Drug cartels co-opt rehab for recruits in Mexico

At least two of the country's six major drug cartels have used treatment facilities to further their trade, top Mexican law enforcement officials told The Associated Press in exclusive interviews. One group even opened its own centers where they brainwashed addicts during rehabilitation, offering them an ultimatum once they kicked their habits: work for us or we'll kill you.

Here, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, 41 people have been killed in massacres at rehab clinics over the past year and a half - massacres prompted not only by recruitment efforts within the clinics, but also by more common reasons like failure to pay for drugs or betrayal of a dealer.

"The rehabilitation centers are an extension of the battlefield," said Edgardo Buscaglia, a leading Mexican drug expert. "There are no refuges anymore."

The phenomenon highlights the government's failure to address the social ills that have grown from Mexico's burgeoning drug trade, he said. While the government has gone after the cartels using the police and military, they have done little to regulate private treatment facilities that have proliferated as cocaine use doubled nationwide over the last six years.

In Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million with an estimated 100,000 addicts, many of the clinics are unlicensed, run out of dilapidated homes by former addicts - making them easy targets for traffickers to infiltrate.

Victor Valencia, the former public safety secretary for Chihuahua state who resigned Sunday and is expected to run for mayor of Ciudad Juarez, blamed the attacks on the Sinaloa cartel. He told AP that cartel members checked themselves into the unlicensed clinics posing as patients. They eventually gained control by co-opting or running off the workers by threatening to kill them.

Sinaloa members sought by police or by the rival Juarez gang would check into the clinics, so they could hide out, Valencia said. The cartel also used the centers to lure in addicts, then tell them they had to work as drug dealers or be killed.

Recovering addicts, even from licensed clinics, often sell candy, cigarettes and gum at Juarez intersections to raise money for struggling rehabilitation centers. Cartels have seized the opportunity and use addicts to peddle drugs as well.

Lorenzo Macarena, a heroin addict, was a patient at a clinic where state investigators later found members of the Sinaloa cartel working.