carrying news about such clashes. 
 
 “It could be a gunshot, it could be a grenade, it could be a threat,” Triana, who directs Reynosa's Twitter efforts, said of what merits a tweeted alarm. “We are just trying to advise people so they don't run risks.” 
 
 The Associated Press contributed to this report. 
 
 dudley.althaus@chron.com
– Mexico says it is deploying extra troops and federal police to reassert its authority in two states bordering the US. Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon have become a battleground for the Gulf and Zetas cartels, and cities like Monterrey, once considered relatively safe, have seen a huge surge in violence. The government says the mission, Coordinated Operation Northeast, will also seek to prevent cartels from regrouping after the arrest of leaders, the AP reports. One cartel boss, Carlos Montemayor, has been arrested in Mexico City. Montemayor took control of the Beltran Leyva cartel after the arrest of US citizen Edgar "La Barbie" Valdez Villarreal. Police say he has told them that men under his command were responsible for the murder of 20 tourists near Acapulco last month, the Los Angeles Times reports. The men had been mistaken for members of the rival La Familia cartel.