A Texas border town police chief and members of Mexican drug cartel cells operating in Houston and across the state are among 429 accused traffickers arrested as part of a nationwide sweep this week, federal authorities announced Thursday.

The captures are the culmination of a multitude of investigations and 2,200 arrests over the past 22 months.

Investigators uncovered schemes that included using fake school buses, cloned company vehicles and bogus bails of hay to move drugs north, and cash and guns south into Mexico.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, cities in which arrests were made this week included Houston, El Paso, Corpus Christi and McAllen.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said 3,000 agents fanned out in 16 states on Wednesday alone to arrest the most recent 429 people.

“Our aim was to target not just cartel operations, but the networks of individuals across the United States the cartels tap to distribute drugs in our country and smuggle cash and guns out of it,” Holder said from Washington.

Project Deliverance

Dubbed Project Deliverance, the arrests reached from New York to California as well as within Mexico.

In the Southern District of Texas, which stretches from Houston to the border, the operation resulted in the indictment of 58 people and the seizure of 31,000 pounds of marijuana; 1,300 pounds of cocaine and an assortment of real estate as well as bank accounts.

“It certainly has dealt a blow to the cartels, said Zoran Yankovich, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Houston Division. “We targeted distribution networks' command and control. That is what we always go after.”

In the Western District of Texas, which includes San Antonio and El Paso, 69 people were snared, many with ties to Ciudad Juarez, where unrelenting drug cartel violence has continued to wrack the border.

U.S. Attorney John E. Murphy, the top prosecutor for that region, said agents nabbed 6,800 pounds of marijuana and more than 1,100 pounds of cocaine — as well as $2.37 million in alleged criminally derived assets.

In Texas' Hidalgo County, Sullivan City Police Chief Hernan Guerra is accused of being in cahoots with the traffickers from both the Zetas and Gulf Cartel, according to the DEA.

He is charged with conspiring to traffic drugs.

“I know very little about the evidence involved here,” said Oscar Alvarez, Guerra's attorney. “I suspect, just based on my general reading, that there must be several cooperating defendants and informants and possibly some wiretaps. It looks like an extensive investigation.”

It remains to be seen how long the chief will be able to draw pay from his $40,000 a year job to run the 15-person force in Hidalgo County.

Authorities contend the chief was charged as part of the same investigation that singled out at least 70 residential lots in Hidalgo County that were purchased with millions of dollars in drug proceeds.

‘Hold them accountable'

“Project Deliverance is the latest engagement in our ongoing struggle to confront and defeat the Mexican cartels,” said Jose Angel Moreno, the top federal prosecutor in Houston.

“These arrests, seizures and prospective forfeitures further our goal to dismantle and disrupt their operations and hold them accountable,” he continued.

What overall effect the operation will have remains unclear.

U.S. officials said although it broke up transportation and distribution networks from various Mexican trafficking organizations, such networks have proven themselves to be replaceable.

A similar federal operation last fall resulted in the arrests of 300 alleged members of La Familia, one of Mexico's more vicious drug gangs, which distributes methamphetamine and other drugs across the United States.

Difficult to disrupt

Despite those arrests, and blows against the gang in Mexico, La Familia remains a powerful presence in the Mexican underworld.

“Is Deliverance going to solve the problem? No,” said a U.S. official, who requested anonymity, and characterized it as “chipping away” at trafficking organizations' U.S. networks.

“You hope that by attacking all sections of the organizations you will have the ability to at a minimum disrupt — and hopefully dismantle — them,” the official said. “The ideas is from top to bottom try to attack the entire organization.”

Among those named in a stack of indictments is a freelance criminal who specialized in smuggling heroin into the U.S. for the Sinaloa Cartel and other organizations.

The alleged trafficker was arrested in Mexico in May. He was allegedly shipping as much as 150 pounds of heroin a month to various U.S. states and bringing $2 million in proceeds monthly into Mexico, the official said.

He is named in dozens of drug related indictments across the United States, indicating the reach of his transportation network.

San Antonio Express-News staff writer Lynn Brezosky contributed to this report.

dane.schiller@chron.com

dudley.althaus@chron.com