A ferocious war between rival drug gangs and police in Mexico has left 1,378 people dead so far this year, with no sign of the bloodshed abating, official figures indicate.
The carnage — characterized by people being executed, decapitated or tortured — has emerged as one of the biggest challenges facing Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who has placed the anti-narcotics fight at the heart of his mandate started 18 months ago.
In that time, 36,000 soldiers deployed to help overwhelmed — or corrupt — police have confiscated 55 tonnes of cocaine, 13,500 weapons and 263 airplanes.
But the cartels have barely been weakened, employing a sophisticated arsenal against one another and the security forces as they vie for control over cocaine trafficking to the US.
Undaunted, the country’s top prosecutor, Eduardo Medina Mora, predicted “we are going to win — even though it doesn’t look like it.”
Calderon’s vow to “rescue all the regions under the sway of the narcos” has shaken up years of status quo of official inaction and corruption that have made his pledge all the more difficult to fulfill.
Today, the cartels are well-armed, with a wide network of influence in the security forces that makes it difficult to determine who is killing whom and for what motives.
Northern towns such as Culiacan and Ciudad Juarez are the scenes of the worst of the violence, which has caused residents to live in constant fear.
“In the past, the cartels acted quietly, they didn’t need to bring the war to the streets. But now there is an offensive by all the government’s resources in a coordinated way, and the president has declared war on them,” said Raul Benitez Manaut, of the Center for Research on North America at the Autonomous University of Mexico.
The Mexican drug cartels “have increased their power” as those in Colombia have been weakened, he said.
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