BATTLES AND BEHEADINGS AS VICIOUS DRUGS WAR SPIRALS OUT OF CONTROL

Violence Soars As Military Offensive Attempts to Contain Territorial
Struggle Between Rival Trafficking Gangs

Male, about 40, gaffer tape over his eyes, tortured, strangled, shot
twice, and dumped on a patch of wasteland - and wrapped in Christmas
paper.

Without the yuletide motif the unidentified corpse would have been
just another statistic. As it was, the extra detail earned him a brief
mention in the nightly news roundup.

Every day Mexicans are bombarded with the shocking, and at times
bizarre, details of a territorial struggle between rival
drug-trafficking gangs, and their battle against a major military-led
offensive launched six months ago by President Felipe Calderon.

The El Universal newspaper claims the number of
execution-style murders for the year reached 1,000 by May 15 - six
weeks earlier than they did last year, and more than three months
earlier than the year before that. By last Sunday the paper's count
had reached 1,263.

As the violence increases observers are questioning whether the
military offensive can ever fulfil its objective of reimposing order
in the large parts of the country blighted by organised crime. Some
warn it could be the prelude of far worse to come. "The risks are
really high both for the Calderon presidency and for Mexico's
institutions," said Bruce Bagley, a drug trafficking expert from Miami
University. "This is a bomb with a fuse that has been lit."

The crackdown began on December 11 2006, with 7,000 soldiers sent to
the central state of Michoacan, the site of some of last year's most
shocking violence, including an incident in which five severed heads
rolled on to a disco dancefloor.

Now there are some 25,000 troops and military-style federal police
deployed across the country, but the traffickers hardly seem
intimidated. This week a threat to the public security chief in the
eastern state of Veracruz was delivered via a note beside a severed
head, and two police stations in the Pacific state of Guerrero were
attacked with grenades. Last week assassins gunned down two men in a
Mexico City funeral parlour and two gift-wrapped grenades were left in
the capital's metro.

Last month gunmen killed a federal intelligence chief, and a commando
of 50 hitmen travelled 200 miles through the desert to abduct 13
people in a small town near the US border.

Some 69% of Mexicans believe that the term "war" aptly describes what
is going on, according to a poll released this month by the Reforma
newspaper. But is it winnable? "The [Mexican] army can no more control
this situation than the Americans and the British can control the
situation in Iraq," says Samuel Gonzalez, a former Mexican drugs tsar
and security analyst. "The army can make its presence felt and perhaps
limit some of the most extreme expressions of the violence, but the
structural causes remain."

Mexico's drug traffickers rose to supremacy on the continent after the
demise of the big Colombian cartels in the 1990s. The cocaine is grown
in the Andes but the Mexicans control 90% of the routes into the US
market, according to US reports that also note growing Mexican
involvement in methamphetamine production and trafficking. With
repatriated profits estimated at $8bn-$25bn (UKP4bn-UKP12.5bn) a year,
outbreaks of turf violence are hardly surprising and nothing new. But,
analysts say, they have never before reached today's scale.

Power Struggles

Most analysts link the spiral of narco violence to the greater
importance attached to territorial control since Mexico became a
market, as well as a transit point, for illegal drugs. Some also say a
near obsession with catching kingpins in the past triggered bloody
internal power struggles within trafficking organisations, and
encouraged provocative territorial grabs by rivals in areas previously
dominated by the imprisoned leaders.

The main battle today is between the Sinaloa Cartel (headed by Joaquin
"El Chapo" Guzman) and the Gulf Cartel (whose veteran leader Osiel
Cardenas was extradited to the US in January).

But this is a proxy war in most of the country, filtered through local
organisations fighting local battles at the same time. Leading drug
analyst Luis Astorga associates the current chaos with the collapse of
the one-party system that governed Mexico until 2000, which had both
provided an orderly framework for corruption and been powerful enough
to set limits on the violence.

President Calderon is right, he says, to try to fill the authority
vacuum left by the new democracy, but to rely so heavily on the army
to do this is potentially disastrous. Mexicans largely trust the
military - seen as a clean alternative to the deeply corrupt civilian
police forces. "We could have the Zetas phenomenon multiplied,"
Astorga says, referring to the notoriously well-trained and ruthless
hitmen of the Gulf Cartel formed from military deserters in the late
1990s. "That would take the violence associated with drug trafficking
to a whole other level."

Human rights activists, meanwhile, see massive army involvement as a
recipe for abuse. Earlier this month two women and three children died
when soldiers opened fire on a car passing a mountain checkpoint. In
another incident in May soldiers allegedly raped five young women.

"Calderon is playing with fire," says political analyst Jorge Zepeda.
"It took an enormous effort to remove the generals from power in the
1940s; there are huge dangers with giving them such a key role again."

Corruption

Many believe a better answer lies in an overhaul of the police and a
crackdown on corruption. But that would require a degree of political
consensus improbable in Mexico's deeply polarised environment. In fact
many observers interpret Calderon's offensive, launched days after he
took office, as an attempt to cement himself in power after a
wafer-thin election victory shrouded by accusations of fraud.

Today the president is enjoying high approval ratings, but pollsters
warn these could start to ebb away if the violence does not begin to
fall off soon.

The government and some sympathetic analysts say it is natural for
things to get worse before they get better. "They are trying to
generate political fallout to force a retreat," federal security chief
Genaro Garcia said recently. "They will not succeed."

In the meantime Calderon finds himself trying to avoid comparisons
with Colombia in the early 90s - when drugs kingpin Pablo Escobar put
a price on every policeman's head - and is highlighting the more
successful Italian fight against the Mafia.