MEXICO'S DRUG WAR BRINGS NEW BRUTALITY

Mexican country music was blaring in the background at the Sol y
Sombra bar a few weeks back when several men in military garb broke
up the late-night party. Waving machine guns in the air, they
screamed at the crowd to stay put and then dumped the contents of a
heavy plastic bag on the dance floor.

Five human heads rolled to a bloody stop.

"This is not something you see every day," said a bartender, who
asked not to be named for fear of losing his own head. "Very ugly."

An underworld war between drug gangs is raging here, medieval in its
barbarity, its original causes lost in a fog of reprisals, its foot
soldiers operating with little fear of interference from the police.

Even in a country accustomed to high levels of drug violence, the
killings are unprecedented in their scope and brutality. In recent
months, the violence has included a brazen raid on a local police
station by men armed with grenades and a bazooka, a dramatic
helicopter jailbreak and daytime kidnappings. Seventy-one police
officers, prison guards and federal agents, along with two judges and
three prosecutors, have been killed, all either gunned down or
tortured. Among them were five police officers beheaded to terrify
their colleagues.

In all, the violence has claimed more than 1,700 civilian lives so
far this year and federal officials here say the killings are on
course to top the estimated 1,800 underworld executions that occurred
last year. Those death tolls compare with 1,304 in 2004 and 1,080 in
2001, these officials say.

Mexico's law enforcement officials maintain that the violence is a
sign that they have made progress dismantling the major organized
crime families in the country. The arrests of several drug-cartel
leaders and their top lieutenants have sparked a violent struggle
among second-rank mobsters for trade routes, federal prosecutors say.
The old order has been fractured, and the remaining drug dealers are
killing each other or making new alliances.

"These alliances are happening because none of the organizations can
control, on its own, the territory it used to control, and that
speaks to the crisis that they are in," said Jose Luis Santiago
Vasconcelos, the top federal prosecutor for organized crime.

Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca said a steadily rising tide of
drug addiction within Mexico itself has spurred some of the murders,
as dealers fight for local markets. At the same time, more and more
honest police officers are trying to enforce the law rather than turn
a blind eye to drug traffickers, often paying with their lives,
prosecutors say.

But those assessments, other authorities say, are overly rosy and may
explain only part of the picture. Some experts say the Mexican police
forces, weakened by corruption and cowed by assassinations, are
simply not up to the task of countering the underworld feuds
unleashed by the arrests of cartel leaders over the past six years.
So little do drug dealers fear reprisals from the police that their
attacks have been more and more brazen.

Many of the dead made their living in the drug trade and perished in
a larger struggle for territory between a federation of cartels based
in Sinaloa on the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf Cartel from the
northeastern state of Tamaulipas, federal prosecutors say.

The five men beheaded in Uruapan, for instance, were street-level
methamphetamine dealers, addicted themselves to the synthetic drug
similar to crack cocaine. They were linked loosely to the Valencia
family, part of the Sinaloa group, the police say. The killers came
from a gang called "The Family," believed to be allied with the Gulf Cartel.

A day before, the killers had kidnapped the five men from a
mechanic's shop they had been using as a front for selling "ice."
They killed their victims by sawing off their heads with a bowie
knife shortly before going to the bar, law enforcement officials said.

"You don't do something like that unless you want to send a big
message," said one U.S. law enforcement official here, speaking on
the condition of anonymity.

The beheadings, in fact, have become a signature method of
intimidation aimed at both drug trafficking rivals and the federal
and local authorities. In the tourist town of Acapulco, killers from
one drug gang decapitated the commander of a special strike force,
Mario Nunez Magana, in April, along with one of his agents, Jesus
Alberto Ibarra Velazquez. They jammed the heads in a fence in front
of the municipal police station. "So you will learn to respect," said
a red note next to them.

"This year has been one to forget, a black year," said Jorge Valdez,
a spokesman for the Acapulco police. "It's the most violent year in
the last 50 years, and the acts are barbaric, bloody, with no trace
of humanity."

But the violence is by no means limited to Acapulco. In mid-July,
about 15 gunmen attacked a small-town police station in Tabasco state
at dawn with grenades, a bazooka and machine guns in an attempt to
liberate two of their gang members who had been arrested after a bar
fight the night before. Two police officers died in the assault.

One reason for the wave of police killings is that the Mexican police
do a poor job of protecting their own. Arrests have been made in only
a handful of the assassinations of police officers this year. The
overwhelming majority remain unsolved, because witnesses fear
testifying against drug traffickers. Even seasoned investigators are
afraid to dig too deeply into the murders.

"There is an atmosphere that affects us, of distrust, of terror
inside the police force," said Jesus Aleman del Carmen, the head of
the state police in Guerrero.

One of the officers killed this year was Gonzalo Dominguez Diaz, the
state police commander in Patzcuaro, Michoacan. In February, he
received a death threat from a local businessman who law enforcement
officials say has links to the Valencia organized crime family, which
once controlled most of the drug trade in the state.

The threat came just minutes after Dominguez had arrested two men on
weapons-possession charges. He arrived home that night pale and
shaken, his widow, Fanny Carranza Dominguez, said. His anxiety grew
over time, after prosecutors released the men he had arrested due to
a lack of evidence, his wife said.

In early May, he told his wife he had heard on the street that gunmen
were looking for him. "He said, 'I know that if I arrest them I am
risking my life,'" she recalled.

On May 8, a car cut off Dominguez's police car as he was driving home
alone at about 6:30 p.m. Within minutes, he was shot point-blank in
the head with a 12-gauge shotgun and twice in the chest with an
AK-47. He never unholstered his sidearm. So far, prosecutors have
made no progress in solving his murder. He was 47, the father of three.

"I think the commanders that haven't been killed are in the 'game,'
and the ones that have been killed, it is because they attacked
crime," Carranza Dominguez said, the "game" being the corruption
fueled by the drug trade.

Dominguez was one of 16 state and federal police commanders
assassinated this year across Mexico, along with two judges handling
drug cases and two federal prosecutors. Local police chiefs have also
been targeted. Eight have been murdered, most of them in Michoacan.

While attacks on the police have risen, they have been far outpaced
by grisly gangland executions. In Michoacan, the criminal gang that
calls itself "The Family" is believed to be responsible for murdering
and beheading 12 other people, besides the ones they delivered to the
Sol y Sombra bar. The heads have often been accompanied by cryptic
messages declaring the killings divine justice, accusing the victims
of crimes or daring their rivals to send more henchmen.

Nearly every day, new victims are found in states along the major
drug shipment routes, especially Quintana Roo, Michoacan, Guerrero,
Tamaulipas and Baja California. Most are bound, gagged and shot to
death, their bodies dumped on lonely roads.

In the towns hardest hit by the gangland warfare, the fear is
palpable. For two years now, Nuevo Laredo has been the main
battleground for a fight between gunmen loyal to Joaquin "Chapo"
Guzman of Sinaloa and the remnants of the Gulf Cartel, whose leader,
Osiel Cardenas, is in prison awaiting trial.

"I wouldn't be human if I said I wasn't afraid," acknowledged
Elizabeth Hernandez Arredone, a state prosecutor in Nuevo Laredo.

The effects are everywhere. Church attendance is down, the Reverend
Alberto Monteras Monjaras of Santo Nino Church said, because even a
Sunday morning can be dangerous.

"People used to sleep outside on the porch if it got too hot," he
said. "Not anymore. You stay inside and you put three or four locks
on the door."

Tourists used to spill across the border from Laredo, Texas, to swig
tequila, buy trinkets and run wild. Not anymore. Even the legendary
Quinto Patio restaurant, which has been open 24 hours a day for 40
years, recently began closing at 3 p.m. because no customers dared
eat there after that hour.

"There's no gringos," said Jorge Casahonda, an official tour guide
who stood alone on a recent afternoon surveying the virtually empty
streets of downtown Nuevo Laredo. "It's sad."