piling up

ice found nine bodies in nine hours Wednesday in the violence-plagued Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, including a beheaded man and four people who were shot to death in a car.

A Chihuahua state attorney general's spokesman says the victims died in five incidents Wednesday morning.

He said the bullet-riddled bodies of three men and one woman, all unidentified, were discovered in a car shortly after midnight.

About an hour later, police found the body of a man who was shot repeatedly outside a bar.

The toll rose to six just after sunrise with the discovery of a gunshot victim lying by the side of a road.

Later in the morning, police found two bodies, one beheaded, wrapped in a blanket.

The ninth victim turned up in a car.

Ciudad Juarez is Mexico's most violent city, with more than 1,600 murders this year.

my kind of treatment center

Authorities have closed 10 unregistered drug rehabilitation centers in Ciudad Juarez and say they are going after others they fear may serve as cover or recruiting grounds for drug trafficking gangs in the violence-plagued city across from El Paso, Texas.

Gunmen have slaughtered 28 people this month at two rehab centers in Ciudad Juarez in separate attacks that investigators blame on a bloody struggle between rival drug gangs.

Sergio Belmonte, the spokesman for the Ciudad Juarez mayor's office, says there is evidence traffickers are recruiting members through unregulated rehab centers.

"There are unregistered centers that they (traffickers) set up themselves, they are recruitment centers, because their most faithful soldiers are the addicts," Belmonte said. "They give them drugs, draw them together and recruit them."

Chihuahua state Gov. Jose Reyes Baeza said that while there are legitimate rehab centers, "there are others that have taken advantage of the situation to provide cover, while really doing other things."

Reyes Baeza said irregularities have been discovered in at least 12 other centers, including a lack of permits, and he pledged "we are going to close" them.

Chihuahua state authorities said records showed the center attacked on Tuesday, Anexo de Vida, had not been registered with the government and may have been operating clandestinely. Ten other centers in Ciudad Juarez have been closed for operating illegally, although police would not say whether they may have been run by gangs.

Most of those closures occurred after a Sept. 2 attack that killed 18 people at a drug rehab center, which was not among those closed for being unregistered.

Drug-rehabilitation professionals worried that authorities could exaccerbate the very social problems of addiction they are trying to fight.

"It is dangerous to demonize these centers. ... If these patients are put back on the streets, they are invariably going to return to their old behaviors," said Alonso, an employee of the Ave Fenix recovery center, where neither counselors nor addicts are identified by their last names to avoid the stigma associated with addiction.

"Instead of closing them, the right thing to do would be to train them (the centers) so they can function correctly," Alonso said.

Families have pulled relatives out of rehab centers because of the attacks. At least 41 people have been killed in attacks on Ciudad Juarez rehab clinics in the past year.

Javier, a 22-year-old drug addict, who refused to give his last name for fear of reprisals, has been in and out of rehab trying to cure a drug habit that began with marijuana at 14 and later progressed to cocaine. He is worried about the closures.

"There are rehab centers that really give you help, from the heart," he said in an interview at the city's Amarr clinic.

Authorities have blamed the latest shootings on a rivalry between the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels, although investigators have named no suspects.

The battle for both the local drug market and lucrative smuggling routes into the United States have made Ciudad Juarez the most dangerous city in Mexico, with at least 1,647 people killed so far this year.

That turf war, however, has changed since the government sent thousands of army troops and federal police earlier this year to patrol the city, Belmonte said.

Cartel lieutenants who once roamed the city in convoys of flashy SUVs, staging daylight shootouts on main boulevards, are now increasingly forced to take their battles to gritty back streets, in attacks that target lower-level operatives.

That may help explain why attacks on clinics have increased, Belmonte said.

"This is a war that was going between the commanders, the leaders, and that is why they fought it out in the streets and the shopping malls," he said.

"The joint operation has inhibited the battle they were openly fighting ... changing the method of attack," he added. "It is now directed at the base level, the dealers."

In an unrelated attack, four people – including a police officer and a 3-year-old boy – were injured when gunmen open fire on a people leaving an Independence Day parade in San Bartolo Tutotepec, a small town in the central state of Hidalgo, the state Public Safety Department said Thursday.

Police arrested a suspect in Wednesday's shooting but had not established a motive.

side effects of the drug war:corruption

As a high-ranking U.S. anti-drug official, Richard Padilla Cramer held frontline posts in the war on Mexico's murderous cartels. He led an office of two-dozen agents in Arizona and was the attache for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Guadalajara, Mexico.

While in Mexico, however, Cramer also served as a secret ally of drug lords, according to federal investigators.

Identified informants

Cramer allegedly advised traffickers on law enforcement tactics and pulled secret files to help them identify turncoats. He charged $2,000 for a Drug Enforcement Administration document that was e-mailed to a suspect in Miami in August, authorities say.

"Cramer was responsible for advising the (drug traffickers) how U.S. law enforcement works with warrants and record checks as well as how DEA conducts investigations to include 'flipping subjects,' " or recruiting informants, according to a criminal complaint filed by a DEA agent.

DEA agents arrested Cramer, 56, at his home in Arizona on Sept. 4.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney in Miami said yesterday that she could not comment, but said cases that begin with complaints usually go before a grand jury.

Cramer's duties as the ICE attache in Guadalajara included serving as a liaison with Mexican police, assisting investigations and gathering intelligence.

But the investigation revealed that Cramer also worked for "a very high-level drug lord," according to federal officials. The 26-year government veteran became a full-time adviser to traffickers after retiring from ICE in January 2007, according to the complaint.

A trafficker "convinced Cramer to retire ... and begin working directly for (him) in drug trafficking and money laundering," according to the complaint.

Cramer sold secret documents that he obtained from active U.S. agents, an aspect of the case still under investigation.

Cross-border corruption

The charges underscore the corruptive power of the cartels, which have bought off Mexican politicians, police chiefs and military commandos. Drug lords have reached across the international line with increasing ease, corrupting U.S. border inspectors and agents to help smuggle cocaine north. In 2006, the FBI chief in El Paso, Texas, was convicted of charges related to concealing his friendship with an alleged drug kingpin.

Cramer stands out because his rank and foreign post made his work especially sensitive, officials said. Stunned colleagues described him as a well-regarded investigator who spoke fluent Spanish and operated skillfully in the array of U.S. and Mexican agencies at the border when he ran the ICE office in the action-packed border zone of Nogales, Ariz., his hometown.

"It came as a complete shock," said Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada in Arizona. "I have been in law enforcement at the border 42 years and I have seen some strange things, but I have never ceased to be surprised. You have to be watchful and mindful. The cartels have touched local, state and federal agencies."

Estrada worked with Cramer and Nogales police in 1979, and encountered him periodically as Cramer rose through the federal ranks.

Job application

About five months ago, Cramer showed up at the sheriff's office in the small county on the border, Estrada said. The retired agent had returned from Mexico to his house in Sahuarita, about 15 miles south of Tucson, Ariz. He applied for a job as a county detention officer, which pays about $30,000 a year, Estrada said.

In contrast, Cramer's federal rank probably commanded a salary of between $130,000 and $150,000, plus benefits, officials say.

Estrada, surprised, told Cramer that working as a jail guard would be "quite a drop," the sheriff recalled.

"He said he wanted to keep being active, go back to his roots, keep busy," Estrada said. "So we put him through all the ropes: polygraph, background checks. We didn't find anything suspicious."

While Cramer trained at a state law enforcement academy with younger cadets, a DEA investigation of a Mexican drug ring active in Miami accelerated after more than two years in the making. Working with four informants, agents had run across evidence implicating Cramer in corruption.

Investing in coke

In 2007, a cartel informant showed agents documents - four from the DEA database, one from ICE, two from the State of California - supplied by an American in Mexico named "Richard."

Agents identified the American as Cramer and learned that he requested database checks from DEA agents in Guadalajara. Such requests often are granted as a routine courtesy among agencies, officials said. ICE had six offices in Mexico at the time, though the two-agent outpost in Guadalajara has since closed.

Agents learned that Cramer allegedly invested $40,000 in a scheme by Mexican traffickers to smuggle 660 pounds of cocaine by sea from Panama via U.S. ports to Spain. Agents tracked the shipment and Spanish police seized it in the northwest city of Vigo in June, 2007, setting off a dispute among traffickers over who was to blame for the loss.

Cramer allegedly helped the Mexican drug lord conduct an internal hunt for henchmen responsible for the bust. Suspects under surveillance in Miami declared that Cramer checked databases to unmask informants whose families would be kidnapped in retaliation.

Early in September, DEA agents traveled to Arizona and informed Estrada that they planned to arrest his new jail guard.

"It was the last person I would have imagined," Estrada said.

"I think something went terribly wrong in Mexico," Estrada said. "I'm curious to know what flipped him to the other side."

los zetas

Police say a body with both arms cut off was found dumped on a street in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas.

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Arturo Sandoval, spokesman for a regional prosecutor's office, says the victim was found late Tuesday with his severed arms crossed and placed on top of a cardboard sign on his chest. Soldiers immediately removed the sign and police have not released what it said.

Drug cartels often leave messages next to the victims they kill.

Sandoval says assailants stuffed plastic bags into the man's mouth and taped his eyes.

He says police were still trying to confirm the identification of the victim.

Ciudad Juarez is Mexico's deadliest city with more than 1,300 drug-related killings this year.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico (AP) -- Two rural journalists have been arrested for allegedly working as informants for a violent drug trafficking cartel, according to courts in the southern Mexico state of Tabasco.

Newspaper correspondents Roberto Juarez and Lazaro Abreu Tejero Sanchez are being held on charges that they accepted thousands of dollars from the Zetas, a fierce drug gang aligned with the Gulf cartel, the state court system said in a news release.

The two reporters signed confessions while being question by police and prosecutors, according to the court statement on Tuesday, but later retracted them when brought before a judge.

Prosecutors say the two kept some of the money in exchange for withholding stories and sharing police information, and distributed some of it to other journalists, who may also face arrest.

Police said they learned about the payoffs, which amounted to about $4,500 a month, from a Zetas lieutenant.

The reporters work at towns near the Guatemalan border for the Villahermosa newspaper Presente, where spokespeople said no one was available to comment about the arrests.