Mexican authorities announced Saturday the arrest of a drug kingpin -- nicknamed "El Kilo" -- based in the country's northeast and suspected of having links to the mass graves recently found in the region.

Security forces have captured Martin Omar Estrada Luna, who is a presumed leader of the Zetas drug cartel in San Fernando, a town in the border state of Tamaulipas, the government said in a statement.

No information was immediately provided on how, when or where he was detained.

Mexico's attorney general had previously identified Estrada Luna as one of three prime suspects behind the mass graves.

Authorities began finding the graves earlier this month during an investigation into a report of the kidnapping of passengers from a bus in late March. The investigation led them to San Fernando -- the same place where in August of last year, the bodies of 72 migrants were found at a ranch.

Officials recovered 10 more bodies from the clandestine graves Wednesday and Thursday, bringing the total number of bodies found to 126, state attorney general's spokesman Ruben Dario Rios Lopez said.

In the wake of the grisly discovery, the Tamaulipas state governor appointed a new head of public security.

Tamaulipas is one of Mexico's most active states when it comes to drug trafficking. The Gulf cartel and the Zetas cartel operate in the state and have strongholds there.

The Zetas have been blamed for the mass graves and also for the deaths of the 72 migrants found last year. One of its presumed members, Jose Manuel Garcia Soto, was arrested earlier this month and is a suspect in the killing of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata.

Nationwide, the Mexican government says there have been some 35,000 drug-related deaths since President Felipe Calderon began a crackdown on the cartels in December 2006.

In this March 19, 2005 file photo, prostitutes wait for clients at a street in the Merced neighborhood in Mexico City. The pimps of the town of Tenancingo have sent hundreds of unsuspecting Mexican women into virtual bondage to work as prostitutes in the allies near Mexico City's La Merced marketplace or as far as Atlanta in the United States.

In this impoverished town in central Mexico, a sinister trade has taken root: entire extended families exploit desperation and lure hundreds of unsuspecting young Mexican women to the United States to force them into prostitution.

Those who know the pimps of Tlaxcala state — victims, prosecutors, social workers and researchers — say the men from Tenancingo have honed their methods over at least three generations.

They play on all that is good in their victims — love of family, love of husband, love of children — to force young women into near-bondage in the United States.

The town provided the perfect petri dish for forced prostitution. A heavily Indian area, it combines long-standing traditions of forced marriage or "bride kidnapping," with machismo, grinding poverty and an early wave of industrialization in the 1890s that later went bust, leaving a displaced population that would roam, looking for elusive work.

Added to that, says anthropologist Oscar Montiel — who has interviewed the pimps about their work — is a tradition of informal, sworn-to-silence male groups. He believes that, in the town of just over 10,000, there may be as many as 3,000 people directly involved the trade. Prosecutors say the network includes female relatives of the pimps, who often serve as go-betweens or supervisors, or who care for the children of women working as prostitutes.

A pimp Montiel identified only by his unprintable nickname said his uncle got him started in the business and that he has since passed the techniques on to his brother and two sons. Federico Pohls, who runs a center that tries to help victims, says established pimps will sometimes bankroll young men who aspire to the profession but lack the clothes, money and cars to impress young women.

Dilcya Garcia, a Mexico City prosecutor who did anti-trafficking work in Tenancingo, confirms that many boys in the town aspire to be pimps.

"If you ask some boys, and we have done this, 'Hey what do you want to be when you grow up?' They reply: 'I want to have a lot of sisters and a lot of daughters to make lots of money.'"

The Tenancingo pimps troll bus stations, parks, stores and high schools in poverty-stricken areas of Mexico, according to prosecutors who have raided their operations in Mexico City — often the "proving ground" where women are tried out as prostitutes before being moved to the U.S.

The pimps use a combination of threats, mistreatment, unkept promises of marriage and jobs, that send their victims on a slippery slope that usually ends in the filthy alleys near Mexico City's La Merced marketplace or at a cheap apartment in metro Atlanta. There, the women are isolated and sometimes forced to service dozens of male clients a day.

Garcia, who has dealt extensively with the victims, says some pimps even show up with fake "parents" to convince women they are serious about commitment.

"The way they fish for their victims is very cruel, very Machiavellian, but very effective," said Garcia. "When somebody is isolated, or unprotected, they are the perfect victim."

A young victim who agreed to speak to The Associated Press fit that profile perfectly. She asked not to be identified because she fears retaliation from her pimp's family.

Miguel Rugerio was charming and sweet when she met him in her impoverished hometown in the gulf coast state of Tabasco, she said.

He wooed her with sweet words and promises — good jobs in the U.S. for both of them with lots of money to send home to build a house in Mexico for their future. He wanted to meet her parents — a sure sign of a serious relationship in Mexico — and said he wanted to marry her.

She couldn't believe her good fortune.

But after he got her to Tenancingo he quickly changed. When the girl, just 17 at the time, wanted to go home for her sister's 15th birthday, he said no.

"I thought he was joking, and he said he wasn't joking, that I couldn't go home," she said. "I told him I would escape, and he said he would find me and make a scene in my hometown."

He got upset and locked her in a room.

"He told me that because I was his woman I had to stay with him," she said.

He finally said she could go home for a day for her sister's party but that if she didn't come right back, he'd hurt her family. When she returned to him after the party, he and his family started to mistreat her — abusing her, humiliating her and making her do all the housework.

A few weeks later, he brought her to Mexico City and forced her to work as a prostitute.

"He told me that if I didn't do it, he was going to hurt my sister and my family," she said. "I was very afraid of him."

A typical scenario, prosecutors say, involves an elaborate sham of a marriage — sometimes with false papers and names — before the pimp feigns a sudden financial crisis that would put the couple out in the street. The pimp then casually mentions a friend whose wife "worked" them out of the problem, noting, "If you love me, you'd do that for me."

Sometimes the tactics are more violent.

Garcia tells of an 18-year-old woman who was picked up by a Tenancingo pimp; her 1 1/2-year-old baby girl was placed in the care of one of his female relatives, and the woman was then taken to a down-at-the-heels Mexico City hotel and made to serve dozens of clients per day, for around 165 pesos ($12) apiece. When she resisted, the pimp told her, "If you don't do what I'm asking you to, you'll never see your daughter. You'll see what we'll do to your daughter."

Mostly, the pimps concentrate on isolating women, lying to them, and breaking down their self-esteem.

The victim who spoke to the AP described it this way: Her pimp, Rugerio, humiliated her, pulled her hair, withheld food and told her that she had to practice sex acts on him so she would perform well with the clients.

"I didn't like it," she said. "I felt ugly and it was very painful."

Rugerio told her he would send her to the U.S. and that he'd join her a bit later. After walking through the desert, she was sent to a nondescript apartment complex in suburban Atlanta, where she was met by two women and a man who, she was told, were related to Rugerio.

One of the women took her shopping for clothes. Even though it was September and starting to get chilly, the woman selected mostly short, tight skirts and tops and told her she'd have to start working the next day.

"I asked them what kind of work I would be doing," the young victim said. "She took out a bag of condoms and then I knew."

Her minders kept her in a small, sparsely furnished apartment, isolated from any other girls and mostly ignored her during the day. Around 4 p.m., a driver would come pick her up to take her to work. In the beginning, she had sex with between five and 10 men a night, but as time went on the number got as high as 40 or 50, mostly Latino men.

"I felt like the worst woman in the world," she said, her voice cracking and tears welling up in her eyes during an interview with the AP three years later. "I felt that if my family found out, they would be so disappointed because of what I was doing."

She thought about escaping many times, she said, but she was afraid because Rugerio had told her that if she left, the police would arrest her and toss her in jail. She also didn't know anyone, didn't have any money and didn't know where to go.

Miraculously, one night, when she got into the car that came to take her to work, a woman from her hometown was inside. She said she had been prostituted by a relative of her pimp but that the driver had helped her escape and they would help her escape too. With the help of the driver, she got away and eventually wound up testifying against her former pimp.

The 28-year-old Rugerio was sentenced in February to five years in federal prison in the U.S. for helping smuggle young women from Mexico to Atlanta and forcing them into prostitution.

But many others aren't caught.

"We've always suspected the problem is larger than we know about," said Brock Nicholson, deputy special agent in charge of the Atlanta division of the federal Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "Oftentimes, victims are very reluctant to come forward."

Those arrested on suspicion of forced prostitution almost never admit it.

Of three suspected pimps captured in raids on Mexico City hotels whose testimony the AP gained access to, all denied the charges against them; they said they were merely guests or employees of the hotel.

And while some in Tenancingo will admit pimps do operate there — resident Josue Reyes says "a few people have given the town a bad name" — others are seemingly in denial, despite the inexplicably luxurious houses that crowd the otherwise dusty, impoverished town.

The three-story homes with elaborate ironwork and Greek-inspired cornices are "safe houses" used by the pimps to awe — and then confine — their victims, said Federico Pohls, a human rights activist who works with victims.

Not so, says Maximino Ramirez, the secretary of the Tenancingo town council.

The structures were "built on hard work," he said, pointing to his own compound of three houses. Indeed, he said, all the palatial homes were built with money sent home by migrants working in restaurants and other businesses in the United States.

He dismissed the claims of the women.

"In this day and age, in the 21st century, are you going to tell me that a woman of 18 or 20 can be tricked?" he asked. "Maybe they went into (prostitution) of their own free will, and then after a while, they say: You know what? They forced me to."

But town residents have another name for the imposing houses. In the local Indian language, they call them "Calcuilchil" — literally, Houses of Ass.

It is an open secret. In 2008, a group of sociologists asked 877 residents of Tlaxcala if they knew of any place where human trafficking was occurring; 132 mentioned Tenancingo and an adjoining village — about 10 times more than any other locality.

How can such a trade flourish without police interference? Bautista, the Mexico City prosecutor, says it would be impossible without corruption.

Tlaxcala police say it is difficult to catch such crimes at their point of origin, because the full gravity of the crime has not yet been realized, even by the victims, when they are in Tenancingo. Some are held or mistreated, but usually by men they believe to be their husbands. Most have not yet been prostituted.

State prosecutors' spokeswoman Judith Soriana says only about a half dozen people have been prosecuted under laws against human trafficking in the last couple of years. She denies it's a particular problem in the state, saying "it has been blown out of proportion."

"There is nothing that indicates it is particularly high in this area," Soriana said. "Pimping isn't a problem exclusive to this state, it happens everywhere in the world."

Authorities in central Mexico say a newborn baby girl who was declared dead but later revived inside her coffin has died.

Hidalgo state attorney general Jose Rodriguez says the baby died of asphyxia, three days after being declared dead the first time by a doctor in the town of Tulancingo.

The baby was born prematurely on Monday and declared dead by a doctor.

Rodriguez said Thursday that during the wake the baby's parents heard a strange noise coming out of her little coffin and when they opened it found the baby crying. He said the baby was in stable condition in a hospital.

But on Friday Rodriguez told a press conference the baby had died Thursday night.

The doctor who declared the baby dead the first time is under investigation.

A U.S. border-patrol agent on duty near Campo, 60 miles east of San Diego, Calif.

When U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled on Wednesday that key provisions of Arizona's new anti-immigration law were unconstitutional, she could have also declared them unnecessary. That is, if the main impetus behind the controversial legislation was, as Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said when she signed it in April, "border-related violence and crime due to illegal immigration." The fact is, despite the murderous mayhem raging across the border in Mexico, the U.S. side, from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, is one of the nation's safest corridors.

According to the FBI, the four large U.S. cities (with populations of at least 500,000) with the lowest violent crime rates — San Diego, Phoenix and the Texas cities of El Paso and Austin — are all in border states. "The border is safer now than it's ever been," U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Lloyd Easterling told the Associated Press last month. Even Larry Dever, the sheriff of Arizona's Cochise County, where the murder last March of a local rancher, believed to have been committed by an illegal immigrant, sparked calls for the law, conceded to the Arizona Republic recently that "we're not seeing the [violent crime] that's going on on the other side."  

Consider Arizona itself — whose illegal-immigrant population is believed to be second only to California's. The state's overall crime rate dropped 12% last year; between 2004 and 2008 it plunged 23%. In the metro area of its largest city, Phoenix, violent crime — encompassing murder, rape, assault and robbery — fell by a third during the past decade and by 17% last year. The border city of Nogales, an area rife with illegal immigration and drug trafficking, hasn't logged a single murder in the past two years. 

It is true that Phoenix has in recent years seen a spate of kidnappings. But in almost every case they've involved drug traffickers targeting other narcos for payment shakedowns, and the 318 abductions reported last year were actually down 11% from 2008. Either way, the figure hardly makes Phoenix, as Arizona Senator John McCain claimed last month, "the No. 2 kidnapping capital of the world" behind Mexico City. A number of Latin American capitals can claim that dubious distinction.

An even more telling example is El Paso. Its cross-border Mexican sister city, Ciudad Juárez, suffered almost 2,700 murders last year, most of them drug-related, making it possibly the world's most violent town. But El Paso, a stone's throw across the Rio Grande, had just one murder. A big reason, say U.S. law-enforcement officials, is that the Mexican drug cartels' bloody turf wars generally end at the border and don't follow the drugs into the U.S. Another, says El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles, is that "the Mexican cartels know that if they try to commit that kind of violence here, they'll get shut down." 

Which points to perhaps the most important factor: the U.S. has real cops — not criminals posing as cops, as is so often the case in Mexico — policing the border's cities and states. Americans and Mexicans may call their border region "seamless" when it comes to commerce and culture, but that brotherly ideal doesn't apply to law enforcement. That's especially true since state and local police are backed along the border by the thousands of federal agents deployed there. Thus the tough Arizona law — which seeks to allow local and state police to check a person's immigration status, a provision that Judge Bolton agreed opened the door to racial profiling by officers, and requires immigrants to carry their documents at all times — was sparked by largely unfounded fears.

Arizona law-enforcement officials say they believe the Cochise County rancher, Robert Krentz, was killed by an illegal immigrant — perhaps a coyote, or migrant smuggler — or a drug trafficker. His last radio transmission home as he inspected his property indicated he was helping a struggling person he believed to be one of the migrants who regularly trespass private land while crossing into the U.S. But while such assaults are hardly unheard of along the border — and while it's hardly irrational to worry about Mexico's violence eventually spilling into the U.S. — they have hardly risen to a level that justified the draconian Arizona bill. (In fact, if an illegal immigrant did murder Krentz, it would be the first time in more than a decade that a migrant has killed an American along the border's Tucson, Ariz., sector.)

"There's a real disconnect between emotions and facts when it comes to the border," says El Paso city councilman Beto O'Rourke. "You've got a lot of politicians exploiting this fear that the Mexicans are coming over to kill us."

The Arizona law, which Judge Bolton also said infringed on federal jurisdiction, may be a product of border bluster. But it has more than succeeded in getting Washington's attention. Even though the Obama Administration was one of the plaintiffs in the suit against the law, the President is sending 1,200 more National Guard troops to the region this weekend. What's more, our broken immigration system — and the federal government's feckless failure to address it — is a front-burner issue again.

The nation's border is actually a safe place. The nation's debate about it, at least politically, is anything but.

Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel Villareal, a principal leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel, was killed during a military raid in a suburb of Guadalajara, Mexico's defense department said.

Military intelligence located Coronel in the city of Guadalajara, Jalisco state, Brig. Gen. Edgar Luis Villegas told reporters. During the operation Thursday, Coronel tried to avoid arrest, firing on the military personnel, killing one and wounding another before he himself was killed, Villegas said.

The operation resulted in the arrest of Coronel's right-hand man, Iran Francisco Quinonez Gastelum. Coronel had used two houses located in the Guadalajara neighborhood of Colinas de San Javier as "safe houses" and had not associated with anyone but Quinonez "to maintain his low profile and not draw attention," Villegas said.

Coronel, who was from the state of Durango, had gotten his start in criminal activity working for Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who was responsible for sending drugs from Central and South America to the U.S. market, Villegas said.

After Carrillo died, Coronel joined the Guzman Loera drug trafficking group, rising in a short time to become one of its principal leaders next to Joaquin Guzman Loera, aka "El Chapo Guzman," and Ismael Zambada Garcia, aka "El Mayo Zambada," Villegas said.

Coronel led the organization's criminal activity in the west, including the states of Jalisco, Colima, Nayarit and part of Michoacan, "controlling the cocaine traffic through the "Pacific Route," Villegas said.

The U.S. State Department and the FBI were offering $5 million for information leading to Coronel's capture, he said.

During Thursday's operation, authorities found weapons, cash, jewelry, vehicles and furniture, he said.

In addition to eliminating a major drug trafficker, the raid could also dampen criticism against the federal government that it favors the Sinaloa cartel compared to other drug trafficking organizations it is fighting.

"Although the Ignacio Coronel Villareal Mexican Drug Trafficking Organization is based in Mexico, the scope of its influence and operations penetrate throughout the United States, Mexico, and several other European, Central American and South American countries," according to the FBI, which lists Coronel among its most wanted.

Coronel was indicted by a federal grand jury in Texas in 2003. That year, a U.S. federal arrest warrant was issued for Coronel charging him with conspiracy to possess a controlled substance with intent to distribute and conspiracy to import a controlled substance.

Thursday's action was the strongest blow against the Mexican drug cartels since the December 2009 killing of Arturo Beltran Leyva in Cuernavaca. Beltran Leyva also was killed in a military raid.

The Mexican federal government said in April that 22,700 people have died in the country since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the cartels shortly after taking office in December 2006.

A top lieutenant in a Mexican drug cartel has been arrested in northern Mexico, federal police said in a statement Wednesday.

Rogelio Segovia Hernandez, who heads the armed wing of the Juarez cartel, was arrested in Chihuahua on Tuesday.

A reward of about $240,000 had been offered for his arrest, federal police said.

Authorities said at the time of his arrest, he had a pistol, grenade and at least six bags of an undisclosed amount of cocaine.

Intelligence provided by the federal police indicated Segovia, 30, was the principal operator for La Linea in the activities of drug trafficking distribution, kidnappings and killings in towns near Ciudad Juarez as well as Chihuahua.

Segovia was being investigated in extortion of large sums of money from businessmen in exchange for "freedom from aggression" from

La Linea, according to police.

He was also a suspect in the August 25th, 2008, execution of five people at a ranch in the town of Aldama, Chihuahua.

The Mexican attorney general's office offered a reward for Segovia's capture in May.

Guards and officials at a prison in northern Mexico allegedly let inmates out, lent them guns and allowed them to use official vehicles to carry out drug-related killings, including the massacre of 17 people last week, prosecutors said Sunday.

After carrying out the killings the inmates would return to their cells, the Attorney General's Office said in a revelation that was shocking even for a country wearied by years of drug violence and corruption.

"According to witnesses, the inmates were allowed to leave with authorization of the prison director ... to carry out instructions for revenge attacks using official vehicles and using guards' weapons for executions," office spokesman Ricardo Najera said at a news conference.

The director of the prison in Gomez Palacio in Durango state and three other officials were placed under a form of house arrest pending further investigation. No charges have yet been filed.

Prosecutors said the prison-based hit squad is suspected in three mass shootings, including the July 18 attack on a party in the city of Torreon, which is near Gomez Palacio. In that incident, gunmen fired indiscriminately into a crowd of mainly young people in a rented hall, killing 17 people, including women.

Police found more than 120 bullet casings at the scene, and Najera said tests matched those casings to four assault rifles assigned to guards at the prison.

Similar ballistics tests linked the guns to earlier killings at two bars in Torreon, the capital of northern Coahuila state, he said. At least 16 people were killed in those attacks on Feb. 1 and May 15, local media reported.

Najera blamed the killings on disputes between rival drug cartels. "Unfortunately, the criminals also carried out cowardly killings of innocent civilians, only to return to their cells," he said.

Coahuila and neighboring Durango are among several northern states that have seen a spike in drug-related violence that authorities attribute to a fight between the Gulf cartel and its former enforcers, known as the Zetas.

Mexico has long had a problem with investigating crimes, catching criminals and convicting people. Reports estimate less than 2 percent of crimes in Mexico result in prison sentences. But Sunday's revelation suggests that even putting cartel gunmen in prison may not prevent them from continuing to commit crimes.

Interior Secretary Francisco Blake said the revelation "can only be seen as a wake-up call for authorities to address, once again, the state of deterioration in many local law enforcement institutions ... we cannot allow this kind of thing to happen again."

Also Sunday, Mexican federal police announced the arrest of an alleged leading member of a drug gang blamed in recent killings and a car-bombing in the violence-ridden border city of Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas.

Police described Luis Vazquez Barragan, 39, as a top member of La Linea gang, the enforcement arm of the Juarez cartel, saying he received orders directly from cartel boss Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.

Vazquez Barragan allegedly organized payments, moved drugs and oversaw a system of safe houses in and around Ciudad Juarez.

Police said he held the same rank as fugitive gang leader Juan Pablo Ledezma, though Vazquez Barragan is not named on reward or most-wanted lists published by the Attorney General's Office, as Ledezma is.

La Linea has been blamed for a car bomb that killed three people July 15 in Ciudad Juarez and for two separate shootings March 13 that killed a U.S. consular employee and two other people connected to the consulate.

Police did not say when they caught Vazquez Barragan, but he was allegedly in possession of about a half-kilogram (pound) of cocaine and two guns.

His arrest led to a raid on a safe house where authorities detained four suspects and freed a kidnap victim.

Also Sunday, the Attorney General's Office said soldiers on patrol in Ciudad Madero in the border state of Tamaulipas seized an arsenal of about three dozen guns, 17 grenades and thousands of bullets in a house.

Elsewhere in Tamaulipas, police and prosecutors raided a lot full of truck-pulled tankers in the border city of Reynosa and seized two loaded with oil of a type sometimes stolen from the pipelines of the state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos. Nore than a dozen other tankers and freight containers were also seized.

Mexican drug cartels have allegedly become involved in increasingly sophisticated thefts of fuel and oil from Mexico's pipelines.

In the Pacific coast state of Guerrero, authorities reported Sunday they had found the bullet-ridden bodies of six men dumped in various locations, including three in or around the resort of Acapulco. Two of the dead men were identified as people kidnapped earlier in the month.

Drug gang hitmen shot dead the grieving mother, brother, sister and aunt of an elite Mexican marine who died after taking part in a raid that killed a notorious drug lord, police said on Tuesday.

Gunmen burst into the family's home in Quintin Arauz in the southern state of Tabasco just before midnight on Monday, firing assault rifles. It appeared to be a revenge attack for a Mexican navy operation last week that killed Arturo Beltran Leyva, the boss of a major drug cartel.

"They broke the door down with a sledgehammer and sprayed them with bullets in the living room and bedrooms," said Saturnino Dominguez, the local deputy police commander.

A fifth family member was injured in the attack.

The strike that killed Beltran Leyva was a victory for President Felipe Calderon and his flagging drug war, but it could spur revenge attacks and fan fresh violence as rival cartels seek to take over territory from the drug lord's weakened cartel.

Elsewhere in Mexico, suspected cartel hitmen fired at four houses in different locations around the Pacific port of Mazatlan on Tuesday, although no casualties were reported, a spokesman for the Sinaloa state prosecutor's office said.

In separate attacks, hitmen shot dead the tourism secretary in the drug violence-plagued western state of Sinaloa and another gang opened fire on a restaurant in the northern border city of Piedras Negras where the state prosecutor was eating with other government officials and a U.S. mayor from the state of Texas, Mexican media said.

Despite the deployment of 49,000 troops across Mexico, broad daylight shootings are common and killings by drug gangs have soared to a record of well above 7,000 this year. Torture, decapitations and other atrocities have become common.

The rising bloodshed has alarmed the U.S. government and hurt Mexico's image as a relatively stable destination for foreign investors and tourists.

The attack on the family home in Tabasco came hours after the funeral of special forces marine Melquisedet Angulo, who died of wounds suffered during the strike that killed Beltran Leyva and five bodyguards last week.

Calderon condemned the attack, saying: "We must not be frightened by the unscrupulous criminals who commit barbarities like this."

Angulo had been lauded as a hero by the navy and his mother was promised a lifelong pension, making his family an identifiable target.

Mexican soldiers and navy personnel usually wear masks during drug operations to keep their identities secret.

A neighbor who heard Monday night's gunshots and saw several vehicles fleeing the scene said: "It all happened in less than a minute."

Bodies of two of the victims were covered by sheets inside the Angulo house, where police found about 80 bullet casings.

Dominguez said police suspected the killers were working with the Beltran Leyva cartel.