DRUG WARS GAINING FIREPOWER, FEROCITY

Brazen Commando-Style Raids And Greater Brutality Signal
Militarization Of Mexican Cartels' Ongoing Conflicts

TIJUANA, MEXICO - The caller painted an ominous scene: A convoy of 40
vehicles filled with 70 heavily armed and masked men, witnesses said,
was prowling the streets of Rosarito Beach.

Three police officers responded to the quiet neighborhood and were
quickly abducted. A day later, their mutilated bodies turned up in an
empty lot.

Their heads were found in the Tijuana River.

The attack was the latest in a series of paramilitary-style
operations that have plagued Mexican cities as warring drug cartels
escalate their battles to control key smuggling routes.

With Mexican authorities relying more heavily on the military to
combat drug smuggling, traffickers have responded in kind, forming
large forces of assailants and arming them with frightening arrays of weaponry.

In April, nearly two dozen heavily armed gunmen tried to assassinate
Baja California's top-ranking public safety official in a wild
shootout on a Mexicali street. The attackers launched grenades and
fired more than 600 rounds, wounding three bodyguards.

In the past year, commando-style raids have been regular occurrences
in Tijuana, with convoys of masked gunmen snatching victims from
restaurants and street corners in brazen daylight raids.

"It's a disturbing manifestation of latest drug-war frenzy. ... The
militarization of the drug war in many ways on the side of law
enforcement has corresponded with the militarization of tactics and
personnel on the criminal side," said David Shirk, director of the
Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.

The situation, Shirk added, "has heightened the competition and
raised the stakes in a way that has led to extreme violence, at a
level we have not seen before in Mexico."

Turf warIn Nuevo Laredo, on the Texas border, a raging turf war
between the Gulf Cartel and Sinaloa drug gangs has killed more than
230 people in the past 18 months.

The defection of a military commando unit, the Zetas, to the Gulf
cartel in the late 1990s became the model for military-style
assaults, experts say.

Federal officials say they killed or captured the original group, but
they say they think jailed Gulf cartel leader Osiel Cardenas still
had at least 120 cadres trained by the Zetas at his command as
recently as last August and was using them increasingly to battle the
rival cartel led by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

The violence is not limited to cities along the U.S.-Mexico border.
In Apatzingan, in the central state of Michoacan, last Aug. 18, four
men were killed and a policeman and four bystanders wounded in a
shootout between rival drug gangs that involved dozens of
paramilitary gunmen in 10 vehicles.

Two weeks earlier, police in nearby Uruapan, also in Michoacan, had
arrested a group of 10 alleged drug-gang members armed with
50-millimeter rifles, AK-47s and AR-15s.

Cartels also are using increasingly brutal methods to intimidate
their enemies. The Rosarito Beach beheadings followed the
decapitation in April of a police commander in Acapulco, whose head
was found in a public plaza.

Mara SalvatruchaJose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, the top
organized-crime prosecutor in the Mexican attorney general's office,
has taken over the investigation of the Baja California beheadings.
In an interview for the Mexico City newspaper El Universal, Santiago
said the abductions and beheadings were characteristic of the brutal
Central America-based Mara Salvatrucha gang, which has become
increasingly involved in the Mexican drug trade. "Acts like the ones
we have just seen are manifestations of groups related to the Maras," he said.

"We have seen the phenomenon of decapitation in El Salvador, a brutal
act of intimidation that is occurring here as (Mexican) drug gangs
are worn down and resort to recruiting this kind of group."

Jeffrey McIllwain, a criminal justice professor at California State
University, San Diego, who studies border-security issues, thinks the
violence is a sign that pressure from law enforcement is affecting
the cartels' bottom line.

"The fact is that it has hurt operations, severely in some cases ...
so it makes sense that the cartels would step up their game," McIllwain said.

Shocking audacityIn Baja California, the crime wave could signal an
escalation of the fierce war to control the lucrative Tijuana
smuggling corridor, which has been traditionally controlled by the
Arellano-Felix Cartel. Several top-ranking members of the cartel have
been killed or arrested in recent years, and other cartels may be
sensing weakness, say experts.

Some recent attacks were shocking for their audacity, say experts.
Last month, three men armed with AK-47s stormed into an office of the
Mexican federal attorney's office in Tijuana and shot two agents,
killing one. In December, assailants attacked the Tijuana home of a
state police commander, killing two of his bodyguards. In October,
Tijuana's chief of homicides narrowly escaped an attack by assailants
who fired more than 50 bullets at his car.

"It's a more aggressive form of violence, with new ingredients," said
Victor Clark, a border expert and director of Tijuana's Binational
Center for Human Rights.