VIOLENCE IN MEXICO STRETCHES TO U.S.

MEXICO CITY-Drug-related violence erupted this weekend in several
parts of Mexico, claiming both American and Mexican lives and
undermining the efforts of both countries' governments to quell an
escalating war among the region's powerful drug cartels.

On Saturday, three people associated with the U.S. Consulate General
office in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, were
killed, prompting the evacuation of dependents of U.S. State
Department personnel on Sunday. Among those killed were a couple
driving in a car in broad daylight with their baby in the back seat.
The baby was unharmed. In the tourist resort of Acapulco, at least 15
people were killed in gangland hits over the weekend, officials said,
including six local policemen. Violence is on the rise at another key
point of the U.S.-Mexico border-the city of Reynosa, across from
McAllen, Texas. Officials say the drug war there is entering a
dangerous new phase, in which two formerly aligned drug gangs have
fallen into open warfare.

The three Saturday killings shook the American expatriate community in
Ciudad Juarez, where more than 400 people have been killed this year.
The shootings took place within minutes of each other in two different
locations. In one incident, a U.S. citizen employed by the Consulate
and her husband, also American, were killed, White House National
Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer said. In the other, the Mexican
husband of a Mexican citizen who worked at the Consulate was killed.

Mr. Hammer said President Barack Obama was "deeply saddened and
outraged by the news." The attacks on employees working for the U.S.
government in Ciudad Juarez take the violence there to a new level.

Until now, killings have generally been between rival cartels or have
targeted the Mexican government. President Felipe Calderon's strategy
of using the military in place of police to deal with the country's
powerful drug lords has come under increasing fire from critics who
say it has ratcheted up the violence while failing to curb the power
of the drug lords.

Mr. Calderon has been especially criticized in Ciudad Juarez, where
the violence has intensified in the past two years although Mr.
Calderon has sent some 7,000 soldiers as well as 2,000 federal police
to patrol. He is expected to announce details this week of a recent
change of strategy that will focus on attemps to "re-stitch" the
fabric of society in the border city, focusing more on creating jobs,
building schools, opening parks, and providing counseling for drug
addicts trying to kick the habit. Further down the Texas border,
authorities say they are deeply worried about rising violence in the
town of Reynosa, across from McAllen, Texas. Two gangs that were
allies for years in the drug trade appear to have fallen into open
fighting there, experts say.

The recent violence involves the long-established Gulf Cartel and its
former enforcers, a group called Los Zetas. The Zetas have over the
past few years gotten into the trafficking business on their
own-butting up against the business interests of their former allies.

So far this year, more than 50 people have been killed in the
firefights that break out almost daily along the border.

"Both Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel are trying to push each other
out," said Alberto Islas, a private security analyst in Mexico. The
two cartels have been leaving cryptic public messages denouncing each
other. Earlier this month, residents of Reynosa awoke to find what
appeared to have been a bedsheet with a scrawled message, allegedly
from the Gulf Cartel, accusing the Zetas of being "terrorists,
robbers, rapists and traitors." As the conflict grows in Reynosa,
human-rights groups say it also features another element common to the
Mexican drug war: the intimidation of local media outlets.

In the last two weeks, eight Mexican reporters from Reynosa had been
kidnapped, according to the Inter-American Press Association, in
deliberate attempts by drug traffickers to stifle coverage of the drug
war by journalists.

Local media coverage of drug violence was rare even before the
kidnappings. Milenio, the Mexican national paper, said publicly last
week that it had decided to suspend coverage of the conflict out of
security concerns. "It's an incredible level of fear," said Carlos
Lauria, the senior Americas coordinator at the Committee to Protect
Journalists. "It's not only drug coverage that gets stifled, but any
coverage of organized crime." Mexico has been engulfed by drug-related
violence over the past few years, caused partly by a breakdown in old
alliances between groups that erupted into open competition for
lucrative smuggling routes to serve the world's largest drug-consuming
nation, the U.S.

In the 1990s, Osiel Cardenas, the then-leader of the Gulf Cartel,
brought Los Zetas into existence after recruiting 30 members of the
Airborne Special Forces Group, an elite Mexican army squadron that had
been trained in the U.S. The defectors took on the name Los Zetas and
became a feared enforcement wing of Mr. Cardenas's organization, known
for assassinations and the use of army materiel such as bombs and
AK-47 assault rifles. With the arrest of Mr. Cardenas in 2003, the two
groups began to operate independently. Mr. Cardenas, who was
extradited to the U.S. in 2007, was sentenced last month in a U.S.
court in Texas to 25 years in prison on felony charges.