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.