THE BORDER REPORT

This morning, they killed the mother of the Special Forces trooper who died in the gunbattle with Arturo Beltrán Leyva. Killed her while she slept along with three others, all familymembers of Melquisedec Angulo Córdova.

This is the Beltrán Leyva legacy. No intelligence, no networks, pure violence. Mr. Angulo's name was one of the only ones published in the media as being one of the men who went after Beltrán. That must be how they got his name or they would have targeted someone who actually posed a threat, say, the commanding officer who organized the attack. Angulo didn't have a vendetta, he was serving his country when he went up against them.

A story has been widely circulated in the media of the Dec. 2 murder of Edgar Bayardo, the snitch who allegedly gave up Beltrán. My Mexican law enforcement people are telling quite a different tale that I'm trying to corroborate from up here but I know now that Bayardo was not the soplón.

This idiocy, of killing Angulo's mother, confirms some of that. There's no intel here, and I mean that in the smarts sense and in context of information-gathering. Getting to her and the rest of the family was a relatively simple thing. Follow the funeral to Paraíso, Tabasco and proceed from there. There was newspaper, radio and television coverage; the Internet's full of stories of what the man did for his country and how he died. The funeral was yesterday.

When the acting chief of security for Mexico City was murdered in 2008, Beltrán's people were blamed for that assassination as well. Inept killer, he used two guns but only one had a silencer.

The murder does nothing to further the Beltrán Leyva name. It is possible, of course, that some other organization, say, for instance, the Sinaloans, did the job in order to cast a shadow on their enemies. But the time to cast shadows and blame has passed. Beltrán is dead. And the Sinaloans, for all their own semblance of viciousness, maintain relatively decent public relations (so far, anyway). When the Beltrán people killed the son of a restaurant owner in a nasty shootout in Cd. Obregón a while back, a man came to visit the owner and told him his son's killing had been avenged. The next day, three Zetas turned up dead in the canals outside the city. I know the story because I talked to the owner and to a journalist in the area.

Bad, bad move. They're desperate, drowning; the cartel is headless. But a dead cascabel will still bite.