PROSPEROUS HAVEN IN MEXICO IS INVADED BY DRUG VIOLENCE

MONTERREY, Mexico -- Biti Rodriguez could have gone anywhere for her
10-year-old's birthday party. But Incredible Pizza, a mammoth
restaurant and fun house tucked into the corner of a strip mall here,
offered her something that suddenly has become a consuming obsession: safety.

She herded her daughter, Alejandra, and a dozen other giggling girls
through two metal detectors one recent afternoon at this pizza parlor
that promises "incredible security for your children," then dumped
bags of presents on a table to be probed by a guard. It took a while
to actually get inside, but Rodriguez didn't care. She thinks all the
extra security is "super bien" -- super good.

Not so long ago, metal detectors at a pizza place would have been
unimaginable in Monterrey, Mexico's third-largest metropolitan area,
with more than 3.6 million residents. The city once seemed as if it
could do no wrong -- two years ago it was named the safest city in
Latin America by an international consulting group, it boasted the
region's wealthiest residential neighborhood, and it was a strong
competitor for the Major League Baseball franchise that became the
Washington Nationals.

But in the past year, the drug violence raging across Mexico has
landed hard in Monterrey, jarring residents who once felt immune to
the shootouts so commonplace in other big Mexican cities.

In the first six months of 2007, Monterrey registered 162 killings,
nearly as many as were recorded in all of last year and about 50 more
than in all of 2004. But it wasn't just the killings that shook up
the Biti Rodriguezes of this city -- it was the brazenness of the killers.

A hit man walked calmly into the landmark Gran San Carlos restaurant,
past rows of Monterrey's signature hanging roasted cabrito, or goat,
and shot dead a man seated at a table beneath the stained-glass
cupola. Gunmen launched volleys of bullets into a popular seafood
restaurant at the height of the lunch rush, and police officers were
mowed down in broad daylight.

The executions triggered tremors of fear. Newspapers now run daily
tallies of slayings. A roadside hotel has advertised bulletproof
rooms. Heavily armored cars have become a new status symbol, with
corporate chieftains dishing out as much as $400,000 for
Mercedes-Benz sedans that ward off not only bullets but also
grenades. In the San Pedro Garza Garcia suburb, where hillside
palaces rival the mansions of Beverly Hills, a new saying was born:
"There are no Tuesdays without killings."

"I can't say Monterrey is the safest city in Mexico anymore -- that
would be a lie," Jesus Marcos Giacoman, president of the 122-year-old
Monterrey Chamber of Commerce and Tourism, said in an interview. "I
can say we're going to make it the safest again."

An Economic Powerhouse

Monterrey wraps around the stunning, rocky peaks of the Sierra Madre,
130 miles southeast of McAllen, Tex. Gleaming towers form its
skyline, and U.S.-style malls and upscale restaurants line its wide boulevards.

Known as the "Sultanate of the North" because of its popularity with
Middle Eastern businessmen, Monterrey revved into an economic
powerhouse after the North American Free Trade Agreement went into
effect in 1994. The world's largest cement maker is here, as well as
Mexico's biggest beer producer and one of the world's largest glass
manufacturers. Major American corporations operate huge plants.

For the past five years, Monterrey stayed mostly peaceful while the
rival Sinaloa and Gulf drug cartels fought over territory in other
cities near the border, such as Nuevo Laredo. But something more
complicated has happened here in the past year, Aldo Fasci Zuazua,
deputy attorney general of Nuevo Leon state, said in an interview at
his Monterrey office.

For unknown reasons, the local drug lords who warehouse cocaine,
methamphetamines and marijuana for the big cartels began fighting
each other, Fasci said. Their bloody battles unnerved the national
and transnational cartels that counted on Monterrey's small-time
operators to funnel tons of drugs into the United States.

A business that had run smoothly for years was suddenly a mess, and
the national cartels felt compelled to sweep into Monterrey to
"restore order," Fasci said. In the vernacular of organized crime,
that meant killing people.

Fear Takes Hold

By April, assassinations were so rampant that the U.S. Embassy issued
a travel warning for Monterrey noting that "Mexican and foreign
bystanders" had been killed in Mexico. The next month, the business
magazine America Economia dropped Monterrey from the top of its list
of best places to do business in Latin America, a blow for a city
that reaped a bonanza of publicity in 1999 when Fortune magazine
dubbed it Latin America's top business locale.

Within days of America Economia's piece, Mexican President Felipe
Calderon dispatched federal troops to patrol Monterrey's streets, one
in a series of military assaults against cartel strongholds across the country.

Monterrey's wealthy -- the city is said to be home to more than a
dozen of Mexico's most powerful families -- were well prepared to
withstand the violence in their streets. Top corporations began
hiring armed security forces. Executives and their families now
travel in protective bubbles ringed by bodyguards and live behind
high walls fitted with motion sensors and cameras.

But Monterrey's middle class, the pride of a state that boasts that
its annual per-capita income of $14,000 is twice the national
average, became frantic. Biti Rodriguez cringed each night when she
watched the news. In her neighborhood, parents stopped letting their
kids walk to school. School administrators tightened rules about who
could pick up children.

Authorities know that private schools accept drug dealers' money to
educate their kids, but "there's nothing that the government can do
about it," Fasci said.

Rodriguez felt compelled to do something she'd never done before: She
started locking the doors of her suburban Monterrey home.

Underworld Infiltration

With hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into the pockets of drug
traffickers, authorities here suspect that organized crime has
diversified, investing in criminal enterprises such as kidnapping and
smuggling illegal immigrants, as well as legitimate businesses such
as real estate.

The underworld has infiltrated state and municipal governments and
police forces, damaging confidence in public institutions even though
about 400 law enforcement officers suspected of corruption have been
taken off the streets. One councilman here estimated that as many
200,000 people in the state of Nuevo Leon -- 5 percent of the
population -- may be involved directly or indirectly in the drug trade.

Local politicians, especially in the many municipalities that abut
Monterrey, say they feel like targets. One recent afternoon, a
municipal councilman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that
he "feels threatened all the time" and that even the most minor
decisions become complicating labyrinths that can paralyze local
governments afraid of unknowingly angering drug lords.

To protect himself, he conducts extensive investigations, gaming out
every possible scenario about the possible ripple effects of his
votes. But those inquiries carry risks, too. "If you're asking all
these questions," he said, "sometimes these narcos find out and get nervous."

Although he can afford to buy a car, he doesn't. He said driving the
same car would make him easy to spot, so some days he grabs a taxi,
other days he hops a bus. His route to the office varies from day to
day -- it takes much longer, but he feels safer.

His municipality and others around Monterrey suffer from police
shortages as officers quit rather than risk their lives at a time
when several dozen officers have been killed. Authorities say police
victims range from good cops who challenge the cartels to corrupt
cops killed for favoring one cartel over another.

Jose Antonio Samaniego Hernandez might have been one of those good
cops, his family said in an interview. He survived one assassination
attempt but was gunned down three months later while leaving the
ramshackle home where he lived in a cramped bedroom with his wife,
daughter and mother. Samaniego became a number that day -- execution
victim No. 33 of 2007, according to the newspaper Milenio.

But to Anna Calderon Garcia, 15, he was the police officer down the
street, the guy in the uniform who stopped to talk to all the kids.
He was also one of half a dozen police officers she has known --
either as neighbors or because they spoke at her school -- who have
been shot dead.

After never hearing a gunshot in her life, Calderon said, she has
twice been startled by gunfire. One night while leaving a Wal-Mart,
she and friends saw the bodies of two murdered policemen lying in the
parking lot.

"It changed my life forever," she said. "Now I'm always looking
around me, wondering if I might get shot."

While most of the shooting victims in Monterrey have been alleged
drug traffickers, innocent victims have also fallen, including a
42-year-old mother of five caught in the crossfire during a gunbattle
in December.

Kids in Calderon's class, like children in so many other places, once
dreamed of being police officers, putting on uniforms, playing a
glamorous real-life game of cops-and-robbers. Not anymore.

She lives three blocks from a funeral home and cups her ears when she
hears sirens. Each time, she said, she whispers to herself: "Another dead one."