http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/page1/3220962

June 12, 2005, 12:37AM

Drug trade a way of life in Culiacan

Tolerating hundreds of gangland executions and venerating an unofficial saint of smugglers, residents of this city in Mexico's Sinaloa state accept the risks and welcome the wealth
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS

CULIACAN, MEXICO - Despite repeated crackdowns and the arrest of tens of thousands of suspected gangsters, narcotics-fueled violence continues to shake northern Mexico.

More than 550 people have been killed so far this year, including the newly appointed police chief in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, who was gunned down on his first day on the job last week.

President Vicente Fox has vowed action, throwing thousands of federal police and army troops at the problem, so far to little effect.

Mexican presidents have launched similar anti-narcotics drives for more than three decades. But all have failed in the face of well-financed smugglers, corrupt officials, inept police and the ambivalent citizens of communities compromised by the drug trade.

In few places is the challenge facing Fox more evident than in Culiacan, capital of the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa, home turf for most of Mexico's top criminals.

Federal officials blame Sinaloa-based gangland bosses, particularly Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, for the violence racking Nuevo Laredo and other cities along the Texas border. Guzman's outfit, the Sinaloa cartel, is battling another crime organization for control of smuggling routes into the United States.

In this city of 1 million people, where $85,000 Hummers share the road with jalopies, the smuggling of illegal drugs to U.S. consumers has flowered from a business into a way of life. Gangland executions have become as common, and as grudgingly accepted, as the region's stupefying heat.

"This is a city very close to the United States and very far from God," says human rights activist Mercedes Murrillo, 69, paraphrasing the famous lament of a 19th-century Mexican dictator. "The whole city benefits from drug trafficking.

"People here have permitted what never should have been permitted," she says. "We, both society and the government, are permitting the killings."

Nearly 200 people have been killed in Culiacan â€â€