DRUG CARTELS ADOPT BEHEADING AS MESSAGE

MEXICO CITY - To send a chilling message to their underworld rivals,
Mexican drug cartels are adopting a method of intimidation made
notorious by Middle Eastern terrorist groups.

At least 26 people have been decapitated in Mexico this year, with
heads stuck on fences, dumped in trash piles and -- most recently --
tossed onto a nightclub dance floor.

Although beheading goes back centuries as a form of execution, it has
become the latest tactical escalation of an ongoing turf war that
gets nastier all the time, with hit men looking for new ways to instill fear.

"Before, they tortured the hell out of people, but they didn't throw
their heads out in public," said James Kuykendall, a retired U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration agent. "Whatever they did, they did
not do this -- they did not impale them on the side of the road."

Why cartels are using this form of murder and mutilation now is anyone's guess.

Beheadings have had a high international news profile in recent years
as the tool of radical Islamist groups that release video of
executions of kidnapped hostages.

In Mexico, as crime bosses fall and turf shifts, the pattern of
killing is changing.

The infamous Gulf and Sinaloa cartels and their smaller, newer
offshoots are fighting for control of smuggling routes from the
southern border with Guatemala to the northern border with the United
States, including the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo at the
entrance to Interstate 35.

"It is clearly a message for the living. What they are trying do with
these beheadings is leave an impression on their enemies," said Jorge
Chabat, a Mexico City analyst who studies drug trafficking. "This is
a sign the war is spreading and it is getting more horrible."

Police, wise guys and lawyers are among the dead, but most of the
victims remain unidentified. Some were blindfolded or showed signs of torture.

The boldest strike came this month when five heads were scattered on
the dance floor of the Sol y Sombra bar in a town in the state of
Michoacan -- a region west of Mexico City infamous for drug trafficking.

"The family does not kill for pay, does not kill women and does not
kill innocents," read a handwritten sign left beside the heads. "The
only ones who die deserve to die and all the people know that this is
divine justice."

Saying the attacks were too delicate a topic, Mexican police and
federal prosecutors declined to discuss the beheadings in more than
general terms.

They point to the Zetas -- a group of highly trained Mexican army
deserters -- and the Maras -- Central American gangsters known for
their brutality and extravagant facial tattoos -- who work as hit men
for the cartels.

No arrests for the killings have been announced. According to news
accounts, beheadings have occurred in the states of Guerrero,
Michoacan, Baja California and Nuevo Leon.

The cartels are saying there is now a higher price than the
traditional gangster death for opposing them, said Bruce Bagley, a
University of Miami analyst.

"Filling people full of bullets is old hat. This has really been an
attention-getter and it has clearly scared the hell out of people," he said.