TROOPS SENT TO MEXICAN STATE IN DRUGS WAR

Mexico's newly sworn-in president sent more than 6,500 soldiers,
sailors and federal police to violence-plagued Michoacan state to
crack down on drug turf wars that have left hundreds dead in a wave of
execution-style killings and beheadings.

Felipe Calderon took office on December 1 pledging a "battle" against
crime, promising more funds for the army and law enforcement and
appointing hard-line Interior Minister Francisco Ramirez Acuna to
oversee the fight against organised crime.

"The battle against organised crime has just begun," Ramirez Acuna
said today, as he announced the administration's first major offensive
against drug gangs. "We are looking to take back the spaces that
organised crime has seized."

Security officials said police and soldiers will arrest traffickers,
mount checkpoints and burn crops of marijuana and opium poppies grown
in Michoacan's rugged mountains.

Navy ships will seal off the state's small Pacific coast, along which
smugglers carry drugs on their way to the US. The force will operate
19 planes, 38 helicopters, and four ships.

Hilly, largely rural Michoacan is Calderon's home state and a major
drug transshipment point north; police here have reported more than
500 killings this year, about half of which investigators say are
linked to a turf war between two rival drug gangs.

Calderon has come under criticism for his proposed budget cuts in
other areas, and the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, the PRD,
still refuses to recognise Calderon's narrow July 2 electoral victory
over the PRD candidate.

However, Michoacan Gov. Lazaro Cardenas Batel, a PRD member, welcomed
Monday's announcement and said he hoped the federal forces would stay.

"We hope it won't be a fleeting presence, that it will be a presence
that will seriously reduce the level of violence in Michoacan,"
Cardenas Batel told local media.

In apparent attempts to terrorise rivals and the public, the Michoacan
gangs have carried out a wave of decapitations, placing the severed
heads on public display with threatening notes including one that
read, "See. Hear. Shut Up. If you want to stay alive."

In the most gruesome case, gunmen burst into a nightclub and rolled
five heads onto the dance floor.

In another, a pair of heads were planted in front of a car dealership
in Zitacuaro, a town best known until now as a nesting ground for
monarch butterflies.

Officials said they had made major drug busts in other states since
Calderon took office two weeks ago, seizing more than two tons of
cocaine and nearly 20 tons of pseudoephedrine, used to make
methamphetamine.

Calderon, a career politician from the conservative National Action
Party, has vowed to smash the drug gangs, which have been blamed for
more than 2,000 drug-related killings this year, including several
police chiefs, journalists, town mayors and at least one judge.

Calderon's predecessor Vicente Fox promised the "mother of all
battles" against organised crime, sending in thousands of soldiers and
police to places like the border city of Nuevo Laredo and the tourist
resort of Acapulco.

Those efforts failed to quell the violence for long.

While Mexico has made some headway in arresting the heads of the
Tijuana and Gulf cartels, major traffickers like Joaquin "El Chapo"
Guzman remain at large, the drug gangs have regrouped and formed
nationwide alliances which fight each other for control of local
markets and drug shipment routes.

Federal investigators say the violence in Michoacan stems from a turf
war between a local gang called Los Valencia -- apparently allied with
Guzman's Sinaloa cartel -- and a shadowy group known as "The Family,"
apparently allied with the Gulf cartel, a group which operate a bloody
gang of enforcers known as the Zetas led by ex-Mexican army operatives
turned hit men.

The killings rose in 2004 following the arrest of Valencia leader
Armando Valencia and his lieutenant Carlos Alberto Rosales Mendoza.
Investigators say their arrests encouraged Gulf Cartel leaders to try
to battle their way into their territory.

Many security experts say it will take more than just brute force to
defeat the cartels, who are heavily armed, using rocket-propelled
grenades and bazookas, and well financed, making billions of pounds
smuggling marijuana, heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine into the US.