Troops sent to Mexican state in drugs war

“The battle against organised crime has just begun,” Ramirez Acuna said today, as he announced the administration’s first major offensive against drug gangs. ”We are looking to take back the spaces that organised crime has seized.”

Security officials said police and soldiers will arrest traffickers, mount checkpoints and burn crops of marijuana and opium poppies grown in Michoacan’s rugged mountains.

Navy ships will seal off the state’s small Pacific coast, along which smugglers carry drugs on their way to the US. The force will operate 19 planes, 38 helicopters, and four ships.

Hilly, largely rural Michoacan is Calderon’s home state and a major drug transshipment point north; police here have reported more than 500 killings this year, about half of which investigators say are linked to a turf war between two rival drug gangs.

Calderon has come under criticism for his proposed budget cuts in other areas, and the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, the PRD, still refuses to recognise Calderon’s narrow July 2 electoral victory over the PRD candidate.

However, Michoacan Gov. Lazaro Cardenas Batel, a PRD member, welcomed Monday’s announcement and said he hoped the federal forces would stay.

“We hope it won’t be a fleeting presence, that it will be a presence that will seriously reduce the level of violence in Michoacan,” Cardenas Batel told local media.

In apparent attempts to terrorise rivals and the public, the Michoacan gangs have carried out a wave of decapitations, placing the severed heads on public display with threatening notes including one that read, “See. Hear. Shut Up. If you want to stay alive.”

In the most gruesome case, gunmen burst into a nightclub and rolled five heads onto the dance floor.

In another, a pair of heads were planted in front of a car dealership in Zitacuaro, a town best known until now as a nesting ground for monarch butterflies.

Officials said they had made major drug busts in other states since Calderon took office two weeks ago, seizing more than two tons of cocaine and nearly 20 tons of pseudoephedrine, used to make methamphetamine.

Calderon, a career politician from the conservative National Action Party, has vowed to smash the drug gangs, which have been blamed for more than 2,000 drug-related killings this year, including several police chiefs, journalists, town mayors and at least one judge.

Calderon’s predecessor Vicente Fox promised the “mother of all battles” against organised crime, sending in thousands of soldiers and police to places like the border city of Nuevo Laredo and the tourist resort of Acapulco.

Those efforts failed to quell the violence for long.

While Mexico has made some headway in arresting the heads of the Tijuana and Gulf cartels, major traffickers like Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman remain at large, the drug gangs have regrouped and formed nationwide alliances which fight each other for control of local markets and drug shipment routes.

Federal investigators say the violence in Michoacan stems from a turf war between a local gang called Los Valencia – apparently allied with Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel – and a shadowy group known as “The Family,” apparently allied with the Gulf cartel, a group which operate a bloody gang of enforcers known as the Zetas led by ex-Mexican army operatives turned hit men.

The killings rose in 2004 following the arrest of Valencia leader Armando Valencia and his lieutenant Carlos Alberto Rosales Mendoza. Investigators say their arrests encouraged Gulf Cartel leaders to try to battle their way into their territory.

Many security experts say it will take more than just brute force to defeat the cartels, who are heavily armed, using rocket-propelled grenades and bazookas, and well financed, making billions of pounds smuggling marijuana, heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine into the US.