Pubdate: Sun, 04 Mar 2007
Source: Kansas City Star (MO)
Copyright: 2007 The Kansas City Star
Contact:  http://www.kcstar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/221
Author: Jeremy Schwartz

DRUG WAR RIPS APART MEXICO

The Conflict Between Cartels Takes Violence To Bloody New Extremes

In An Attempt To Halt The Bloodshed In A War Between Rival Drug 
Cartels, Mexican Police Have Begun Random Vehicle Inspections On The 
Beach At Acapulco

ACAPULCO, Mexico -- On the sun-kissed beach, women paraded by in 
bikinis, vendors sold cheap bracelets to the tourists and heavyset 
men in Speedos sipped margaritas.

On the boardwalk, though, machine gun-wielding members of Mexico's 
elite federal police force pulled over cars for random inspections, 
stopped city buses and checked trunks and IDs.

More than 250 people were executed last year in Acapulco as the 
sweltering Pacific resort became the latest battleground between 
rival cartels battling for supremacy of the multibillion-dollar drug trade.

After what experts called a decade of paralysis, corruption and 
inefficiency, newly elected President Felipe Calderon has sent 20,000 
Mexican military and federal troops to six states to confront the drug cartels.

It remains to be seen whether Calderon's operations, the defining 
action of his young administration, will restore law and order or are 
a publicity gambit, as his critics allege.

What is more clear is that as the war between the Matamoros-based 
Gulf Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel plunges into its third year, 
Mexico has passed into a stage of violence unprecedented in the 
nation's modern history.

Police are gunned down inside their own headquarters, the executions 
videotaped by gloating hit men. Traffickers are decapitated, their 
heads spilled across dance floors as warnings. Federal legislators 
are sprayed with bullets. Singers are murdered after concerts. Former 
safe harbors such as Monterrey have become battlefields. Beach 
resorts have become militarized zones.

"The Mexican state wasn't ready for this war," said Jorge Chabat, a 
Mexico City analyst who specializes in criminal justice. "The 
narco-traffickers have traditionally lived in their own dimension, 
with their own laws. Until recently, the narcos didn't leave that 
dimension. Now we're seeing them leaving, like ghosts leaving a haunted house."

Drug violence is nothing new in Mexico. What is extraordinary is the 
extreme violence of recent months.

Luis Astorga, a sociology professor at Mexico City's National 
Autonomous University, said that the Gulf Cartel, with its armed wing 
of former army officers known as Zetas, has accelerated the level of 
destruction.

"It's part of the psychological war, which they learned in the 
counter-insurgency while they were in the military," he said. 
"They're killing machines without ethical brakes. In the old days, 
they put heads on spears to paralyze their adversary. But (the Gulf 
Cartel's) rivals have the same logic, so they've entered a violent spiral."

Few people expect Calderon to dismantle the cartels or even seriously 
weaken them.

"He's trying to establish a minimum of order," Chabat said. "He's 
sending a message that someone is in charge."

Calderon has earned praise from the Bush administration for his firm 
stance against the cartels and for extraditing some top drug lords, 
including Osiel Cardenas, who was running the Gulf Cartel from his 
maximum-security prison cell.

The operations are widely seen as a stopgap. The Mexican government 
has neither the manpower nor money to keep them going indefinitely.

So far the operations have met with mixed success. Even critics 
acknowledge that soldiers have brought order to some far-flung 
pockets that have long existed beyond the rule of law. And while 
experts warn that it is too early to tell, it seems that the 
blistering pace of drug killings -- more than 2,000 in 2006 -- has 
slowed since the military was unleashed.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman