MEXICO CITY – Three former drug enforcement agents and nine soldiers have been arrested and sent to a prison in the southern state of Guerrero for allegedly having links to drug traffickers, the Mexican Attorney General’s Office said Wednesday.

The men were arrested on a warrant issued by a judge in the western state of Nayarit, the AG’s office said.

The 12 suspects are being held at the regional prison in Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero.

The former security forces members face drug and organized crime charges.

The men were investigated for having links to the Sinaloa drug cartel and the Beltran Leyva cartel, “which they allegedly provided with information about probes conducted by SIEDO (the AG’s organized crime unit) of members of these criminal organizations,” the AG’s office said.

SIEDO, to which former agents Miguel Angel Jardon Silveyra, Alfredo Mendez Hernandez and Miguel Alonso Malpica belonged, is the lead law enforcement agency in fighting drug trafficking in Mexico.

The soldiers arrested on drug charges were identified as Roberto Garcia Ramirez, Jose Manuel Reyes Flores, Raymundo Morales Merla, Jaime Guatemala Niño, Luis Eduardo Basurto Romero, Luis Martinez Rios, Ricardo Santos Vazquez, Jorge Bautista Benitez and Francisco Jimenez Garcia.

Two of the soldiers are captains, two are second lieutenants and the rest are first lieutenants.

Mexico’s most powerful drug trafficking organizations, according to experts, are the Tijuana cartel, which is run by the Arellano Felix family, and the Gulf, Juarez and Sinaloa cartels.

Two other large drug trafficking organizations, the Colima and Milenio cartels, also operate in the country.

“Los Zetas,” a group of army special forces veterans and deserters who initially worked as hitmen for the Gulf organization, may now be operating as a cartel, some experts say.

The Sinaloa organization is the oldest cartel in Mexico and is led by Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman, who was arrested in Guatemala in 1993 and pulled off a Hollywood-style jailbreak when he escaped from the Puente Grande maximum-security prison in the western state of Jalisco on Jan. 19, 2001.

Guzman, considered extremely violent, is one of the most-wanted criminals in Mexico and the United States, where the Drug Enforcement Administration has offered a reward of $5 million for him.

Since taking office in December 2006, President Felipe Calderon has deployed more than 45,000 soldiers and 20,000 federal police officers across Mexico in a bid to stem the wave of violence unleashed by drug traffickers. EFE