Drug Gang Chief Reported Killed in Mexico

By Elisabeth Malkin

MEXICO CITY — The Mexican authorities said Friday that a leader of the Gulf drug gang had been killed in Matamoros during a day marked by street fighting between soldiers and gunmen that paralyzed the city, which is across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Tex.

The gang leader, Antonio Ezequiel Cárdenas Guillén, who American and Mexican officials say took control of the cartel after his brother Osiel Cárdenas Guillén was arrested in 2003, was killed by Mexican marines, according to a statement by Alejandro Poiré, the security spokesman for the government.

Three other gang members were also killed, the statement said, and the Mexican Navy reported that two marines and a soldier died during the six-hour gun battle.

There was no official confirmation of any additional deaths. But the Matamoros newspaper El Expreso reported on its Web site that one of its reporters, Carlos Guajardo Romero, had been killed in the cross-fire shortly after noon as he covered the fighting.

Mexican officials shut down all three bridges that link Matamoros with Brownsville. They were closed for two hours but reopened on Friday night.

The United States Consulate in Matamoros tightened restrictions for its personnel, restricting personal travel from midnight to 6 a.m. The consulate recommended that Americans in Matamoros limit their travel to the daylight hours and urged them to be “vigilant and aware of their surroundings at all times.”

With much of the Mexican media silenced in Matamoros and Reynosa, which is across from McAllen, Tex., it was left to social networks to report what took place on Friday.

On one video posted on YouTube, gunfire and grenade explosions rang out across streets that were almost deserted. A battle for control between the Gulf gang and its onetime enforcement arm, the Zetas, has unleashed fierce fighting this year, and the Mexican authorities have stepped up their search for the leaders of both. Mr. Cárdenas, 48, controlled the Matamoros-Brownsville smuggling corridor for the Gulf gang and was responsible for shipping large cargos of marijuana and cocaine to the United States, the State Department has said.

source: http://www.nytimes.com