Mexico suspends search for Hartley as intelligence analyst highlights possibility of more killings, beheadings

ZAPATA — Mexico’s search for McAllen man David Michael Hartley was temporarily suspended Thursday with no definite word as to when it would resume.

Hartley, 30, is widely presumed dead after what his wife, Tiffany Young-Hartley, has described as an attack by cartel "pirates" Sept. 30 on the Mexican side of Falcon Reservoir, a sprawling waterway that spans the country’s border with the U.S.

“There is a recess,” Ruben Dario Rios Lopez, a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office in Tamaulipas, said Thursday in Spanish. “We are going to look into new strategies between both U.S. and Mexican authorities in order to see what we can do, because up to now we have not been able to recover the body of this person.”

STRATFOR, a private intelligence service based in Austin, said in a report Wednesday that its sources indicate low-level members of the Zeta drug cartel were responsible for the attack and that the group destroyed the body that same day in a bid to avoid a U.S. backlash.

Despite that view, Mexico intends to continue its efforts to find the man after it reviews its approach, Rios said.

“We hope that with this rethinking, we can resume the search for David Hartley in a few days,” he said.

The halt in the effort comes two days after the severed head of a Tamaulipas state police commander investigating the case was delivered in a suitcase to a military post in Miguel Alemán, across the border from Roma.

The suspension also coincided with Thursday’s comments by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the federal government was doing all it could to help find Hartley’s body — and with a prediction by a STRATFOR analyst that there will be more killings and beheadings of Mexican authorities if that search continues.

Rios declined to comment on STRATFOR’s appraisal of the situation.

But a search for a Mexican citizen would have been called off after three days, said Bolivar Hernandez, a mid-level official with the Tamaulipas Attorney General’s Office. 

News of the search’s suspension came as a surprise to Hartley’s family.

“That’s the first we’ve heard,” Bob Young, the man’s father-in-law, said Thursday when contacted by The Monitor.

He said the family would have to analyze the situation before determining their next step.

MESSAGE RECEIVED

The Zetas will almost certainly respond to any increased efforts in Mexico’s investigation into Hartley’s disappearance with more killings and beheadings of Mexican authorities, STRATFOR analyst Scott Stewart warned Thursday.

The group’s report Wednesday suggests there anyway may not be a body to recover.

"STRATFOR sources have indicated that once Hartley was identified as an American, his body was destroyed the same day as the incident to prevent a backlash from the U.S. government against the group," that report states.

Young-Hartley, 29, has said three boats of gunmen opened fire on the couple, fatally shooting her husband in the head, as the pair rode separate personal watercraft during a sightseeing trip to a partially submerged church in the Mexican town of Old Guerrero.

Mexican officials have denied a connection between the search for Hartley’s body and the beheading this week of Tamaulipas State Police Cmdr. Rolando Armando Flores Villegas.

But Stewart believes the delivery of the severed head to the Miguel Alemán military post was a clear signal to stop investigating and said that such grisly warnings would be repeated if officials stepped up the search.

“Should there be any concerted effort to really resolve things, I’m certain we will see more killing of officials involved,” said Stewart, STRATFOR’s vice president of tactical intelligence.

“This wasn’t just killing the guy,” he said. “This was using (Flores) to deliver a message. … The military is seen as a threat to these cartels, and it’s a very, very specific message.”

MISTAKEN IDENTITY

In the report STRATFOR issued Wednesday, the firm postulated that members of the Zetas mistakenly believed Hartley and his wife were aligned with the rival Gulf Cartel.

On Sept. 30, the couple traveled toward Falcon Reservoir in a pickup truck with Tamaulipas state plates, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. Troopers pulled them over in Starr County after noticing the trailer carrying their two personal watercraft had expired tags. They were let go with a warning.

STRATFOR noted in its report that the Old Guerrero area they visited in Mexico is known as a battleground in the Zetas’ ongoing struggle with the Gulf Cartel.

Citing unnamed sources, STRATFOR reported that low-level Zetas identified the Hartleys as a potential Gulf Cartel surveillance team and rashly chose to retaliate by shooting at the couple.

Now, Stewart said, the Zeta leaders are struggling to control the damage as attention piles on them from Mexican and U.S. authorities and the news media.

“Obviously they do want to take out real Gulf Cartel spies,” Stewart said. “But they don’t necessarily want to kill American citizens and bring a ton of publicity on (their) organization right now.

“I think this was an overstepping thing.”

ZETAS

The Zetas got their start in the late 1990s when then Gulf Cartel leader Osiel Cárdenas Guillen persuaded a group of some 30 members of the Mexican army’s elite Airborne Special Forces Groups to change their allegiance and become enforcers for his organization.

Since then, they have recruited additional members and have branched out on their own, becoming a formidable drug trafficking organization in their own right. Violence has gripped cities across northeast Mexico since February, when the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas began fighting over smuggling routes into the United States.

Both groups are also locked in an ongoing struggle with Mexican authorities.

More than 29,000 people have died in drug-related violence since Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched his military crackdown on the cartels when he took office in late 2006, according to Reuters news service.

The campaign has taken a toll on the criminal organizations, with many of those casualties coming from their own ranks

“There’s an awful lot of violence down there, a lot of people with guns, and the cartels are desperately seeking to replenish their ranks,” Stewart said. “These guys now are not of the same quality of the initial Zeta group that came out of the special forces.

“We’re seeing a lot more people with less training than normally would be the case.”

Stewart said STRATFOR has received unconfirmed reports that the Zetas’ second-in-command, Miguel “Z-40” Treviño Morales, is now cracking down on lower-level members following the Falcon Reservoir incident.

“They may have even grabbed some family members of the individuals responsible for the murder,” Stewart said. “(Morales) doesn’t want this kind of attention, especially from the U.S. side.”

STRATFOR

Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez, whose office is heading the U.S. investigation into Hartley’s disappearance, described STRATOR as a reputable source but said he doubts some of its assertions.

“There are some inconsistencies (in the report),” he said. “For example, they say he was shot twice in the head; he was only shot once in the head.”

Hartley's family, for its part, doesn’t ascribe much importance to STRATFOR's conclusion that the incident was a case of mistaken identity.

“That is one of the theories that is out there," said Young, the man’s father-in-law. "I think it is just a theory."

He said the family still holds out hope for more definite answers from investigators about what happened and why.

Stewart defended STRATFOR’s report, describing an organized research effort to evaluate the veracity and track record of the group’s private sources. He said STRATFOR maintains relations with former cartel members and with professionals at law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

His group has also drawn its recent conclusions from the observations and personal assessments of sources close to, but not within, Mexican cartels, Stewart said.

 “This report we had (for) the Hartleys came from somebody with a very good track record,” he said. “It rang true to us, knowing what’s going on in that area. It fits with the analytical framework that we’ve established in the area.”

He described the connections STRATFOR has as “people who know people-type things.”

Stewart confirmed his group has been in contact with investigators involved with the search.

“We’ve talked to authorities on both sides of the border,” he said. “Some have been more forthcoming than others. Some have been more knowledgeable.”

With the potential for more attacks on Mexican authorities, Stewart suggested law enforcement personnel south of the border were in a bind. As they seek to satisfy U.S. government and media demands for answers, Mexican officials also have to consider their own safety and priorities.

“It’s not like this is the only murder case,” Stewart said. “What we’re seeing from the Mexican sources is that they’re perplexed. This is just one gringo.

“They’ve got a huge blotter of murders they have to deal with (of elected officials, police and political candidates),” he said. “By contrast, this just isn’t real high on their priority” list.

WARNING

A San Antonio TV station reported Thursday that Texas Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw issued a new travel warning advising Texans to stay out of Mexico.

DPS, however, said there was no new advisory to that effect. though a spokesman for the department noted the agency had been warning Americans about the dangers of crossing the border for months now.

The department first issued an advisory about Falcon Reservoir on May 17, urging Americans to avoid the Mexican side of the lake after several armed robberies and attempted armed robberies of boaters, mostly in the Old Guerrero area.

DPS issued a second advisory Oct. 1, the day after Hartley disappeared, renewing its warning to boaters to avoid Mexican waters at Falcon Reservoir and stay on the U.S. side of the lake.

The agency had also released a travel advisory March 4, advising spring break participants to stay away from border cities in Mexico because of increased drug violence.

U.S. State Department, meanwhile, issues its own travel advisory for Mexico on Sept. 10, with Tamaulipas one of several areas singled out for special mention.

“Recent violent attacks and persistent security concerns have prompted the U.S. Embassy to urge U.S. citizens to defer unnecessary travel to Michoacán and Tamaulipas,” the notice states.

SEARCHING

Those warnings don’t seem to have done Hartley any good.

Two weeks after his reported death at the end of a marauder’s gun, authorities seem no closer to finding out what became of him.

“We haven’t found a body in 14 days,” said Gonzalez, the Zapata County sheriff, “and the probability of finding one is getting slimmer and slimmer.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke about the Hartley case during one-on-one interview Thursday on ABC's Good Morning America and defended federal efforts to help recover the man's body. Her remarks were the first public comments on the matter by a high-level official within President Barack Obama's administration.

"The United States Government is supporting local law enforcement, supporting the authorities on the border, doing everything that we know to do to try to assist in helping to find the body and helping to find the perpetrators," she said. "This is a terrible tragedy, and obviously, we are sickened by it, as we are with the spike in violence that has gone on in Mexico directed primarily against innocent Mexicans."

Hartley's family had previously said they weren't getting enough help from the State Department to find the man’s body, but his father-in-law took Clinton’s statement as a positive sign.

"The fact that they are looking into the situation down here is encouraging,” Young said. “We want the search to continue."

____

Monitor photo editor James Colburn contributed to this report.

____

Martha L Hernández, Neal Morton and Lindsay Machak cover general assignments for The Monitor. They can be reached at (956) 683-4846.