THE BORDER REPORT

HERMOSILLO, SONORA - Had breakfast this morning with one of the few cops along the border that I trust. He had some interesting speculations about the siege of Cananea. "Don't you find it odd that 17 gunmen managed to escape?" he says, pushing away the remnants of his machaca and scrambled eggs and lighting a cigarrette. The state government says 16 gunmen died in the hills of Arizpe, at a ranch called El Matadero. The operation started smart and ended up a complete fiasco. Some of the killers hid in the Cananea home of a woman, Silvia Alonso, purportedly a lover of Sonora's most wanted druglord, Francisco Hernandez Garcia, El Dos Mil. She was popped by federal investigators from Mexico City last week. Others joined the assault, driving in from a ranch between Caborca and Altar, Sonora, 70 miles south of Sasabe, Ariz. Kidnapping two girls wasn't part of the plan; neither was raiding a cellphone store, or getting lost in the mountains. It would have been comical if it weren't so deadly. "They got lost in the mountains and kidnapped a rancher in the area to make him show them the way," my source says. They cut off one of the rancher's ears when he wouldn't cooperate. A policeman from Hermosillo was arrested after cops found him driving toward Arizpe in a personal SUV, still wearing his uniform. The text messages on his cellphone were from the now-desperate gunmen. His orders were to come pick them up and extract them from the gunbattle. Seventeen gunmen were arrested but a roughly equal number are still being hunted in the mountains. "They need to be looking in Naco. I believe the killers are in Naco," my man says. An incident on May 14 may speak to that. Witnesses say that morning, just before dawn, eight men pulled up in a couple of different trucks. Armed with axes, they destroyed the gastanks of a Pemex station then pulled out. That was 48 hours before the siege began. It seems like a senseless vandalism except that the gas station belonged to "El Kalichi," Carlos Molinares Nunez, a marijuana trafficker from Naco. Molinares was picked up by the DEA in December at his wife's house in Tucson. What's never been explained to me is how the Mexican Federal Attorney General's Office managed to arrest him two weeks prior in Caborca. According to the PGR, they picked him up off a federal warrant out of Agua Prieta; the charge was migrant smuggling. Somehow, two weeks later, DEA manages to nab him in Tucson. "It could be that we handed him over," my source says. "Probably not, that kind of arrest is little more than a kidnapping and there'd be tremendous repercussions if Mexico started handing over suspects to your country." Molinares has been a target of Dos Mil since he tried to take the druglord out in a Fall 2005 hit on the Cananea-Naco highway. The hit failed, Dos Mil responded with a $1 million bounty on Molinares' head. Shortly after his arrest, someone set fire to his house in Naco. The message was clear: he and anyone who worked with him are persona non grata in Naco.

-- Michael Marizco