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McALLEN, Texas (AP) — Mexico's president-elect asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to evaluate the murder case of a Mexican woman who was sentenced to 99 years in prison for the death of a Texas boy.

Enrique Pena Nieto filed a brief in his personal capacity supporting the appeal of Rosa Estela Olvera Jimenez. He argued that Jimenez was denied due process because she wasn't given funds to hire expert witnesses and had ineffective counsel.

Pena Nieto was governor of the state of Mexico when Jimenez, a native of that state, was sentenced in 2005 for the death of a nearly 2-year-old boy she had been babysitting in Austin. The boy died three months after choking on five paper towels lodged in his throat.

Jimenez said the boy ate the paper towels, but prosecutors argued that she stuffed the towels into the boy's mouth.

Pena Nieto, who was elected president in July and takes office in December, was joined in the brief by the current governor of the state of Mexico and a Mexican lawyer.

"Granting Rosa's petition could rescue an innocent woman from languishing in prison for the rest of her life, cut off from her daughter and the son born to her in jail as she awaited trial," the brief said.

It also could also impact other cases. The brief notes that more than two million Mexican nationals live in Texas, and many of them — like Jimenez — are there illegally. Without resources, the brief argues, they are at a disadvantage in the criminal justice system.

Jimenez was five months pregnant in 2003 when she was babysitting the boy and her own young daughter.

"The little boy loved her," said Chris Johns, an Austin attorney representing Pena Nieto in the case. There was no evidence of trauma anywhere on the boy's body, he said.

Jimenez argued at trial that the boy had eaten the paper towels himself and she had a neighbor dial 911 after seeing the boy turn blue. Prosecutors alleged Jimenez held the boy down and shoved paper towels down his throat, according to the brief.

The jury sided with prosecutors and handed down the sentence. Jimenez's children were later taken to live with her mother in Mexico, Johns said.

Jimenez is requesting that the Supreme Court consider her case on her claims of innocence and ineffective counsel. Her trial attorney had asked the judge for funds to hire expert witnesses but didn't do so on the record, jeopardizing her initial state appeal, which was denied.

She later went before a habeas court seeking a new trial. With the financial support of the state of Mexico, she hired expert witnesses, and the judge presiding over four days of testimony from Jimenez's experts recommended she receive a new trial.

In April, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said it agreed with some but not all of that judge's findings and denied Jimenez's request for a new trial.

Ryan Bates, an attorney handling Jimenez's appeal, said that if the habeas judge had such strong doubts, due process requires she get a new trial.

"When an impartial judge can look at the case of a habeas petitioner like Rosa Jimenez and say that it's more likely than not that no rational juror would find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in a retrial, everyone involved knows that there's severe constitutional doubts about the validity of the original trial and its verdict," he said.

RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas (AP) — Officials from a U.S. agency that monitors the U.S.-Mexico border are to explain why they're allowing construction of border fence segments in the Rio Grande flood plain.

The explanation will come at a South Texas citizen forum Wednesday evening in Rio Grande City.

Earlier this year, the U.S. side of the International Boundary and Water Commission withdrew its objection to border fence construction in the flood plain, finding it wouldn't obstruct the flow of the Rio Grande significantly.

The decision potentially affects about seven miles of fencing planned in the flood plain. U.S. Customs and Border Protection says there are no immediate plans to build the segments because funding doesn't exist, but Mexico argues the fencing would violate a treaty and deflect floodwaters to its side of the river.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A falling out between the leaders of the hyper-violent Zetas cartel appears to have put the gang in the hands of a brutal and feared gangster who has been blamed for an eruption of bloodshed in Mexico's once relatively calm central states.

Miguel Angel Trevino Morales is a former cartel enforcer who apparently won a showdown with Zetas founder Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano for leadership, law enforcement officials say.

Lawmen and even competing drug capos picture Trevino as a brutal assassin who favors getting rid of foes by stuffing them into oil drums, dousing them with gasoline and setting them on fire — a practice known as a "guiso," a Spanish word for "stew."

That could be a worrisome turn for the Zetas, which already was the hemisphere's most violent criminal organization. It has been blamed for a large share of the tens of thousands of deaths in Mexico's war on drugs, though other gangs too have repeatedly committed mass slayings.

"There was a lot of talk that he was pushing really hard on Lazcano Lazcano and was basically taking over the Zetas, because he had the personality, he was the guy who was out there basically fighting in the streets with the troops," said Jere Miles, a Zetas expert and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent who was posted in Mexico until last year.

"Lazcano Lazcano, at the beginning he was kind of happy just to sit back and let Trevino do this, but I don't think he understood how that works in the criminal underworld," Miles said. "When you allow someone to take that much power, and get out in front like that, pretty soon the people start paying loyalty to him and they quit paying to Lazcano."

The rise has so alarmed at least one gang chieftain that he has called for gangs, drug cartels, civic groups and even the government to form a united front to fight Trevino Morales, known as "Z-40," whom he blamed for most of Mexico's violence.

"Let's unite and form a common front against the Zetas, and particularly against Z-40, Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, because this person with his unbridled ambition has caused so much terror and confusion in our country," said a man identified as Servando Gomez, leader of the Knights Templar cartel, in a viedo posted Tuesday on the internet.

A Mexican law enforcement official who wasn't authorized to speak on the record said the video appeared to be genuine.

"He is the main cause of everything that is happening in Mexico, the robberies, kidnappings, extortion," Gomez is heard saying on the tape. "We are inviting all the groups ... everyone to form a common front to attack Z-40 and put an end to him."

Trevino Morales has a fearsome reputation. "If you get called to a meeting with him, you're not going to come out of that meeting," said a U.S. law-enforcement official in Mexico City, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.

In two years since Zetas split with their former allies in the Gulf cartel — a split in which Trevino reported played a central role — the gang has become one of Mexico's two main cartels, and is battling the rival Sinaloa cartel.

Now the Zetas' internal disputes have added to the violence of the conflict between gangs. Internal feuds spilled out into pitched battles in the normally quiet north-central state of San Luis Potosi in mid-August, when police found a van stuffed with 14 executed bodies.

San Luis Potosi state Attorney General Miguel Angel Garcia Covarrubias told local media that a 15th man who apparently survived the massacre told investigators that both the killers and the victims were Zetas. "It was a rivalry with the same organized crime group," Garcia Covarrubias said.

The leadership dispute also may have opened the door to lesser regional figures in the Zetas gang to step forward and rebel, analysts and officials said.

Analysts say that a local Zetas leader in the neighboring state of Zacatecas, Ivan Velazquez Caballero, "The Taliban," was apparently trying to challenge Trevino Morales' leadership grab, and that the 14 bullet-ridden bodies left in the van were The Taliban's men, left there as a visible warning by Trevino Morales' underlings.

The Taliban's territory, Zacatecas, appears to have been a hot spot in Trevino's dispute with Lazcano. It was in Zacatecas that a professionally printed banner was hung in a city park, accusing Lazcano of betraying fellow Zetas and turning them in to the police.

Trevino began his career as a teenage gofer for the Los Tejas gang, which controlled most crime in his hometown of Nuevo Laredo, across the border from the city of Laredo, Texas, officials say.

Around 2005, Trevino Morales was promoted to boss of the Nuevo Laredo territory, or "plaza" and given responsibility for fighting off the Sinaloa cartel's attempt to seize control of its drug-smuggling routes. He orchestrated a series of killings on the U.S. side of the border, several by a group of young U.S. citizens who gunned down their victims on the streets of the American city. American officials believe the hit men also carried out an unknown number of killings on the Mexican side of the border, the U.S. official said.

Trevino Morales is on Mexico's most-wanted list, with a reward of 30 million pesos ($2.28 million) offered for information leading to his capture.

Raul Benitez, a security expert at Mexico's National Autonomous University, said that the Zetas are inherently an unstable cartel with an already huge capacity for violence, and the possibility of more if they begin fighting internal disputes. "I think the Zetas are having problems, and there is no central command," he said.

The Zetas have been steadily expanding their influence and reaching into Central America in recent years, constructing a route for trafficking drugs that offloads Colombian cocaine in Honduras, ships it overland along Mexico's Gulf Coast and runs into over the border through Trevino Morales' old stomping grounds.

Samuel Logan, managing director of the security analysis firm Southern Pulse, notes that "personality-wise they (Trevino Morales and Lazcano) couldn't be more different," and believes the two may want to take the cartel in different directions. The stakes in who wins the dispute could be large for Mexico; Lazcano is believed to be more steady, more of a survivor who might have an interest in preserving the cartel as a stable organization.

"Lazcano may be someone who would take the Zetas in a direction where they'd become less of a thorn in the side for the new political administration," Logan said in reference to Enrique Pena Nieto, who is expected to take office as president on Dec. 1. "In contrast, Trevino is someone who wants to fight the fight."

Referring to Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel, a member of the rival Sinaloa Cartel who died in a shootout with soldiers in July 2010, Logan noted, "Trevino is someone who is going to want to go out, like Nacho Coronel went out, with his guns blazing."

Associated Press writer Michael Weissenstein contributed to this report