SECRETO A VOCES

For sheer balls, the guy's strategy was unmatched.

For more than a year, Luis Camacho Pasos, a Sinaloan, would infiltrate rival smuggler gangs in Phoenix, pretending to be an illegal immigrant in need of a coyote. Once the smugglers moved him into Phoenix, he would tell the smugglers that they needed to call his wife to get the rest of the fee. They'd place the call and that's when his own gang would get the drop on them, over-powering the smugglers, out-gunning them, out-thinking them on their own turf, west Phoenix.

The smugglers couldn't stop him; neither could the cops, not for a while anyway. After three months raiding the Sinaloans, Camacho's now doing 15 years in state prison, but there's plenty more of him, although his case was unique because of his infiltration into the smuggler rings.

Last month, a group of men dressed in T-shirts of the Phoenix police department pretended to serve a search warrant on a home; fully decked out in body armor and Kevlar helmets, sporting AR-15s.

Right-wing conspiratists wanted to believe there was something special about the attack they launched, screaming about Mexican Army soldiers raiding Arizona.

Someone even grabbed an internal e-mail from the police union, claiming it showed how sophisticated the hitmen were. Strategic Forecasting, Inc., the international security consulting agency that U.S. agencies depend on for intelligence, had an utter hey-day with the act, writing it up as if it were a new attack on the Alamo.

As usual with these things, it was juicy but untrue. Some of these people don't seem to understand that the frightening issue behind these attacks isn't the bizarre, but the commonality. These kinds of attacks have been going down in Phoenix nearly every day this year, detectives say.

And I can't understand why the Sinaloans put up with it.

The most powerful drug cartel in Latin America has so easily dominated Ciudád Juárez, eliminating more than 500 people from the Carrillo Fuentes cartel; snatching a city that the Carrillo dynasty held for more than 30 years in less than seven months of war.

"It's nearly over now," says a Justice Department source monitoring Sonora and Chihuahua.

"The only ones getting killed now are drug dealers, little people, irrelevants," he says. "Chapo's got it pretty well in the bag."

The only thing left, as the Sinaloans say, is the corrido.

Which leads me back to Phoenix. How is it possible that La Republica can so easily destroy a rival drug lord like Vicente Carrillo but get run roughshod by little more than street gangs in Phoenix?

Any other city in either country, the Sinaloans won't stand for someone ripping them or trying to move in; but in Phoenix, it's small-time guys like Pablo Duran Guzmán, who in 2007, would simply tackle rival smuggling groups off the side of the road, the purist, most primitive bajador style attacks you can think of. The response from the Sinaloans? Nothing.

“It could be that they simply don’t care; consider how much they’re pulling in off their loads,” speculates a prosecutor with the Mexican Federal Attorney General’s Office in Hermosillo.

“They’re losing what, a few loads of pollos, maybe some weed, a little coke? Cost of doing business,” he says.

Maybe, but they’re also losing respect, at the least, mine, at the most, that of street gangs working U.S. cities.

The Phoenix detective grinned a little when I suggested his police department allow the Sinaloans to handle their own business, work over the gangs and bring back a bit of the peace that organized crime should offer.

He can't say it, but he's thinking what I'm thinking, back the cops off, let the Sinaloans take care of their own problems. Bring some control back to Phoenix.

For years now, the Sinaloans have claimed Phoenix and Arizona in general as their own. I don’t have a problem with that, someone has to and better them than some Cananea hillbilly.

But it’d be nice if they acted like they cared once in a while. From a public relations standpoint, you're appearing weak and that can't be a good thing for anybody.

-- Michel Marizco

*With apologies to The Joker.