LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Some of the cartel's initial members were elite Mexican troops, trained in the early 1990s by America's 7th Special Forces Group or "snake eaters" at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, a former U,S, special operations commander says.

"They were given map reading courses, communications, standard special forces training, light to heavy weapons, machine guns and automatic weapons," Craig Deare says, who was the former special forces commander who is now a professor at the US National Defense University.

"I had some visibility on what was happening, because this [issue] was related to things I was doing in the Pentagon in the 1990s," Deare says.

The Mexican personnel who received U.S. training and later formed the Zetas came from the Airmobile Special Forces Group, which is considered an elite division of the Mexican military.

Their U.S. training was designed to prepare them for counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics operations, according to Deare.

There is nothing unique about Mexican operatives learning counter-insurgency tactics at the facility, as military forces from around the world train at Ft. Bragg. However -- critics say the specific skills learned by the Zetas primed them for careers as contract killers and drug dealers.

"The Zetas definitely have the reputation of being the most dangerous, the most vicious, the most renegade of the cartels," Kristen Bricker, a Mexico-based research associate with the North American Congress on Latin America says.

About 29,000 people have died since Felipe Calderon, Mexico's president, declared war on the drug cartels in 2006.