DRUG VIOLENCE ALTERS THE FLOW OF LIFE IN MEXICO

Mexico - With a bingo hall, a dog track and a vast room of slot
machines, Casino Caliente has a fair share of shrieks and groans any
night of the year. But when a team of heavily armed men dressed in
black barged in and ordered everyone to the floor on a Friday night
this month, the outbursts rose to an entirely different level.

"Everybody down!" the masked men shouted, adding expletives to make
their point and urgently directing their automatic weapons this way
and that. Panic filled the bingo hall, for no one knew what was to come next.

Gone are the days when Mexico's drug war was an abstraction for most
people, something they lamented over the morning papers as if it were
unfolding far away. Reminders are everywhere, like the radios
blasting drug ballads that romanticize the criminals and the giant
banners that drug cartels hang from overpasses to recruit killers and
threaten rivals.

The Mexico-based traffickers that ship narcotics from South America
to the United States are in a pitched battle with President Felipe
Calderon's government, which has sent the army to trouble spots
around the country to shut them down. Police agencies, infiltrated by
the drug traffickers and lacking training, have not shown themselves
to be up to the job. The results have been mixed: there have been
huge drug seizures and arrests of some kingpins, but also violent
retaliation by the heavily armed traffickers, who have been killing
law enforcement officers and many noncombatants as well.

Life in Mexico is changing in subtle ways as the possibility of that
violence lurks at every intersection, dance floor and town square.
With increasing frequency, child-size chalk outlines are drawn on the
asphalt at the latest homicide scene. Raids are carried out at
baptism parties, at fancy restaurants, at bingo halls like the
Caliente, where, it turned out, no shots were fired that night. The
armed men proved to be federal police officers, and they quickly left
with two men suspected of being traffickers in tow.

"Those who don't see the drug war going on around them have their
heads stuck in the sand," said Jeannette Anaya, a Tijuana actress who
is trying to mobilize the city's artistic community to rally for peace.

Two women and two girls were among the victims in an attack in
Guerrero in recent days. This month, 13 people were killed at a
family gathering in the mountains of Chihuahua, including several
teenagers, a 4-year-old and a 16-month-old. In all, 2,682 people have
been killed in the drug war this year, including elderly bystanders,
schoolchildren and pregnant women, according to a tally by a
newspaper, El Universal.

"The violent mass killings of people not connected to criminal
organized violence, their cowardly executions, is intolerable for
Mexico," said Jose Reyes Baeza, Chihuahua's governor, who has
criticized the federal government's approach to the violence. "The
trend is unacceptable and must be contained."

The wealthy bulletproof their vehicles, wear protective clothing and
move around flanked by burly men with earpieces. But others with
fewer resources resort to their own makeshift measures to stay alive.

Manuel, a businessman in his early 40s who lives in Tijuana, avoids
restaurants in the city, particularly those that serve food from
Sinaloa, which has produced more top cartel leaders than any other
state. His father is from Sinaloa and he loves the shrimp tamales and
other offerings from the region, but he fears that there is a bigger
chance that he might encounter thugs at restaurants that feature that food.

"Seafood is what they serve and it's the best," he said, refusing to
provide his last name because of the fear that his words might come
back to haunt him. "But I'd rather eat at home. How can I take my
wife and my children to a restaurant when I don't know who the people
are around? What happens if something goes wrong?"

He has reason to be rattled. His brother was grabbed from his Tijuana
home nearly a year ago by masked men and has not been heard from
since, one of numerous people who have disappeared in late-night
raids linked to the drug cartels.

"We all live in fear now," he said. "Any of us could be taken or
killed. I try to wear nothing and do nothing that attracts attention.
I wear T-shirts and a hat. I have no jewelry. I don't want to stand out."

In modern Mexico, a new way of cautious thinking is setting in. A
Hummer pulls beside one's vehicle at an intersection? Better keep
looking straight ahead. Or better yet, many recommend, do not stop at
red lights at all.

A big debate circulates over police checkpoints. Should one stop and
risk that the people dressed as police officers really are on the
side of the law?

Women should be careful how they shun a man's unwelcome attention.
Who knows what offense he might take and what weapons he might be
packing. Men should be careful that the woman they are eyeing is not
the girlfriend, wife or sister of someone who kills for a living.

"You have to be more careful with everything these days," said Jose
Carlos Vizcarra, who heads an advisory group on crime in the border
town of Mexicali. "If you go into a bar and there's a beautiful girl
standing alone, you have to think twice about going up to her. Who
knows if she's a drug dealer's girlfriend? If he walks in when you're
buying her a beer that could be the end of you."

And women are not just companions of narco-traffickers, said Howard
Campbell, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at El Paso who
has studied trafficking in Mexico. Some women are smugglers in their
own right, rising up in the male-dominated narco-trafficking world
and unleashing violence of their own.

Women are also deeply involved in the laundering of drug money, Mr.
Campbell wrote in a recent article in Anthropological Quarterly,
running businesses like day care centers, jewelry stores and clothing
boutiques that help keep drug gangs functioning. That necklace? That
dress? That nanny? All of them, in modern Mexico, might be financing
the drug trade.

"It's impossible to know exactly who is who these days," Mr. Campbell
said. "That can be dangerous."

Anything, in fact, can be dangerous. The father of another kidnapping
victim said courting had substantially changed these days. One of the
man's two sons had broken up with his girlfriend. Another boy, with
ties to traffickers, started dating her. One day last year, men
dressed in black arrived at the man's house and took one of his sons
away, grabbing the wrong son by mistake. He has not been heard from ever since.

All this is not to say that Mexicans are paralyzed with fear.
Thousands were scheduled to march through the streets of Mexico City
and numerous other cities on Saturday night to light candles and
reclaim the streets.

Still, many have become inured to things that once would have alarmed
them. They are doing things, like having chips inserted in their
forearms so they can be tracked if they are kidnapped, that they
never could have imagined during more sedate times.

The police have complained of onlookers gathering at crime scenes
with cameras to snap photos of the corpses.

"The worst thing that can happen is for us to become accustomed to
the dramatic daily count of deaths and kidnappings caused by
narcotics assassins," El Universal said in a recent editorial.

At the Tijuana bingo hall, once the federal officers escorted the two
men suspected of being traffickers out just after midnight that
Friday, some rattled gamblers rose from the ground, abandoned their
bingo cards and made a beeline for the exit. For them, the evening
had brought far more excitement than they had bargained for.

But others, as if nothing much had happened, got up from the floor,
readjusted their cards and continued trying their luck.