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"We successfully concluded the largest and hardest hitting operation to ever target the very violent and dangerously powerful Sinaloa drug cartel," DEA Acting Administrator Michele M. Leonhart said in a prepared statement. 

In the past 21 months Operation Xcellerator has led to the arrest of 755 individuals, the seizure of $59.1 million in U.S. currency, over 12,000 kilograms of cocaine, 16,000 pounds of marijuana, 1,200 pounds of methamphetamine, 8 kilograms of heroin, approximately 1.3 million pills of Ecstasy and some $6.5 million worth of assets, including 149 vehicles, three aircraft, three boats and 169 weapons, the DEA said.

Announcements like this one, although eye-popping, usually amount to little more than time-outs in the steadily escalating drug-war violence that now threatens to spill across the U.S. border. In the 1980s rival Colombian cartel-backed cocaine gangs fought running gun battles across South Florida.   

In response, the Department of Homeland Security "has contingency plans to surge personnel and other resources, including the U.S. military, to parts of the southern border if law enforcement agencies on the ground are overwhelmed by the spillover effects of escalating criminal violence in Mexico," UPI homeland security editor Shaun Waterman reported Wednesday.