KILLINGS IN DRUG WAR IN MEXICO DOUBLE IN '08

MEXICO CITY -- Killings linked to Mexico's drug war have more than
doubled this year compared with 2007 and are likely to grow even
further before they begin to fall, Attorney General Eduardo
Medina-Mora said Monday.

The prosecutor tied the sharp increase in deaths to a battle for
control among cartels and a power vacuum created by a series of
high-profile arrests and seizures.

The number of gangland killings reached 5,376 from the beginning of
the year until Dec. 2, a 117 percent increase over the 2,477 killings
in the same period in 2007, Mr. Medina-Mora said in a luncheon meeting
with foreign correspondents.

The bulk of the killings have occurred in the border states of
Chihuahua and Baja California, where traffickers have sought to wipe
out rivals on the streets of Juarez and Tijuana, and in Sinaloa, where
one of the country's most powerful cartels has its base.

"These criminal organizations don't have limits," said Mr.
Medina-Mora, who previously served as Mexico's public safety director
and spy chief. "They certainly have an enormous power of
intimidation."

Even while acknowledging that there was a "significant increase" in
drug-related homicides, Mr. Medina-Mora said the overall level of
violence in Mexico remained moderate compared with that in other Latin
American countries.

Mexico's overall homicide rate last year, 11 deaths per 100,000
people, was a small fraction of the rates in Colombia, Guatemala, El
Salvador and Brazil, he said.

Even as he released the new statistics though, the number of killings
in Mexico was climbing. At least 18 people were killed in two southern
states on Sunday, The Associated Press reported. They include two
people whose heads were left in plastic buckets near the office of the
governor of Guerrero State, and 10 suspected drug traffickers and one
soldier killed in a gun battle in Arcelia, Guerrero.

Taking on the cartels that supply most of the illegal drugs consumed
in the United States has been a frustrating exercise for Mexico.
Officials complain that the guns the criminals use are coming from the
United States and that the billions of dollars in drug profits have
corrupted many institutions in Mexico.

The attorney general's office itself recently found that numerous
officials in its organized crime unit were working for traffickers,
receiving cash payments to tip off the cartels about impending raids.

But Mr. Medina-Mora said that the arrests of those officials showed
that Mexico was taking seriously its fight to root out criminals
wherever they are found.