U.S., Mexico take steps to fight drugs at border

CUERNAVACA, Mexico - U.S. and Mexican officials said yesterday that they would soon name a group to develop strategies for stopping the cross-border flow of weapons and drugs.

Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina-Mora, emerging from a conference with U.S. officials, said more meetings were needed to develop plans to bring warring drug cartels under control along the border.

He announced plans to begin checking 10 percent of the vehicles entering his country from the United States for illegal weapons.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. met privately for several hours with Medina-Mora, Interior Minister Fernando Gomez-Mont, and Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna.

The officials worked out an agreement that might be signed when President Obama visits Mexican President Felipe Calderon later this month.

More than 9,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico since Calderon took office in 2006.

Holder said the United States was not seeking to change any of its gun laws as part of the effort to curb weapons smuggling. "I don't think our Second Amendment will stand in the way of what we have begun," he said.

Until recently, the United States did not regularly inspect southbound vehicles, and the Mexicans did not scan the license plates of cars coming into the country. Now Mexico will begin scanning vehicles for drugs and money and will begin using intelligence to target the right vehicles, Medina-Mora said.

Mexico will also rely on the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to use technology to help trace the illegal sale of guns.

The development came on the same day that an heir to one of Mexico's most notorious drug empires was grabbed by police as he exercised in a Mexico City park.

Vicente Carrillo Leyva, 32, allegedly inherited a top position in the Juarez cartel from his father, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who was nicknamed "the Lord of the Skies" for sending jets of cocaine to the United States.

The father was considered Mexico's No. 1 drug trafficker when he died in 1997 during plastic surgery to change his appearance.

The U.S. Embassy said yesterday that the embattled remnant of his cartel was still "one of Mexico's most ruthless organized criminal gangs, which controls one of the primary transportation routes for illegal drug shipments into the United States."

Prosecutors said Carrillo Leyva was second only to his uncle Vicente Carrillo Fuentes in the gang, whose battles with upstart cartels have fed a bloodbath that saw 1,600 people killed in its home base of Ciudad Juarez last year.

Just a week ago, Mexico's government posted a $2.1 million reward for Carrillo Leyva and 23 other top cartel suspects. Another figure on the list has already fallen captive, as have two alleged cartel sidekicks facing smaller bounties.