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Drug traffickers aim violence at authorities
By Hector Tobar
6:44 PM PDT, June 8, 2007


MEXICO CITY -- In the dark, early-morning quiet of a funeral parlor here, with a group of mourners praying before the coffin of a 10-year-old boy, another horror-filled week in Mexico's drug-trafficking wars began.

The boy had died in a drowning accident some days earlier and surely had nothing to do with drug trafficking. But his grandfather was Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, the fugitive founder of the Tijuana drug cartel. Just after 4 a.m. Monday, as many as six hooded gunmen interrupted the traditional all-night wake, shooting two people to death.

Before they left, the "commandos" (as one newspaper here described them) had scribbled "Z's" on the victims' backs, a symbol of the Gulf cartel.

By the time the week ended, at least 46 more people would be dead in a dizzying variety of attacks across Mexico, including hand-grenade assaults and decapitations, with police, federal agents and rival drug-traffickers the principal victims.

The killings, dispersed across the country, offer a window into the scope of the violence and the tactics of psychological warfare behind it. Many deaths appear to involve disputes between competing bands of traffickers. At least one of those bands appears to be splitting into at least two different groups.

On Tuesday, authorities in Tuxtepec, in the southeast state of Oaxaca, discovered a severed head with a note: "This is going to happen to all the people who work with the Zetas," referring to the hit men who work for the Gulf cartel. The message was signed, "Sincerely, the New Blood."

The "New Blood" likely refers to a group of Gulf Cartel operatives who have turned against the Zetas as members of the organization bid to control trafficking routes and local drug markets. Genaro Garcia Luna, Mexico's Secretary of Public Safety, said in May that the Gulf cartel had split into rival bands.

In a recent press conference, Garcia Luna said the extreme violence in Mexico was part of a strategy by drug traffickers to force authorities into a "strategic retreat."

"They are trying to create a climate of intimidation and fear ... in order to gain operational advantages," Garcia Luna said.

If the residents of a rural town or urban neighborhood believe that drug traffickers cannot be defeated, they will refuse to cooperate with authorities and create a "social space" of support for traffickers, he said.

News of ever-more spectacular and gruesome killings has become a hallmark of the drug war this year. Every day this week, new tales of gangland violence have filled the newspapers and airwaves.

On Wednesday, authorities discovered a decapitated body left with a scribbled "message" for state police in the port city of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico. The message said police were protecting rival drug traffickers and that the decapitated man had been selling drugs for a rival group.

Four other people were killed in and around Veracruz that same day, including a funeral director who in May had transported the body of Efrain Torres, an assassinated leader of the Zetas, to a cemetery in the city of Poza Rica. The body later was stolen from its crypt.

Another victim of the violence in Veracruz cannot yet be tallied among the dead.

Business owner Roberto Moguel Martinez was kidnapped by armed men Wednesday after being released from a hospital where he had been recovering from wounds suffered in a May 31 attack.

Moguel's mother wrestled briefly with his armed kidnappers on a busy street in the center of the city, according to the Veracruz newspaper Notiver. He has not been seen since.

On Thursday, there were three grenade attacks on two police stations and an army barracks in the southern state of Guerrero. In all, seven people were killed in apparent drug-related attacks there, authorities said.

By Friday, the Web sites of Mexico City newspapers reported as many as 20 people had been gunned down nationwide in drug-related violence the previous 24 hours. The dead included three people shot on a highway in the state of Durango in northwest Mexico.

All this happened on a week when President Felipe Calderon traveled to Europe to meet with Pope Benedict XVI and other leaders. On Monday in Rome, Calderon told reporters that consumers in the United States were to blame for the drug-driven chaos in his country.

"I have argued that this is a shared problem between the United States and Mexico," he said. "The principal cause ... is the use of drugs. And (the U.S.) is the prime consumer in the world."

Calderon has sent the army to numerous Mexican states to fill in for over-matched and corrupt local police.

On Monday, 19 members of the army were ordered imprisoned as suspects in the killing of three women and two children at a rural anti-smuggling checkpoint in Sinaloa. The five were members of a family returning from a wake. Military officials said they had failed to stop at the checkpoint.

For many, the shooting was more evidence of the war-like psychology gripping many corners of Mexico, with an estimated 1,200 people already killed in the violence this year.

Carlos Martinez of the Times' Mexico City bureau contributed to this report.