2 Mexican drug gang members plead guilty in Texas (AP)

[Yahoo!_news]

AP - A member of one of Mexico's most notorious drug operations has pleaded guilty to threatening to kill two U.S. agents who were cornered and held at gunpoint.

Juan Carlos de La Cruz Reyna pleaded guilty to two counts of threatening to assault and murder a federal officer.

De La Cruz Reyna was one of 10 alleged members of various cartels extradited to the U.S. from Mexico late last year. Another alleged Gulf cartel member, Ruben Sauceda-Rivera, pleaded guilty Tuesday to money laundering. Both are to be sentenced July 3.

Sauceda-Rivera, 42, and de La Cruz Reyna, 34, were indicted in 2002 in Brownsville. Sauceda-Rivera originally faced 11 drug trafficking counts and one count of money laundering. The drug trafficking charges will be dropped in exchange for the plea on the money laundering charge, which carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.

De La Cruz Reyna's attorney, Reynaldo Garza, said his client was unable to reach an agreement with prosecutors. Each count of threatening to assault and murder a federal officer carries a maximum sentence of up to five years in prison.

Federal prosecutor Toni Trevino said de La Cruz Reyna was among a group of armed drug traffickers who cornered Drug Enforcement Administration agent Joe Dubois and FBI agent Daniel Fuentes in their car in 1999 in the border city of Matamoros, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville.

Both agents, who were assigned to the U.S. consulate in Monterrey, were in Matamoros to talk with an informant about the cartel's operations. As they drove, they were boxed in and confronted by the traffickers.

Among them was Osiel Cardenas-Guillen, the alleged kingpin of the cartel at the time who was extradited from Mexico in 2007 and is to be tried in Houston in September.

The agents identified themselves but continued to be threatened by the men, including de La Cruz Reyna, who had an assault rifle, Trevino said.

"At one point during the assault, de La Cruz Reyna tried to open the (agents' car) door," she said. "Dubois struggled with de La Cruz Reyna."

The federal agents managed to talk their way out of the confrontation and escape with the informant.

De La Cruz Reyna disputed Trevino's claim that he struggled with the DEA agent.

"That's not true," he said through an interpreter. "I didn't know they were federal agents."

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