COP BEHEADINGS REFLECT ESCALATING BRUTALITY OF MEXICAN DRUG WAR

TIJUANA, Mexico -- The caller painted an ominous scene: A convoy of
40 vehicles filled with 70 heavily armed and masked men, witnesses
said, was prowling the streets of Rosarito Beach. Three police
officers responded to the quiet neighborhood and were abducted. A day
later, their mutilated bodies turned up in an empty lot.

Their heads were found in the Tijuana River.

The attack last week was the latest in a series of paramilitary-style
operations that have plagued Mexican cities as drug cartels escalate
their battles to control key smuggling routes.

With Mexican authorities relying more heavily on the military to
combat drug smuggling, traffickers have responded in kind, forming
large forces and arming them with frightening arrays of weaponry.

Nearly two dozen gunmen in April tried to assassinate Baja
California's top-ranking public safety official in a wild shootout on
a Mexicali street. The attackers launched grenades and fired more
than 600 rounds, wounding three bodyguards.

Over the past year, commando-style raids have been regular
occurrences in Tijuana, with convoys of masked gunmen snatching
people from restaurants and street corners in brazen daylight raids.

"It's a disturbing manifestation of [the] latest drug war frenzy. ...
The militarization of the drug war in many ways on the side of law
enforcement has corresponded with the militarization of tactics and
personnel on the criminal side," said David Shirk, director of the
Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.

The situation, Shirk added, "has heightened the competition and
raised the stakes in a way that has led to extreme violence, at a
level we have not seen before in Mexico."

In Nuevo Laredo, on the Texas border, a raging turf war between two
drug gangs, the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels, has killed more than 230
people in the last 18 months.

The defection of a military commando unit, the Zetas, to the Gulf
cartel in the late 1990s became the model for military-style
assaults, experts say. Federal officials say they killed or captured
the original group, but they say they believe jailed Gulf cartel
leader Osiel Cardenas still had at least 120 cadres trained by the
Zetas at his command as recently as last August, and was using them
increasingly to battle the rival cartel led by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

Violence beyond the border

But the violence is not limited to cities along the border. In
Apatzingan, in the western state of Michoacan, last Aug. 18, four men
were killed and a policeman and four bystanders wounded in a shootout
between drug gangs that involved dozens of gunmen in 10 vehicles.

Two weeks earlier, police in Uruapan, also in Michoacan, had arrested
10 alleged drug gang members armed with AK-47s and AR-15s.

Cartels also are using increasingly brutal methods to intimidate
enemies. The Rosarito Beach beheadings followed the decapitation in
April of a police commander in Acapulco, whose head was found in a plaza.

Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, the top organized crime prosecutor in
the Mexican attorney general's office, has taken over the
investigation of the Baja California beheadings. In an interview for
Friday's editions of the Mexico City newspaper El Universal, Santiago
said the abductions and beheadings were characteristic of the brutal
Central America-based Mara Salvatrucha gang, which has become
increasingly involved in the Mexican drug trade in recent years.

"Acts like the ones we have just seen are manifestations of groups
related to the Maras," he said. "We have seen the phenomenon of
decapitation in El Salvador, a brutal act of intimidation that is
occurring here as drug gangs are worn down and resort to recruiting
this kind of group."

Crackdown hits bottom line

Jeffrey McIllwain, who is on the criminal justice faculty at at San
Diego State University and studies border security issues, said he
believes the violence is a sign that pressure from law enforcement is
affecting the cartels' bottom line.

"The fact is that it has hurt operations, severely in some cases ...
so it makes sense that the cartels would step up their game," McIllwain said.

In Baja California, the crime wave could signal an escalation of the
fierce war to control the lucrative Tijuana smuggling corridor,
traditionally controlled by the Arellano Felix cartel. Several
top-ranking members of the cartel have been killed or arrested in
recent years, and other cartels may be sensing weakness, say experts.

Some recent attacks were shocking for their audacity, say experts.
Last month, three men armed with AK-47s stormed into an office of the
Mexican federal attorney's office in Tijuana and shot two agents,
killing one. In December, assailants attacked the Tijuana home of a
state police commander, killing two of his bodyguards. In October,
Tijuana's chief of homicides narrowly escaped an attack by assailants
who fired more than 50 bullets at his car.

"It's a more aggressive form of violence, with new ingredients," said
Victor Clark, a border expert and director of Tijuana's Binational
Center for Human Rights.