Red on red killings in Mexico drug insurgency

LA Times:

In the dark early-morning quiet of a funeral parlor here, with a group of mourners praying before the coffin of a 10-year-old boy, another horror-filled week in Mexico's drug-trafficking wars began.

The boy had died in a drowning accident some days earlier that surely had nothing to do with drug trafficking. But his grandfather was Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, the fugitive founder of the Tijuana cartel.

Just after 4 a.m. Monday, as many as six hooded gunmen interrupted the traditional all-night wake, shooting two people to death.

Before they left, the "commandos" (as one newspaper here described them) had scribbled Zs on the victims' backs, a symbol of the Gulf cartel.

By week's end, at least 46 more people would be dead in a dizzying variety of attacks across Mexico, including hand-grenade assaults and decapitations, mainly targeting police, federal agents and rival drug traffickers.

The killings offer a window into the scope of the violence and the tactics of psychological warfare that are often behind it. Many of the deaths appear to involve disputes between competing bands of traffickers. At least one of those bands appears to be splitting into at least two different groups.

On Tuesday, authorities in Tuxtepec, a city in the southern state of Oaxaca, discovered a severed head with a note nearby. "This is going to happen to all the people who work with the Zetas," the message read, referring to the hit men who work for the Gulf cartel. The message was signed, "Sincerely, the New Blood."

The "New Blood" probably refers to a group of Gulf Cartel operatives who have turned against the Zetas as members of the organization bid to control trafficking routes and local drug markets. Genaro Garcia Luna, Mexico's secretary of public safety, said last month that the Gulf cartel had split into rival bands.

At a recent news conference, Garcia Luna said the wave of extreme violence was part of a plan by drug traffickers to force authorities into a "strategic retreat."

"They are trying to create a climate of intimidation and fear … in order to gain operational advantages," Garcia Luna said.

If the residents of a rural town or urban neighborhood come to believe that the drug traffickers cannot be defeated, they will refuse to cooperate with the authorities and create a "social space" of support for the traffickers, he said.

News of ever-more spectacular and gruesome killings has become a hallmark of the drug war this year. Every day this week, new tales of gangland violence have filled the newspapers and airwaves.

On Wednesday, authorities discovered a decapitated body left with a message for state police in the Gulf of Mexico port city of Veracruz. The message accused police of protecting rival drug traffickers and said the decapitated man had been selling street drugs for a rival group.

Four other people were killed in and around Veracruz on Wednesday. One was a funeral director who in May had transported the body of Efrain Torres, an assassinated Zetas leader, to a cemetery in the city of Poza Rica. Torres' body was later stolen from its crypt.

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The drug insurgents are following the intimidation tactics of al Qaeda in an attempt to terrorize people into cooperating with them. However as they go after each other the tactic may lose its effect. The government still has much work to do on bringing the rule of law back to Mexico.