MEXICAN DRUG GANG ON ATTACK

LA AJOYA, Mexico (AP) - Mexico's top drug gang has launched a bloody
offensive in a marijuana- and poppy-rich mountain region to show its rivals
that it hasn't been stopped by the arrest of its operations chief and the
death of his fearsome brother.

Police say the Arellano Felix organization was behind a massacre in the
mountain town of La Ajoya, where 23 men in ski masks and camouflage
uniforms turned Kalashnikovs on a Mother's Day party, gunning down 12
people, including four police officers, a 70-year-old woman and a
6-year-old girl.

The attack came less than two weeks after gunmen believed to be on the
gang's payroll rounded up five ranchers in Bastantita, another lonely
enclave in western Sinaloa state. The attackers loaded their victims onto a
pickup truck, drove them to a sun-scorched ravine and shot them one by one.

Police and witnesses also have implicated the Arellano Felix gang in a
recent attack that left eight people dead in Durangito de Alaya, also in
the Sinaloa highlands.

"These are personal scores between drug traffickers that turned into bloody
attacks and killed innocent men, women and children," said the commander of
45 police agents sent to protect La Ajoya after last month's attack. "They
come looking for growers or smugglers but, in the end, they kill everyone."

The police commander uses the pseudonym Jaime Jimenez when talking to
reporters, for fear of retaliation. He was among investigators, drug
experts and witnesses who described an increasingly violent turf war
between the Arellano Felix gang and Ismael Zambada, a rival kingpin known
as "El Mayo."

The Arellano Felixes control Tijuana, using the border city to smuggle tons
of cocaine and marijuana into California and the western United States.
Zambada, who has been trying to challenge the Arellano Felixes' authority
in Tijuana for almost a decade, heads a free-lance group of smugglers based
in Mazatlan, a resort city on Sinaloa's Pacific coast.

But instead of shooting it out on the U.S. border, the gangs are battling
in Sinaloa's sprawling Sierra Madre mountain range, where year-round
sunshine and a lack of police make marijuana and poppy, the principal
ingredient in heroin, the crops of choice.

The White House estimates that since 1998, Mexico has produced 9,480 tons
of marijuana yearly, with a ton fetching $1.6 million on average when sold
to wholesale distributors in the United States. Mexico's up-and-coming
poppy industry annually produces up to 7 tons of heroin, with each ton
worth more than $2.5 million across the border.

U.S. officials say marijuana and heroin can sell for two or three times
those prices upon reaching the streets of America's cities.

Authorities say more than 200 drug distributors operate in Sinaloa, many of
them from families recruited to grow marijuana and poppy for the Arellano
Felixes, Zambada or another drug gang. Peasants are also paid to float
their yields out of the mountains on small canoes and motorboats, police say.

"The rural areas are where the fighting between drug organizations has been
the worst," said Oscar Fidel Gonzalez, Sinaloa's attorney general. "A small
cell of drug smugglers associated with the Arellano Felix family has
escalated years-old conflicts with other groups."

The Arellano Felix gang's Sinaloa attacks have come just as Mexico's most
powerful drug gang seemed in disarray.

On Feb. 10, Ramon Arellano Felix, the gang's ruthless enforcer, was killed
in Mazatlan by state police who U.S. authorities say were working for
Zambada. A month later, authorities captured the head of the gang's
day-to-day operations, Benjamin Arellano Felix, in central Puebla state.

Sensing an opportunity to take over Arellano Felix operations in Sinaloa,
Zambada's deputies went on the attack, investigators say.

Within days of Ramon's death, gunmen shot and killed Abelardo Zatarain, a
member of the family long accused of heading the Arellano Felix gang's
Sinaloa forces. Men wielding machine guns also killed Zatarain's
80-year-old uncle, who investigators say was all but retired from the drug
business.

The Arellano Felixes responded with three mass killings in which the state
attorney general's office says hired hit men targeted peasants who grew or
transported drugs for Zambada.

In addition to the mass killings, a farmer suspected of cultivating
marijuana for Zambada and his adolescent son were found shot to death in
the northern Sinaloa village of El Lota. Scrawled in blood on the man's
shirt was: "Mayo, you're next."

Violence is nothing new in Sinaloa, the birthplace of Zambada, the Arellano
Felix brothers and nearly every major Mexican drug lord.

Authorities reported more than 270 homicides in the first five months of
this year in a state with just 2.5 million people. Last month, Gov. Juan
Millan said 80 percent of those slayings were drug-related.

"The intention is to wipe out competition," Millan said.

Caught in the middle are places like La Ajoya, 800 miles northwest of
Mexico City, where the air is so humid you can almost smell a coastline
that's more than three hours away by car.

On the streets, crosses mark where people were gunned down by drug gangs,
and more than half of the town's 800 residents have fled since the Mother's
Day attack. Similar shootings have turned seven nearby villages into ghost
towns since 1996.

Many families that have stayed are those who have abandoned growing beans
and tomatoes to work for the Arellano Felixes or Zambada, said Jimenez, the
police commander.

"Everyone knows who the traffickers are, but we are afraid to arrest them,"
he said. "If we put someone in jail today, the gangs will use their
influence to get him out on the street tomorrow. He will come looking for
us the next day."

Because of the shootings and kidnappings, police officers guard every
public event in La Ajoya.

Six officers were watching the Mother's Day party and exchanged fire with
the gunmen - who attacked after the festivities had spilled out into the
street so that children could hit a pinnate hanging from a palm tree.

"The violence has made us prisoners in our own town," said Jose Maria
Manjarez, the local justice of the peace. "The narcos control Sinaloa.
There is almost no room for anyone else."