A quieter drug war in Mexico, but no less deadly

MEXICO CITY — As a tactical matter, the gangsters and government security forces fighting Mexico’s drug war have typically opted for the spectacular over the subtle.

Massacres, beheadings and other unspeakable cruelties became cartels’ preferred form of violence. In response, the government sent masked troops with machine guns to patrol Mexico’s streets and paraded its captured drug suspects on television like hunting trophies.

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Timeline - Six years after it began, the U.S.-backed drug war rages on in Mexico.

But in the past few months, that has changed. Mexico’s drug war has gone quiet.

Not less lethal. Just less loud.

The country’s drug-related homicide numbers remain essentially undiminished. More than 12,000 people were murdered last year in gangland violence, according to the latest Mexican media tallies, roughly the same number that were slain in 2010 and 2011.

Yet polls show public perceptions of security improving. Nearly six months have gone by since gangsters have staged one of the large-scale massacres seemingly devised for maximum shock and terror, like the slaughter of 72 kidnapped migrants near the U.S. border in August 2010 or the time killers dumped 49 human torsos along a highway last May.

Grenade attacks, car bombs and wild urban gun battles have also become more rare. In one especially telling shift, Mexico’s military says the number of attacks on its soldiers dropped more than 50 percent last year, a sign that traffickers were looking to avoid — not ambush — army patrols.

“They’re still fighting each other, but the last thing the criminals want to do right now is confront the military,” said Martin Barron Cruz, an analyst at Mexico’s National Institute of Criminal Sciences. “They have learned that spectacular acts of violence only bring more pressure to bear on them.”

The change appears to be a tactical decision, Barron and other security experts say, as cartel bosses increasingly eschew the kind of open warfare and extravagant barbarity that defined the drug war in 2010 and 2011.

The gore, it seems, was bad for business. A sickened Mexican public has backed the deployment of more and more troops and federal police, bringing new highway checkpoints and additional pressures on the gangsters that drive up the costs of smuggling drugs, most of which are bound for the United States.

Another mass killing or elaborate ambush could happen at any moment, of course. Violence has flared in recent weeks in the gritty cement-block barrios that ring Mexico City. And in northern Mexico last week, gunmen barged into a private party and kidnapped 18 musicians and crew members from the band Kombo Kolombia. One band member escaped; the other 17 were shot and thrown down a well.

But in general, while the cartels are still killing each other at almost the same clip, they’re doing it more quietly and in areas of the country where they’re drawing less attention.

It is a strategy that the Mexican government appears to have adopted as well, in its own way.

Just as the traffickers have lowered the visibility of the violence, so has the administration of Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto.