Drug Raids Across U.S. Net Hundreds of Suspects

WASHINGTON — A little more than a week after an American law enforcement agent was shot to death by gunmen suspected of being  in Mexico, federal authorities struck back Thursday with raids across the United States that rounded up more than 450 people believed to have ties to criminal organizations south of the border.

The authorities said sweeps were conducted in nearly every major American city; involved more than 3,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agents; and resulted in the seizure of an estimated 300 kilograms of cocaine, 150,000 pounds of  and 190 weapons. Derek Maltz, a special agent at the , said the sweeps were part of a multinational investigation that could lead to more arrests and seizures in the United States, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil.

Mr. Maltz said that the message the authorities hoped to send with the sweeps was as important as the suspects being brought in. The operation came eight days after Jaime Zapata, an agent, . Mr. Maltz said the planning for the operation had begun before Mr. Zapata’s shooting, but he acknowledged that the United States hoped to show it would not tolerate attacks against its agents.

Louie Garcia, a deputy special  and customs agent involved with the sweeps, echoed that thought in an interview with The Associated Press. “This is personal,” he said. “We lost an agent. We lost a good agent. And we have to respond.”

While thousands of Mexican law enforcement agents have been killed in the drug violence that has plagued Mexico since 2007, Mr. Zapata was the first American official to be killed in the line of duty there in more than 25 years. Obama administration officials called the attack a “game-changer,” hinting to Mexico that more needed to be done to quash the cartels.

After those comments, a Mexican newspaper published President ’s angry reactions to State Department cables obtained by . Some of those cables described Mexican law enforcement agencies as corrupt and unwilling to cooperate with one another.

In response, President Calderón said that American law enforcement was guilty of the same kind of rivalries and that cooperation from the United States in the drug fight ended up being “notoriously insufficient.” American diplomats, he added, had “done a lot of harm” to relations between Mexico and the United States “with the stories they tell and that, in all honesty, they distort.”

President Calderón is to visit Washington next week.

On Wednesday, Mexican authorities detained several people in connection with Mr. Zapata’s murder, saying the traffickers shot the agent because they thought he and his partner were members of a rival drug cartel. Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, who was briefed by senior ICE officials after the shooting, said, “I’m not buying the mistaken identity.”

He added, “Our current strategy is not working. President Calderón is losing this war. And if the traffickers win’ we’re going to have a failed state at our door.”