The U.S. Border Patrol displays some of the tools of the trade used by human smugglers along the border with Mexico, including cellphones, two-way radios and false identification cards, in Deming, N.M.

PHOENIX — Violent crime along the U.S.-Mexico border, which has long plagued the scrubby, often desolate stretch, increasingly is spilling northward into the cities of the American Southwest.

In Phoenix, deputies are working the unsolved case of 13 border crossers who were kidnapped and executed in the desert. In Dallas, nearly two dozen high-school students have died in the past two years from overdoses of a $2-a-hit Mexican fad drug called "cheese heroin."

The crime surge, most acute in Texas and Arizona, is fueled by a gritty drug war in Mexico that includes hostages being held in stash houses, daylight gunbattles claiming innocent lives, and teenage hit men for the Mexican cartels. Shipments of narcotics and vans carrying illegal immigrants on U.S. highways are being hijacked by rival cartels fighting over the lucrative smuggling routes. Fires are being set in national forests to divert police.

In Laredo, Texas, a teenager who had been driving around the United States in a $70,000 luxury sedan confessed to having become a Mexican cartel hit man when he was 13. In Nogales, Ariz., an 82-year-old man was caught with 79 kilograms of cocaine in his Chevrolet Impala. The youth was sentenced to 40 years in prison for one murder and is awaiting trial on another; the old man drew 10 years.

In Southern California, border-patrol agents routinely encounter smugglers driving migrant-laden cars who try to escape by driving the wrong way on busy freeways. And stash houses packed with dozens of illegal immigrants have been discovered in Los Angeles.

But a huge U.S. law-enforcement buildup along the border starting a decade ago has helped stabilize border-related crime rates on the California side; a recent wave of kidnappings in Tijuana, Mexico, largely has been contained south of the border.

The sprawling U.S.-Mexico border has been crisscrossed for years by the poor seeking work in the United States and drug dealers in the hunt for U.S. dollars. For decades neither the U.S. nor Mexico has managed to halt the immigrants and narcotics pushing north. But with the Mexican government's newly pledged war on the cartels, and an explosion of violence among rival networks, a new crime dynamic is emerging: The violence that has hit Mexican border towns is spreading deeper into the U.S.

Enforcement promises

U.S. officials are promising more Border Patrol and federal firearms officers, more fences and more surveillance towers along the desert stretches where the two nations meet.

But law-enforcement officials are wary of how this new burst in violence will play out, especially as the enemy is better armed and more sophisticated than ever. Among their concerns are budget cutbacks in some agencies — including a hiring freeze in the Drug Enforcement Administration — and community opposition to surveillance towers.

Johnny Sutton, a U.S. attorney in west Texas, said he would need at least 20,000 new Border Patrol agents in El Paso alone to hold back the tide. But that is the total number of agents that Washington, D.C., hopes to have everywhere on the border by the end of 2009.

In six years, Sutton's office has tried 33,000 defendants, about 90 percent of them on drug and immigration violations. "We're body-slamming them the best we can," he said.

In Phoenix, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio holds 10,000 inmates in his jail and overflow tents; 2,000 of them, he said, are "criminal aliens" from the border. It is his deputies who are investigating the deaths of 13 people executed in the desert.

Jennifer Allen, director of the nonprofit Border Action Network in Tucson, Ariz., which supports immigrants' rights, said Washington, D.C., and Mexico City need fresh approaches. "The smugglers are no longer mom-and-pop organizations. Now it's an industry," she said. "So the violence increases. That's incredibly predictable."

Raul Benitez, an international-relations professor in Mexico City who also taught at American University in Washington, D.C., blames both countries for the crime wave. As long as Americans crave drugs and the cartels want money, "security in both directions is jeopardized," Benitez said.

Nestor Rodriguez, a University of Houston sociologist, said people on both sides of the Rio Grande view themselves as one community. "People say the river doesn't divide us, it unites us," he said. "When you're at ground zero at the border, you see yourselves as one community — for good or bad."

Rodriguez knows. His first cousin, Juan Garza — born on this side but trained by criminals in Mexico — ran his own murder-and-drug enterprise out of Brownsville, Texas. He was executed in 2001 by the United States.

"Of course there is a spillover of violence into this country," Rodriguez said. "It's pouring across our border, and anybody can get caught up in it."

Small-town tragedy

The small town of Sierra Vista, Ariz., learned firsthand of the rising violence in 2004, when police chased a pickup carrying 24 illegal immigrants on the border town's main drag, Buffalo Soldier Trail. Speeds reached 100 mph. The truck went airborne, hit a half dozen cars, and killed a recently married elderly couple waiting at a stoplight.

"It was just the worst kind of tragedy," said Ed Rheinheimer, the Cochise County attorney. "The coyotes [smugglers] are just more willing to either shoot at the police, fight with the police or to try to flee."

Even more brazen have been several kidnappings of between 50 and 100 immigrants by rival cartels, who hide them in stash houses in and around Phoenix until family members pay a ransom. One captive's face was burned with a cigarette, another captive was nearly smothered in a plastic bag. A woman was raped. Fingers have been sliced off and sent back to families with demands for money.

The border-crime issue became so urgent in Arizona that top officials met in Tucson in June with their counterparts from Sonora, Mexico. Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano agreed to help train Sonoran police to track wire payments to smugglers. Sonoran Gov. Eduardo Boors agreed to improve police communications with U.S. authorities.

In the first nine months of this year, Tucson officials surpassed their record from last year of 4,559 human-smuggling arrests.

In tiny Douglas, Ariz., so far this year, the Mexican consulate has identified the bodies of five Mexican nationals who died under suspicious circumstances while crossing into the U.S., and it is awaiting identification of five more it presumes were Mexicans as well. There were only seven such deaths in all of last year.

Statewide the picture is equally bleak. Slayings of illegal crossers are up 21 percent over last year.

Another visible effect of the cross-border crime wave is the flood of drugs into the country.

Anthony Coulson, assistant special agent in charge of the DEA in Arizona, said records indicate that cocaine and heroin seizures might end up twice as high as last year. Marijuana seizures are increasing 25 percent; nine months into the current fiscal year, he said, they had seized more pot than all of last year, "and 2006 was a record year, " Coulson said.

High-school heroin

In the Tucson sector alone there has been a 71 percent increase in marijuana seizures over the past year, with the U.S. Border Patrol reporting 648,000 pounds grabbed since October.

In tony Scottsdale, a Phoenix suburb, said Sheriff Arpaio, a cartel operative was openly selling heroin to high-school kids. "He was getting 150 calls a day on his cellphone," the sheriff said.

The DEA believes 80 percent of the methamphetamine in the United States is coming from labs in Mexico, which were set up after police raids shut down many of the labs in the U.S.

In Dallas, police are dealing with the deaths of 21 high-school students in the past two years from "cheese heroin," a mixture of Mexican heroin and over-the-counter cold medicine. The hits sell for $2 to $5. Several arrests of dealers have been made; now officials are bracing for the coming school season.

Antonio Oscar "Tony" Garza Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, has issued repeated diplomatic notes of objection to the Mexican government. Last year he sent an advisory to American tourists that "drug cartels, aided by corrupt officials (in Mexico), reign unchecked in many towns along our common border."

A House subcommittee on Homeland Security has investigated the so-called "triple threat" of drug smuggling, illegal border crossings and rising violence and found that "very little" passes the border without the cartels' knowledge.

The cartels send smugglers into the United States fully armed with equipment — much of it imported to Mexico from the U.S. — including high-powered binoculars and encrypted radios, bazookas, military-style grenades, assault rifles and silencers, sniper scopes and bulletproof vests, the panel found. Some smugglers wear fake police uniforms to confuse police as well as Mexican bandits who might ambush them.

The panel's report cited numerous recent crimes. In McAllen, Texas, "two smuggled women from Central America were found on the side of a road badly beaten and without clothing. Their captors (had) intimidated the victims by shooting weapons into the walls and ceiling as they were raped."

In Laredo, Webb County sheriff's deputies came upon 56 illegal immigrants locked in a refrigerator trailer. Eleven were women; two children. After six hours, "Many were near death by the time they were rescued."

Under cartel's spell

It was in Laredo last summer where police encountered Rosalio Reta, then 17, a Houston native who fell under the spell of the Gulf Cartel across the river. Known as "Bart," the youth was 13 when he started visiting Mexico.

"They walk across the bridge," said Laredo Detective Robert Garcia, who investigated a murder that involved Reta. "They see all the nightclubs with no age limit. They see the guys their age spending money, throwing money around, paying for everything. They like ... the women, the fancy cars. They start moving weapons and guns and pretty soon they start asking for money for hits."

Garcia said Reta told him how he helped break a cartel leader out of a Mexican prison. From there he moved up to hit man, and returned to Texas behind the wheel of a $70,000 Mercedes-Benz, Garcia said.

Then last year a Laredo man named Noe Flores was murdered in front of his home, shot by mistake because the cartel thought they were getting his half-brother in a dispute over a woman.

In a handwritten statement to police, Reta admitting driving the car with two accomplices. One of them, identified by Reta as Gabriel Cardona, jumped out and "shot two rounds at first," he wrote. "That was when he fell to the floor and then shot em 13 more rounds and that was when Jesus Gonzales (the other alleged accomplice) started shooting from the rear windows. ... The work was done for the Gulf Cartel of Mexico."

At trial last month, a witness said Reta and the accomplices were paid a total of $15,000 for the hit. But the case ended abruptly when Reta pleaded guilty in return for a 40-year sentence; he had faced 99 years.

Webb County Judge Joe Lopez told the youth: "It's a young life. Come to terms with your God and your faith, or whatever it may be."

Cardona also pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 80 years. Gonzales was arrested but made bail, and disappeared back into Mexico.

Reta awaits trial in a second case, involving the ambush slaying in December 2005 of Moises Garcia, shot in his car in a Laredo restaurant parking lot as his pregnant wife and family watched helplessly.

Los Angeles Times staff writer Richard Marosi in San Diego contributed to this report.

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