MEXICO'S CARTELS ESCALATE DRUG WAR

Gangs Enlist Militias, Whose Tactics Include Beheadings, In Battles
Over Smuggling Routes.

TIJUANA -- The caller painted an ominous scene: A convoy of 40
vehicles carrying 70 heavily armed and masked men was prowling the
streets of Rosarito Beach on Tuesday evening. The three police
officers who arrived were quickly abducted. The next morning, their
mutilated bodies turned up in an empty lot.

Their heads were found in the Tijuana River later that day.

The assault is believed to be one of the largest in Baja California,
and is the latest in a series of precisely executed paramilitary
operations that have beset 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 of assailants and arming them with frightening arrays of weaponry.

In April, nearly two dozen heavily armed men tried to assassinate
Baja California's top-ranking public safety official in a shootout on
a Mexicali street. The attackers fired grenades and more than 600
rounds from assault weapons, wounding three bodyguards.

Over the last year, commando-style raids have been regular
occurrences in Tijuana, with convoys of masked gunmen snatching
victims 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 the
Gulf and Sinaloa cartels has killed more than 230 people in the last 18 months.

The defection of an anti-drug commando unit, the Zetas, from the
Mexican military to the Gulf cartel in the late 1990s paved the way
for military-style assaults, experts say.

Federal officials say they killed or captured the original group, but
they believe jailed Gulf cartel leader Osiel Cardenas still has at
least 120 cadres trained by the Zetas at his command as recently as
last August, and increasingly is using them to battle the rival
cartel led by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

But the violence is not limited to cities along the U.S.-Mexico
border. In Apatzingan, in the central state of Michoacan, four men
were killed and a police officer and four bystanders wounded in an
Aug. 18 shootout between rival drug gangs that involved dozens of
paramilitary gunmen in 10 vehicles.

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

Cartels also are using increasingly brutal methods to intimidate
their enemies. The Rosarito Beach beheadings followed the
decapitation in April of a police commander in Acapulco, whose head
was found in a public 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
today's editions of the Mexico City newspaper El Universal, Santiago
said the abductions and beheadings were characteristic of the brutal
Central American-based Mara Salvatrucha gang, which has become
increasingly involved in the Mexican drug trade.

"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."

Jeffrey McIllwain, a criminal justice professor at San Diego State
University who studies border security issues, 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, which
traditionally has been 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,
experts say.

Some recent attacks were shocking for their audacity, experts say.
Last month, three men armed with AK-47s stormed into the Mexican
federal attorney general'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.

Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux in Mexico City contributed to this report.