WASHINGTON — Drug agents swept through Los Angeles and dozens of other locations Wednesday and Thursday, arresting more than 300 people and seizing large quantities of drugs, weapons and money in the biggest U.S. crackdown against a Mexican drug cartel.
The months-long offensive, the fruit of dozens of federal investigations over the last 3 1/2 years, will put a significant dent in the U.S. operations of La Familia Michoacana, one of Mexico's fastest-growing and deadliest cartels, authorities said.
"The sheer level and depravity of violence that this cartel has exhibited far exceeds what we unfortunately have become accustomed to from other cartels, [and] the toxic reach of its operations extends to nearly every state within our own country," Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said at a news conference in Washington to announce the arrests.
The investigation has involved hundreds of agents and analysts from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, as well as prosecutors and other officials from the Justice Department.
"We're hitting them where we believe it hurts the most: their revenue stream," Holder said. "By seizing their drugs and upending their supply chains, we have disrupted their business-as-usual state of operations."
In all, authorities have arrested nearly 1,200 suspected La Familia members or associates in recent months as part of "Project Coronado," the multi-agency effort to dismantle the organization's methamphetamine and cocaine distribution network in the United States.
But Holder and other officials acknowledged that La Familia has become too powerful, too politically entrenched -- and too popular with Mexico's citizens -- for the arrests to deal the cartel any kind of death blow.
"We have to work with our Mexican counterparts to really cut off the heads of these snakes and get at the heads of the cartels . . . either in Mexico or extradite them to the United States," he said.
For that to happen, U.S. authorities need the full cooperation of the Mexican government in arresting and prosecuting the leaders of La Familia. But according to court documents unsealed Thursday, few if any leaders have been taken into custody by Mexican authorities despite several being indicted in U.S. courts.
La Familia has been linked to hundreds of drug-related killings in Mexico, including the kidnapping, torture and killing of 12 federal agents in the western state of Michoacan, La Familia's home base.
