SURGE IN VIOLENCE SHOCKS EVEN WEARY MEXICO

Drug Killings Nearly Doubled in Past Year

ZIHUATANEJO, Mexico -- Andres Sauzo collects newspapers, astoundingly
grisly newspapers.

There's the one with the close-up shot of a severed human head.
There's the one with the wide-angle of a man hacked to death with a
machete.

But the worst in his bulky archive of drug-war gore rolled off the
presses the day after someone found pieces of what used to be Sauzo's
24-year-old namesake. A hit man had decapitated Sauzo's son, then
chopped off his arms and legs. The killer was so unconcerned about
being brought to justice that he scrawled his own name and nickname --
"El Barby" -- on a note left with the mutilated corpse.

Still, Sauzo's mother, Cristina Gomez, didn't bother to go to the
police. "Why waste my time?" she said in an interview. "This is the
way it is in a town without laws."

Gomez's reaction and the audacity of Sauzo's murder -- one of 11
decapitations in the state of Guerrero this year and one of 2,000
killings in a nationwide war between rival drug cartels -- are
symptomatic of the unraveling of the rule of law that has plagued
Mexico for years.

But in the past year, the number of spectacularly gruesome killings
and the intensity of civil unrest have spiked to such alarming levels
that even Mexicans who were once hardened by years of violence are
shocked.

In flash points across the country, criminals, political groups and
the frustrated poor have challenged the authority of institutions,
intimidating local officials and spreading fear with little or no
worry of legal consequences.

The bulk of the violence is the result of a barbaric, five-year war
between Mexican drug cartels -- which are now approaching the strength
and size of the notorious Colombian cartels of the 1980s. Drug
killings have nearly doubled in the past year; in a single incident
this month, six police officers were fatally shot in the troubled
state of Michoacan.

But other factors are also contributing to the unrest, including
clashes between the rapidly growing class of "micro-dealers," the
lower-level street dealers who control neighborhood distribution and
feed Mexico's growing ranks of drug consumers.

"We have a huge problem, a problem that exists throughout the country;
it's difficult, complicated, dynamic," said Juan Heriberto Salinas
Alt?s, a retired army general who serves as Guerrero state's public
security director. "It's something we've never seen before."

While Mexico's government has struggled to contain drug violence, it
is also contending with the anger, frustration and increasingly brazen
actions of the poor in a country where 40 percent of the population
lives in poverty.

In the past few months, a large federal police force has tried, and
failed, to corral the armed bandits and hordes of protesters occupying
the city of Oaxaca. A handful of bombs apparently placed by groups
sympathetic to the Oaxaca protesters have exploded across Mexico City,
including one that shredded part of the country's electoral tribunal
building.

Meanwhile, Andr?s Manuel L?pez Obrador, the former Mexico City mayor
who was narrowly defeated in a hotly contested presidential election
in July, has announced the creation of a parallel government and
inaugurated himself president. Lawmakers from his Democratic
Revolutionary Party have said they will try to disrupt the
inauguration ceremony of President-elect Felipe Calder?n on Friday.

The upheaval may be an unintended consequence of Mexico's seismic
political shift away from the autocratic 71-year rule of the
Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which lost power in 2000,
said Jorge Monta?o, a Mexican political analyst who was ambassador to
the United States and to the United Nations. President Vicente Fox's
National Action Party has greatly improved government transparency and
hastened the evolution of Mexico's democracy, but it has also
struggled to maintain order and improve Mexico's criminal justice system.

"We moved very quickly from a government that was too tough to a
government that has lost control," Monta?o said.

The PRI was known for repressing public dissent in the name of order
and as a way to keep itself in power. Fox's government, on the other
hand, did little over the past four months to block the huge
post-election demonstrations by L?pez Obrador supporters that shackled
Mexico City, protests that surely would have been quashed by the PRI.

The differences are even starker in the drug war, observers say. The
PRI was known for negotiating with drug cartels, a practice that often
corrupted officials but may have lessened violence.

"In the old days there were rules. We'd say, 'You can't kill the
police. If you kill the police, we'll send in the army,' " said a
former high-ranking PRI official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"We'd say, 'You can't steal 30 Jeep Cherokees a month; you can only
steal five.' "

Fox has sought to limit corruption and has declared "the mother of all
battles" against drugs and jailed several of the country's most
notorious drug lords. But the underworld power struggles that followed
have been unspeakably violent, particularly since the arrests in 2001
and 2003 of the leaders of Mexico's two most powerful drug gangs, the
Sinaloa and Gulf cartels.

The killings, once mainly confined to the lucrative smuggling routes
near the U.S. border, such as Nuevo Laredo, have spread down Mexico's
long coastlines.

"The level of public security has dropped considerably," said Gustavo
Gonz?lez B?ez, a security consultant and former high-ranking federal
prosecutor.

Gonz?lez B?ez's clients travel in expensive, protective bubbles. To
ward off kidnappers, a CEO routinely spends $40,000 on bodyguards and
bulletproof vehicles for a two-day visit to Mexico City, he said.

Citizen Security, an influential private group that pushes for reforms
in the judicial system, recently issued a report blaming the
insecurity on a "criminal justice system [that] does not punish offenders."

In Guerrero, a southern Mexican state best known for its Acapulco
resorts, drug killings have ballooned from 32 at this point last year
to 281, according to Salinas Alt?s, the public security director. Only
a handful of those murders have been solved because of "a high level
of police corruption," he said.

Here along the stunning beaches of Zihuatanejo, a three-hour drive
north of Acapulco, news of the almost daily slaughter in nearby towns
invariably generates banner headlines and graphic photographs in the
newspaper Despertar de la Costa. The paper's owner and guiding
editorial light, Misael Tamayo Hern?ndez, may himself have recently
become a victim of the violence he chronicled.

Tamayo Hern?ndez, known as workaholic family man, was found Nov. 10
naked and dead in a cheap roadside motel room. That day, a Tijuana
police chief was shot to death. A headline in the Mexico City
newspaper El Universal called it "A Normal Day in the Country," and in
an editorial, the paper lamented that "bit by bit, murder by murder,
the country is winning an international reputation for danger."

A medical examiner later declared that Tamayo Hern?ndez died of a
heart attack, but few here accept that conclusion, particularly
because the editor was known to have disputes with drug dealers about
his paper's coverage. Also, Tamayo Hern?ndez's breakfast companion on
the day of his death -- a prominent local businessman -- has
disappeared. Speaking on condition of anonymity, one of Tamayo
Hern?ndez's relatives said in an interview that family members had
suspicions of foul play but were keeping quiet for fear of reprisals.

Sauzo, the father of the young man who was dismembered in Zihuatanejo,
was a devoted reader of Tamayo Hern?ndez's paper. His collection of
gory articles has become a unique form of catharsis. But he found out
about his own son's death while watching television. He went to a
country road to identify his boy, whose hacked-apart body had been
left in five black garbage bags.

The funeral home wanted to cremate him. But Sauzo and his wife
insisted on placing their son's remains in a coffin and bringing him
home for the traditional ritual of sleeping in candlelight next to
their lost loved one.

During those days of mourning, the phone rang constantly. It was the
men who killed their son, asking where they could find his girlfriend,
presumably to do the same to her. Gomez, the grieving mother, didn't
call police. She just changed her phone number and prayed.