With 90 people dead in narcotrafficking-related confrontations across the country, Monday was one of the bloodliest days in recent Mexican history. Yesterday’s carnage came on the heels of a wave of violence last Thursday and Friday in which 85 people were killed. That 24-hour period had marked the country’s deadliest in six years.

Last week’s attacks included a raid on a drug rehabilitation center in the northern city of Chihuahua on Thursday night that left 19 dead. Authorities said raids on such facilities are becoming increasingly common as the victims are often locked inside the buildings and cannot easily escape.

Monday’s most publicized confrontation was an armed struggle in a prison in the northwestern state of Sinaloa that left 29 dead and a local governor struggling to explain how so many guns got into the penitentiary.

“It has to be acknowledged that there is corruption,” Governor Jesús Aguilar Padilla said. “Because we found handguns and a rifle.”

Monday’s second wave of violence came on the same day that President Felipe Calderón released a 5,000-word statement defending his administration’s attempts to increase public safety in the country.

In the strongly-worded statement, which was posted on the presidential website and reprinted in some local newspapers, Calderón traced Mexico’s increasing problems with violence to the voracious appetite for illegal drugs in the United States.

“The origin of our violence problem lies principally in the fact that Mexico is situated next to the country that has the highest rate of drug consumption in the world,” he said.

He also pointed to an influx of weapons from the U.S. after the country’s government failed to renew a law called the Assault Weapons Ban in 2004.

According to Calderón, more than 90 percent of the 76,000 assault rifles his administration has confiscated in the past three years were made and purchased in the U.S.

Calderón did not leave his own country off the hook completely. He cited lack of education and work opportunities as one reason that so many young Mexican men turn to lives of narcotrafficking and organized crime. He also blamed narcotraffickers who, in the interest of diversifying their business, purposefully encourage drug use by young Mexicans in order to create a new market for their products. Cocaine use in the country, for example, doubled between 2002 and 2008.

But Calderón was careful to emphasize that his administration’s policy is not that of a war on narcotraffickers, but rather a fight for public security.

“The objective has been to recuperate the security of Mexican families; to renew Mexico as a country of laws and institutions; and to guarantee an orderly and peaceful coexistence in all the country,” he said.

The number of patients being hospitalised in Buenos Aires for paco abuse has tripled over the last year, according to a survey published in the Argentine daily, Clarín. In 2008, 0.9% of patients were treated for problems directly relating to the drug but over the past year that number has risen to almost 3%. After alcohol, paco abuse is now the second most common form of addiction being treated in the capital’s hospitals. According to the survey, compiled by the Observatory for Addictions, part of the Buenos Aires Ministry for Social Development, even when paco abuse is not the reason for hospitalisation, it is a factor in 9.7% of cases.

Paco is a cheap and highly addictive by-product of cocaine. A dose typically costs between $2 and $10, but the high it produces lasts only a few minutes, so users tend to take 10 to 15 hits a day. Then survey suggests that use is rising dramatically, and in hospitals Penna, Piñero, Alvarez and Santojanni, 14% of the patients had some health problem relating to the drug.

The drug is typically associated with poverty, and the most common users are males under 18 years old. The hospital which received the highest humber of cases (5.9%) is Piñero, which is the main health centre for one of the city’s largest slums, Villa 1.11.14.

The Buenos Aires minister for Social development, María Eugenia Vidal, stated that “the question of paco is part of a more general problem of increasing addictions, that started years ago and has to do with the fact that consumption became normal and that children do not have projects in their lives or strong families to hold them back.”

However, there is evidence to suggest that paco abuse is also spreading among the middle classes. The president of the foundation Convivir, which has a program to treat addicts, said that she was seeing “more cases of children who consume paco, but who are not form such low social backgrounds.”

On Monday 11th January, Mexican newspaper, El Universal, reported that 69 people had died in drug-related violence in the previous 24-hour period. This figure marked the highest daily death toll yet in Mexico’s drug war, bringing 2010’s total number of victims thus far to 283. Of the 69 Mexicans killed, more than a third died in Ciudad Juárez, which borders the Texan city of El Paso. Four people were beheaded, and the face of one victim was discovered stitched to a football.

The bloodshed comes as Mexico’s war on drugs emerges from its deadliest year to date. Although the government has not released official figures, national media say that over 7,600 Mexicans lost their lives in drug-related conflict in 2009, greatly surpassing the then-record tally reached in 2008. According to Mexican officials, since he came to power in December 2006, over 15,000 people have died in President Felipe Calderón’s war on the country’s drug cartels.

Crushing the Cartels

Photo by Angel Morales Rizo

The Mexican Police organize their units in their nationwide attempts to combat the country’s powerful drug cartels.

In the last three years, President Calderón has deployed more than 45,000 troops and 5,000 federal police across 18 states, in an attempt to crush the trafficking groups which are fighting local authorities and battling each other for access to the US market. Some observers, such as former US House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, have likened the situation to a civil war; but President Calderón and numerous Mexican officials have repeatedly insisted that the vast majority of the deaths have been among criminals, not civilians.

Despite this, there is no doubt that 2009 was shockingly brutal. Mayor of Ciudad Juárez, José Reyes Ferriz, admitted in an interview with CNN: “This has been a very difficult year; very complicated.” Juárez was worst hit by the violence, leading all other Mexican cities in the number of deaths, with more than 2,575 slayings – a staggering increase on the 1,600 homicides experienced by the city in 2008. Nonetheless, he is optimistic about 2010. The appointment of a new federal attorney general in September has increased personnel in Ciudad Juárez, which in turn has led to more prosecutions, Reyes Ferriz said. He also championed a new state law which makes it harder for crime suspects to plea bargain or receive lenient sentences.

The Heavy Price of Progress and a Corrupt Police Force

However, the government’s strategies continue to raise questions. President Calderón’s extensive deployment of troops has indeed resulted in the seizure of record amounts of drugs, and senior cartel members have been imprisoned or killed. But another consequence has been an explosion of violence, as the drug cartels fight both the army and each other. Human rights groups caution against using the military to enforce law and order. Others argue that if the army loses the battle, or gets so close to the drug cartels that it is itself corrupted, then there is nothing left between the cartels and the government.

There are regular cases of police officers arrested on corruption charges, or being in the pay of the drug gangs. With massive resources at their disposal, the cartels have repeatedly managed to infiltrate the underpaid police, from the grassroots level to the very top. Efforts are underway to rebuild the entire structure of the Mexican police force, but the process is expected to take years, if not decades.

The Mexican government maintains that their current strategies are working, and the violence, however regrettable, can be seen as a reflection of the success of its policy of taking a hard line against drug-running. It suggests that the “monster” has been wounded, and what we are witnessing is a brutal fight between leaderless cartels for fewer spoils.

Coldblooded Conflict: The Beltran Levya Case

Photo by Jesús Villaseca

Bullets confiscated by the Mexican Police force after the capture of two members of a cartel.

Government claims of the success of their approach are thrown into doubt in light of one of the year’s most significant and poignant incidents in the Mexican cartel war. The location and killing of one of the country’s most-wanted drug-lords was considered amongst President Calderón’s greatest victories in his fight against trafficking. However, the raid which ended the life of “Boss of Bosses”, Arturo Beltran Leyva, was followed up by a revenge attack which sent a chilling message to the Mexican military.

On 16th December, Beltran Levya and four members of his cartel were slain in a two hour gun battle with over 200 marines during a Navy raid on an upmarket apartment complex in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City. The Beltran Leyva cartel, based on the Pacific coast of the country, is one of Mexico’s most violent and powerful drug gangs. With a US$2.3m bounty on his head, Arturo Beltran Leyva was one of President Calderón’s three most wanted criminals, playing a key role in the importation and distribution of tons of cocaine in the US, as well as large quantities of heroin. Officials say that the Beltran Leyva cartel carried out heinous killings, including numerous beheadings. The gang also successfully bought off public officials and police to protect their business and obtain tips on planned military raids.

In a raid which the president described as: “the result of an immense intelligence effort by the Mexican Navy”, young marine, Melquisedet Angulo Cordova, 30, was wounded and killed by a hand grenade. Hours after his state funeral, the marine’s grieving mother, sister, brother and aunt were mowed down by gunmen in a revenge attack which horrified even those inured to Mexican drug-war brutality. In killing a mother, the cartel seemed to violate the most basic code of conduct that even cold-blooded hit-men and traffickers obeyed.

Security Shortcomings and Fears of a Failed State

Photo by Lenny Montana

Marijuana is one of the drugs the Mexican cartels transport.

Critics said the slaying of the Angulo family members exposed a serious security lapse emblematic of the government’s troubled offensive against the powerful drug cartels. The gunmen evidently had no trouble locating the marine’s home, suggesting they had benefited from inside information, and Mexican security expert, Raul Benitez, opined that “the message was to the military and to the government, that if you hit us hard, we will respond in unprecedented ways.” El Universal columnist, Ricardo Aleman, wrote: “This has shown the inability of the state to offer protection to its frontline troops. We do not have the training, intelligence or other elements to wage this war.”

Javier Ibarrola, an expert on the Mexican military, described the attack as “unprecedented yet also predictable”. “What is really most alarming is that there wasn’t the intelligence to foresee this, to adequately study what the traffickers’ reactions were going to be.” He added that it was no longer possible for the government to dismiss deadly violence as mere “killing among cartels.” “We are not facing a criminal group but a corps of combatants who are going to exact revenge and take territory from the government,” he said on Mexican television. “The government is not prepared for this. Presidential speeches do not scare them.”

The insufficiency of the government’s efforts deepens in gravity with increasing suggestions that the country is close to becoming a failed state – claims which the Mexican government vehemently reject. As yet, the violence does not appear to be having a significant effect on the economy; however government ministers do concede that the stakes are high. Economy Secretary, Gerardo Ruiz Mateos, said that if the cartels were not confronted, Mexico ran the risk of having a drug-runner as its next president.

‘Crime Stoppers’

Photo by Gustavo Tuxmemento

The Mexican Police stand guard.

With this fear in mind, Mayor José Reyes Ferriz has looked in a new direction for a means of crushing the cartels in Ciudad Juárez: At the beginning of 2010, the city started working with ‘Crime Stoppers International’, a community-based private organisation which receives anonymous tips from residents and passes them along to law enforcement authorities. The organisation has 1,200 programmes worldwide, and Mexico is the first country in Latin America to work with them. ‘Crime Stoppers’ president, Gary Murphy, points out that the Canada-based organisation guarantees anonymity: Tipsters will call an 800 number that does not have caller ID, and the calls will not be answered in Mexico or the US, but in an undisclosed nation. Reyes Ferriz believes it was a necessary step, because Juarez residents lost confidence in the police a long time ago. Murphy states: “This way they can pass along the information and not have to worry about the repercussions.”

A Downward Spiral

However, each piece of progress made towards bettering the situation seems only to be met by another round of bloodshed, as the spiral of Mexico’s organised crime appears to worsen. By the middle of 2009, crime rates had dropped in the country’s westernmost city, Tijuana, which was hailed by some as a success story in Mexico’s war on drug cartels. The city’s leading crime fighters – Army Gen. Alfonso Duarte Mugica and Secretary of Public Security Julian Leyzaola – were named “men of the year” by Baja California’s leading news weekly, and President Calderón praised the city’s efforts as a model for the rest of the country.

Less than two weeks into 2010, and the bodies were once again piling up in the morgue. Three teenagers in school uniforms were gunned down by automatic weapons, four people were decapitated, at least ten were killed in drive-by attacks, and five were kidnapped, including two security guards and a prominent businessman.

As the violence surges, law enforcement officials in the city have remained mostly silent. To some observers, their renitence betrays a sense of impotence; as though the authorities have exhausted their tough rhetoric. In a silence thick with fear, Mexico’s citizens look to the year ahead in the hope that 2009’s devastating death tolls will not be surpassed. Worse still, Victor Clark, the director of the Binational Centre for Human Rights in Tijuana, describes the country’s terrifying descent into a state ravaged by “acts of violence which appear more and more like narco-terrorism.”

One of Mexico’s most-wanted drug lords was killed in a shoot-out on Wednesday, in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City. Arturo Beltran Leyva, the “boss of bosses”, and four members of his cartel were slain in a two hour gun battle with over 200 sailors during a Mexican Navy raid on an upmarket apartment complex.

The Beltran Leyva cartel, based on the Pacific coast of the country, is one of Mexico’s most violent and powerful drug gangs. With a $2.3m bounty on his head, Arturo Beltran Leyva was one of President Felipe Calderón’s three most wanted criminals. His death marks one of the president’s biggest victories to date in his war on drugs.

Mr Calderón has deployed more than 45,000 troops across Mexico to crush the cartels since taking office in December 2006. Wednesday’s shoot-out at the housing complex, ‘Altitudes’, was described in one Navy statement as “intense”. Cartel gunmen hurled grenades that injured three sailors, as they went from door to door of the complex, evacuating residents.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration says that the Beltran Leyva cartel plays a key role in the importation and distribution of tons of cocaine in the United States, as well as large quantities of heroin. Mexico considers the group one of its six major cartels.

Officials say that the Beltran Leyva cartel has carried out heinous killings, including numerous beheadings. The gang has also successfully bought off public officials, police and others to protect their business and obtain tips on planned military raids.

Mexico’s drug-related violence meanwhile continued, when the severed heads of six policemen were found near a church in the north of the country. Police said the beheadings in Durango state were a revenge attack by the Gulf cartel for the killing of 10 gang members last week.

The last time that Mexican authorities killed a major drug lord was in 2002 when Ramón Arellano Félix, of the Tijuana cartel, was shot by a police officer in the Sinaloa resort of Mazatlan. President Calderón says that the success of the operation in Cuernavaca “was the result of an intense intelligence effort by the Mexican navy.”

However, three Navy personnel were wounded by hand grenades, including one fatality. According to Mexican officials, more than 14,000 people have died in drug-related violence since Calderón came to power, three years ago.