MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS RETURNING FIRE IN FIERCE STRUGGLE

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico - There was nothing subtle about the message. A
black pickup sped up to Tabasco state police headquarters last week
and someone inside lobbed a black bag toward the guard post. The bag
bounced a few times like a soccer ball and rolled to a stop. Inside
was the blindfolded, bloodied head of a man with a mustache.

A few hours later, the headless body of a small-time drug dealer and
alleged police informant was found across the state line in Chiapas,
Mexico's southernmost state.

The gruesome message to police to back off was another sign that
Mexico's drug cartels, whose influence used to be confined largely to
regions near the U.S. border, are fighting an increasingly gruesome
war throughout the country to control the trade.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who took office Dec. 1, has
pledged that his government will defeat the cartels. Soon after
taking office, he extradited two of the most wanted drug bosses to
the United States and dispatched soldiers to three states to crack
down on drug rings, which kill dozens across the country on any given day.

The fight isn't likely to be easy. That's clear in Tabasco, where the
latest skirmish sent hundreds of federal police and soldiers into the
state capital last weekend to surround state police headquarters and
seize a former state police chief.

Tabasco, an oil-rich, swampy state where Mexico's gulf coast bends
toward the Yucatan peninsula, hasn't always been a center for drug
trafficking. But with the U.S. squeezing off cocaine-smuggling routes
by sea in the Gulf of Mexico, more drug shipments are coming through
Tabasco, where two of Mexico's most notorious drug gangs, the Gulf
and Sinaloa cartels, ferry them to the U.S. border or to other parts
of Mexico, where drug use is skyrocketing.

Mayors in Tabasco now travel in heavily armed convoys, fearing
attacks by drug gangs. A main state thoroughfare, Highway 186 - which
passes through Villahermosa as it connects Chetumal, near the Belize
border, with the gulf port of Veracruz - is considered so dangerous
that people avoid stopping on it for fear of becoming victims of drug gangs.

Local crime reporters worry about their safety, especially since
Rodolfo Rincon Taracena, of the newspaper Tabasco Hoy, disappeared
Jan. 20 after including the names of alleged local traffickers in a
report. His colleagues assume that he's dead.

One veteran journalist, whose name McClatchy agreed to keep secret to
protect him, was threatened in January in an unexpected phone call
from Mexico City, 423 miles away.

"They told me, 'Stop creating problems or we will kill you,'" the
reporter said. "When they threaten you, you really start to think. I
talked to my editors, and we agreed that on stories about organized
crime, we won't use bylines."

There also have been written threats to journalists, in which the
letter "s" has been replaced with a "z" throughout the text. This is
widely seen as a calling card from the Zetas, the well-armed hit
squads that work for the cartels.

Villahermosa, Tabasco's capital city, is tense. Last Friday, a
McClatchy reporter was present when police dispatched at least six
trucks of beefy plainclothes lawmen with AR-15 assault rifles to the
Cinepolis shopping mall in response to a reported kidnapping.
Shoppers scurried for cover, some of them weeping, as police stormed
the mall, searching in vain for the would-be kidnappers. Local news
reports said that the kidnapping target, who also escaped, was
connected to organized crime.

In a display of Calderon's new tactics, more than 300 members of the
Federal Preventive Police, backed by army units, sealed off Tabasco's
sprawling state police complex Saturday. They moved through the
headquarters searching for evidence that local police were behind an
ambush of Tabasco's top security official March 6.

The raid was overseen by Gen. Humberto Sanchez Gutierrez, the
preventive police's national commander.

While the troops swarmed the headquarters, federal police swept down
on a local ceremony in the town of Centla and detained Juan Cano
Torres, who'd headed the state police force until Dec. 31. Four other
active or former cops were detained in Tabasco and, along with Cano,
were turned over to a federal agency that's responsible for combating
organized crime.

Local newspapers have reported for months on The Brotherhood, a gang
of corrupt police who use their positions to aid organized crime.
These reports followed a number of high-profile murders of crime
figures and a local mayor last year.

Saturday's action included several raids on ranches that Cano owns,
where he allegedly harbored hired assassins after they completed
hits. Authorities think he's behind the brazen attack earlier this
month on his successor, state Police Chief Francisco Fernandez, a
retired general who was brought in to get tough on drug dealers and
was investigating police ties to traffickers.

"He was aggressively doing his job. It seems more a retaliatory
thing," said a U.S. law enforcement official involved in the drug war
who cited his security in agreeing to speak only if granted
anonymity. "By all sources we have, he was on the up and up."

The attack killed Fernandez's chauffeur. Fernandez survived with
injuries that weren't life-threatening, despite more than 150 shots
fired at and into his red Chevrolet Suburban.

State and federal law enforcement officials announced the detentions
Saturday to hundreds of state police officers, who'd been summoned
from the streets to a hastily called news conference in the
headquarters' auditorium. Many of the officers applauded - twice - as
they learned that allegedly corrupt leaders had fallen.

State and federal officials then implored them to rat out bad
elements. Afterward, one officer who asked not to be identified
confirmed that corruption among midlevel officers is rampant. He
welcomed the action but doubted that many officers would come forward
with information.

"Es muy peligroso," he said quietly. It's very dangerous.

Calderon also has taken other steps that U.S. law enforcement
officials have praise.

He's extradited drug lords wanted in the United States, a departure
from past presidents, who bowed to nationalist sentiment and jailed
drug lords in Mexican prisons, from which many kept running their operations.

On Jan. 19, Calderon surprised U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
officials by delivering Osiel Cardenas, the reputed leader of the
violent Gulf Cartel, and Hector "El Guero (Whitey)" Palma, the de
facto leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, to the U.S. for trial.

"We're going to use extradition as an instrument to combat organized
crime," Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's new ambassador in Washington, said
in an interview.

Calderon also is using the army, sending it to Michoacan and Guerrero
states on Mexico's Pacific Coast, where drug cartels are battling one another.

He's bracing for an expected backlash against public officials. In
recent weeks, a top airport official in Cancun and the brother of a
federal senator there were killed. Some fear that even Calderon could
be in danger.

"You have a president who for the first time wants to do something in
a new way. He's attacking the problem at its origin," said Ricardo
Leon, a lawyer who was the top immigration official in Tabasco until
2004. "I worry about my president's security because he's moving so decisively."