300 arrested in swoop on US drugs cartel

In the largest single strike at Mexican drug operations in the US, authorities arrested more than 300 people in a sting that demonstrates a young cartel’s vast reach north of the border.

The tentacles of La Familia extend coast to coast and deep into America’s heartland, with arrests announced in 38 cities from Boston to Seattle and from St Paul, Minnesota, to Raleigh, North Carolina.

Drug deals went down in Oklahoma parking lots, suppliers were advised to weld drugs into tyre rims for transport, and in the Dallas and Seattle areas, dozens of children were removed from houses where authorities found drugs, guns or cash derived from drug sales.

Perhaps more than any other cartel, La Familia projects a Robin Hood image. The Drug Enforcement Administration said the group is “philosophically opposed to the sale of methamphetamine to Mexicans, and instead supports its export to the United States for consumption by Americans”.

Mexican police said the gang uses religion and family morals to recruit. The gang has hung banners in towns saying they do not tolerate drug use, or attacks on women or children.

One of the gang’s alleged recruiters, detained last spring, ran drug rehabilitation centres, helping addicts to recover and then forcing them to work for the drug gang or be killed, according to Mexico Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna.

La Familia is rarely mentioned in the same breath as the handful of other Mexican gangs that control the flow of drugs into the United States, fuelled by Colombian cocaine suppliers. The Sinaloa, Juarez, Gulf and Tijuana cartels have roots that go back many years, even decades.

But in its short history, La Familia is believed to have emerged as the biggest supplier of methamphetamine to the United States and, increasingly, a peddler of cocaine, marijuana and other drugs.

Complaints that were unsealed across the country portray an organisation that spread deep into Middle America, down to small-time sales.