MEXICO'S DRUG CARTELS TAKE BARBAROUS TURN: TARGETING BYSTANDERS

In Sinaloa, Carnage Brings Widespread Terror

GUAMUCHIL, Mexico -- The three teenagers started their big weekend
singing "Happy Birthday" to the parish priest.

The next day, they prayed for hours with their church youth group,
then went on to a quinceanera, Mexico's archetypal 15th-birthday
celebration. As the party wound down, they talked their parents into
letting them go for a late-night cruise down the main drag in
Guamuchil, a Saturday night ritual in this sleepy market town, friends
and family say.

During that cruise, investigators believe the teens inadvertently
blocked drug cartel assassins in hot pursuit of their enemies. Once
police arrived in the wee hours of July 13, the assassins were gone
but the three teens and a 12-year-old girl who was riding with them
lay dead in their cars. Four others -- another teenager and three
adults -- were dead in nearby cars. There were 539 bullet casings on
the ground.

The killings here -- a massacre of eight people who were not suspected
of drug-trafficking ties -- punctuated a vicious turn in Mexico's drug
war, a savage conflict between rival cartels and the federal
government that has taken more than 7,000 lives in the past 2 1/2 years.

In the past, cartels have killed their rivals, as well as police and
public officials. Occasionally even family members have been slain.
Yet in recent weeks, an increasing number of innocent bystanders have
been gunned down by suspected drug cartel hit men here in Sinaloa, a
cartel stronghold on Mexico's Pacific coast, as well as in the
brutally contested drug corridors along the U.S. border.

In most instances, investigators believe, the victims were merely at
the wrong place at the wrong time, gunned down by assassins who were
once known for their precision but have now taken to wildly spraying
bullets. The effect of the carnage has been widespread terror and a
society afraid to demand justice.

"They have us in a panic," Luciana Arredondo Arredondo, a prosecutor
in Guamuchil, said of the cartels in an interview. "They have us
terrorized."

Here in Sinaloa -- a drug-trafficking haven where more than 580 people
have been killed since January -- the danger to innocents has reached
crisis proportions, Graciela Dominguez, a state legislator, said in an
interview at her office in the state capital, Culiacan.

"You don't have peace of mind walking the streets -- you don't have
peace of mind at home," she said.

Three days before the massacre in this town, cartel assassins killed
11 people in three daylight shootouts in Culiacan. Among the victims
were two college professors who had the misfortune to be waiting in a
car repair shop when the shooting started. Cartel members also are
blamed for holding hostage dozens of customers in a Mazatlan shopping
center and firing bazookas into a Culiacan neighborhood, though no
civilians were killed.

In a country where drug trafficking touches nearly every village and
mountain range, Sinaloa state is generally considered the ground zero
of Mexican organized crime. The Sinaloa cartel is Mexico's largest,
authorities say, and has been rapidly expanding by crushing rivals or
making alliances with other trafficking organizations in a loosely
configured conglomeration known as the Federation.

Sinaloa is the starting point for much of the drugs that pass through
Mexico to the United States. The long, narrow state stretches over 450
miles of coastline laced with tiny inlets and bays, affording drug
traffickers countless clandestine drop points for shipments of
cocaine, heroin and marijuana. Once on shore, traffickers can quickly
squirrel away their cargoes in rugged nearby mountains where villagers
tend to be more loyal to the cartels than to law enforcement.

The current uptick in violence in Sinaloa is most likely the result of
"a historic rupture" in the alliance between Mexico's most feared drug
lord, Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman, and a pair of brothers who had served as
hit men for his Sinaloa cartel, according to a top federal police
official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not
authorized to comment. One of the brothers, Arturo Beltran Leyva, was
arrested in January, and his loyalists -- mistakenly believing Guzman
helped arrange the arrest -- are now seeking revenge against the drug
lord, the federal official said.

"The streets where they once lived together now don't seem big enough
for both of them," the official said.

But law-abiding Sinaloans have also begun to accept some of the blame
for the violence. Drug cartels have openly used this mountainous state
as a center of operations. The richest cartel leaders have flaunted
their wealth by buying fancy cars and living in swanky mansions in the
region.

"The problem is that for years we let this grow -- the society is as
much responsible as the government," said Dominguez, the state
legislator. "This is a lesson for society: If all this hadn't been
accepted, we wouldn't be reaching these levels of violence."

Drug trafficking is directly or indirectly responsible for 20 percent
of the economic activity in Sinaloa, according to Guillermo Ibarra, an
economist at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa. Ibarra also
estimates that drug cartels have at least $680 million of laundered
money deposited in Sinaloan banks. As a result, Sinaloa is one of the
top six Mexican states in terms of bank deposits even though it is
17th in economic production, he said.

"Sinaloa is not a banking center by any means," Ibarra said in an
interview. "It is a financial center for drug traffickers."

The economic might of the cartels makes residents more likely to turn
a blind eye to drug traffickers because they depend on the money, at
least in part, for their livelihood, he said.

"If you took drug money out of Sinaloa, half the automobile
dealerships would fail," Ibarra said. "Half the restaurants would
fail, the real estate market would collapse. Even if you only reduced
drug money by 9 percent, there would be an immediate recession, a
crisis much like the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States."

Sinaloans tend to clam up when investigators try to unravel drug
crimes, law enforcement officials say. In Guamuchil, for instance,
drug cartels are suspected of killing 21 people -- including the eight
slain July 13 -- in the past three weeks. But the cartels have made
residents so fearful of retribution that investigators have not
received a single tip about any of the killings, said Arredondo, the
prosecutor.

"I have nothing, nothing," she said. "Imagine, the families are coming
to me and saying, 'Why aren't you doing anything?' But what can we do?
We have no information."

Arredondo's own office, now ringed by cyclone fencing, was attacked by
cartel hit men in May, though no one was killed. Arredondo missed the
attack -- she was on a three-month leave because of stress.

The Mexican government has responded to the outburst of violence by
nearly tripling the number of federal police and troops in Sinaloa to
2,000. Convoys of federal police -- most wearing face masks to protect
their identities -- ply the streets of Culiacan, and military
helicopters regularly swoop down over the city. But the presence of
troops and federal police has not stopped the violence; many here feel
it has provoked more confrontations.

"The government is failing," Dominguez said. "They've been
implementing these operations, but it appears that they are going
about it without any kind of strategy."

Antonio Guadalupe Arredondo Higuera -- brother of Ignacio Arredondo
Higuera, a 38-year-old welder who was one of the July 13 victims in
Guamuchil -- doesn't expect much from the federal forces either.
"They'll go away soon and leave us here with the cartels," he said
during an interview in the dusty yard of his parents' home.

Arredondo Higuera considers the drug cartels "untouchables." He has
come to think of their leaders as "the Kings of Sinaloa," he said.

"They're just laughing at the law. They kill for the fun of it," he
said. "And they're going to keep doing it."

His mother, Regina Higuera Gutierrez, sat a few steps away, shaking
her head. She has wanted to honor her son's memory -- and perhaps
ensure a better world for the child her son's partner is due to
deliver in three months -- by marching to protest the violence ruining
her home town. She tried to talk her husband, Concepcion Arredondo,
into taking to the streets and saying, "Enough!" But he refused and
forbade her from joining in.

"He's afraid," she said, shaking her head. "We're all afraid."