Mexican drug cartels fight military and one another
By DANE SCHILLER and DUDLEY ALTHAUS Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Dec. 16, 2009, 11:39PM


As Mexican drug-cartel fighting rages, the new breed of capos knows more about battle than business, experts say.

Cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine gush into the United States, but Mexico's largest criminal organizations are taking a beating, and their futures have tumbled into uncertainty.

They are fighting one another for control of lucrative smuggling routes, as well as taking on the 35,000 military personnel deployed by President Felipe Calderon.

By all accounts, the warring has been ugly, public and nonstop.

5 officers' heads found
On Wednesday, the severed heads of five state policemen and a prosecutor were found at a church in western Durango state, in Cuencame, a community plagued by dozens of kidnappings and murders blamed on up-and-coming gunmen known as the Zetas.

Mexican newspapers reported the six officials had been abducted Monday night in another town in Durango and that the assailants were traveling in at least a dozen vehicles.

Those killings mirror the brutality that has punctuated this year in Mexico.

In June, at least 11 bodies were found chopped to pieces and stacked like cordwood in a sport-utility vehicle abandoned in the border state of Sonora.

With no one band strong enough to overcome the others, and the government targeting all of them, chaos has replaced what was once a fairly well-regulated illicit trade.

“It is kind of like Rome; we need a Caesar here,â€