THE BORDER REPORT

The killers from the Gulf Cartel, it appears, lack the flair for subletly of their Sinaloan counterparts. And that's unfortunate, both for them and for the journalists who write about them.

An El Universal reporter was openly threatened by a lawyer of the Cartél del Golfo who apparently called her last night and told her to make her peace with God after she cracked a story of the arrest of one their biggest strong arms, Daniel Perez Rojas.

The Sinaloans wouldn't be quite so blunt, they prefer carefully worded suggestions or outright hits.

Perez Rojas can't possibly be that offended by coverage of his arrest. In terms of the narco-underworld, he is one of the founding members of the Zetas, the gunhand of the Gulf Cartel. He, and 30 of his cohorts, deserted the Mexican Special Forces in the late 1990s and went to work for Osiel Cardenas Guillen, the godfather of the Gulf Cartel. Mexico extradited Cardenas to Houston late last year.  The Zetas trained at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning before deserting the Mexican Army.

Perez was popped about two weeks ago in Guatemala, after a gunfight that left ten men dead. If you recall, at the time, the Guatemalans were saying Shorty Guzmán had been arrested in the gunbattle.

Silvia Otero, the threatened reporter, is a federal government reporter and one  of the toughest journalists working in Mexico today.

I do not yet know who the member of the white powder bar, Omar Cerecedo, is.

To be fair to Perez, it was his lawyer who laid the threat on the reporter, but that cannot be a smart move right now. Not for the Gulf Cartel, who's been on the defensive for more than a year now. My guess is someone is not going to be happy with the narco-lawyer.