DRUG-CARTEL BLOODSHED PUTS RESIDENTS OF SONORAN TOWNS ON EDGE

Every day before her husband went to work, Maria Jesus Jimenez kissed
him and told him the same thing.

"God bless you and bring you back," she would say, as he stood at the
doorway in his Cananea police officer's uniform. And every time he
did, until the night a convoy of black SUVs roared into town and he
was killed by suspected drug smugglers.

Jimenez built a small shrine in front of her house, a little concrete
hut painted sky blue. There, next to figurines of Jesus and the
Virgin of Guadalupe, she plans to put her husband's photo and his nightstick.

The photo she wants to use shows her husband looking resplendent in
his white dress uniform, but it needs a new frame, she said.

Luz Estrella, their 19-month-old toddler, had kissed the old frame so
often that it broke.

In Mexico, drug violence has been rising to new levels of brutality
as powerful drug cartels take on each other and federal troops
dispatched by Mexico's President Felipe Calderon Hinojosa.

The Arizona-Mexico border has been spared most of the violence so
far, but a cloud of quiet fear and intimidation wielded by the drug
traffickers still hangs heavy over the Mexican towns that dot the desert.

Two Republic reporters and a photographer recently spent a week
touring borderlands from Agua Prieta to Caborca to see how the people
of northern Sonora cope.

In Nogales, military patrols now police the streets. In Agua Prieta
and Naco, the police have quit in droves.

In Altar, poor immigrants from southern Mexico huddle in the square
and talk of going home rather than risk the border again.

Travelers avoid the mountain highway from Altar to Nogales after dusk
because of all the smugglers.

A Smuggler's Funeral

The old farming town of Caborca lies halfway between the Arizona
border and the Gulf of California.

Once a stopover on the Spanish missionary trail before the searing
Altar Desert, Caborca is now a town of 52,000 and a staging point for
smugglers going north. Shops are busy, and new two-story mansions are
going up on the edge of town.

On the central palm-lined plaza is the old Candelaria Roman Catholic
Church. The Rev. Edgar Valle Paz is the 33-year-old priest who leads
the church, a youthful man with a friendly, round face who speaks
slowly and softly.

Valle conducts about five funerals a month. The priest knows when
he's burying a narcotrafficante, or drug smuggler. Nobody shows.

"Life means nothing to these people," Valle says. "Every day it seems
like there's another body."

Despite his position, he feels powerless. Valle said he can tell his
congregation not to get involved with drugs or smuggling.

"But to directly come out against certain people would be like
putting a pistol to your head," Valle said. "That would be a very
stupid kind of bravery."

Violence Reigns

Since Calderon took office in December 2006, more than 5,000 people
have been killed in Mexico's drug wars. Cartels intimidate, torture
or execute anyone capable of disrupting multibillion-dollar profits,
including other smugglers, police, federal troops, journalists and
government officials.

By mid-August 2008, there were 2,680 murders attributed to the drug
cartels, surpassing the previous year's record number.

Along the Texas and California borders, violence the past two years
has grown more gruesome, brazen and indiscriminate. Beheadings are a
weekly occurrence, mutilations routine. Cartels post executions on
the Internet.

In Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, 800 people have
been killed this year, tripling the 2007 rate.

In Juarez and Culiacan, capital of the Pacific coast state of
Sinaloa, crude car bombs have become a weapon of choice.

Three of Mexico's top drug-enforcement officers were assassinated in
May and June.

Mexico is now the dominant supplier of Colombian cocaine, black-tar
heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine to the United States. Smuggling
illegal immigrants has grown into a lucrative side business for drug cartels.

Money drives the violence. Cartels bought powerful weapons and hired
military commandos to wipe out rivals, informants and law
enforcement. What emerged are private armies that shoot their way out
of trouble, often with grenades and rocket launchers. Money also buys
police, judges, politicians, journalists and professionals.

Violence and corruption continue to destabilize Mexican society and
the borderlands.

Policing the Police

Naco is a windy speck of a Sonoran ranching town east of the Huachuca
Mountains.

In the cramped concrete police station, the assistant police chief
says the town of 6,000 has no smuggling problem.

Next door, Mayor Lorenzo Villegas knows better. He has seen the
darkened SUVs that cruise the dirt streets and has read the reports
of beating victims turning up in clinics.

Villegas motions his assistant to bring out a large cardboard box.
It's filled with drug-testing kits. The mayor has replaced two-thirds
of the Police Department since he took office in December 2006,
including one officer whose urine showed cocaine.

Naco has gone through 17 police chiefs in seven years. Villegas has
fired three in this term of office alone.

"I'll replace as many as it takes," Villegas says. "I'll change them
every month if I have to."

In February 2007, Villegas fired Police Chief Roberto Tacho amid
complaints he was on the smugglers' payroll.

Soon after, Tacho's brother, Agua Prieta's police chief, was gunned down.

Tacho was later arrested trying to cross the border at Douglas with
57 pounds of marijuana concealed in his gas tank.

The Smuggling Franchise

Violence in Sonora is never far away, but it's more a tool of
enforcement than turf war.

Sonora is still controlled by the Sinaloa cartel. Every aspect of
smuggling is franchised work, available to anyone - even rivals - who
pay the Sinaloa cartel the going tax.

The desert is big enough and demand in the United States large enough
for a number of players to co-exist without fighting over turf.
Violence along the Texas and California borders occurs in the dense
urban areas around major crossing points. In contrast, the
Sonora-Arizona border is wide-open desert landscape and smuggling
routes are dispersed, making violent ambushes much harder to carry out.

There's the occasional killing in Sonora to make an example of
somebody who got greedy or got too unreliable, but the wholesale wars
between the cartels for supremacy have not happened yet. Border
authorities watch and worry.

"Whenever something happens in Juarez, we see a ripple effect all the
way to the eastern part of Sonora, around Agua Prieta and Naco," said
Tony Coulson, the Drug Enforcement Agency's assistant special agent
in charge in Tucson. "That's why we watch that corridor."

In July, an Agua Prieta police officer was killed. The next day, 10
members of the department quit.

A decapitated police officer was found in July near the Sonoran state
capital, Hermosillo. A message had been carved into his hog-tied body
with a knife. His index finger had been stuffed into his mouth, a
fate reserved for snitches. It was the first time a decapitated body
was found in Sonora, U.S. authorities said.

Bad Signs

In a pleasant Nogales neighborhood less than a mile from the border,
a man is showing off a fleet of cars in his repair lot.

All were seized in drug raids. Business is good. He points to a red
sports car gathering dust and says the driver was killed during a
narco shootout.

Earlier that week, there was another shootout in Nogales, a chase,
and more gunplay in Hermosillo, 156 miles away.

The man watches a half dozen tan armored personnel carriers drive up
the street. Army soldiers grip their semiautomatic rifles. Federal
agents in dark-blue uniforms stare out behind mirrored sunglasses.

Like seized cars, military convoys are also more common now in Nogales.