US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder were to meet with Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina-Mora and Interior Minister Fernando Gomez-Mont in Jiutepec, Mexico -- the latest in a string of high-level visits by US officials, culminating in a visit by President Barack Obama later this month.

The latest visit comes a day after the US Senate approved a 550 million dollar package to stop the southward flow of guns and money to cartels from US sources.

Obama last week announced extra agents for the southern US border and vowed to staunch narcotics demand, as officials pledged full support for Mexico's battle against drug cartels.

More than 6,400 have died since the start of last year in drug-related bloodshed in Mexico that is spilling over the US border and that experts say is fed by easy access to guns and drug profits in the United States.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has gambled his presidency on the battle against drug trafficking, and launched a crackdown involving more than 36,000 troops more than two years ago.

But the crackdown has unleashed a violent response from the cartels and aggravated turf wars for lucrative drug routes into the United States, the world's main consumer of cocaine.

"The greatest power given to drug traffickers from weapons comes from the United States," Calderon said in a recent interview with AFP.

Mexican prosecutors meanwhile announced early Thursday the arrest of Vicente Carrillo Leyva, a top leader of the Juarez drugs cartel and one of the government's most-wanted criminals.

Mexico's attorney general last Monday published a list of 24 drug kingpins in the country's main gangs and offered rewards of up to two million dollars for each, including Carrillo Leyva.

The Juarez cartel -- named after Mexico's most violent city of Ciudad Juarez on the US border -- is one of the crime syndicates involved in the bloody drug feuds.

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Washington, April 29, 2009
At the height of the Cold War, a U.S. Army corps commander in Europe asked for information on his Soviet opposite, the commander of the corps facing him across the inter-German border. All the U.S. intelligence agencies, working with classified material, came up with very little. He then took his question to Chris Donnelly, who had a small Soviet military research institute at Sandhurst in the United Kingdom. That institute worked solely from open-source, i.e., unclassified, material. It sent the American general a stack of reports 6 inches high, with articles by his Soviet counterpart, articles about him, descriptions of exercises he had participated in and other valuable material.