Mexico Drug Cartels Send A Message of Chaos, Death

A Mexican soldier escorts a drug suspect arrested this week in Tijuana. Cartels and their cells are fighting police, the army and one another. (By Guillermo Arias -- Associated Press)

Walters said Calderón and his troops are destabilizing the cartels, arresting and extraditing their leaders, sowing chaos among the ranks, which is one reason the violence is so extreme. "Terror is evidence of weakness," he said. "If you have power in other ways, you don't do this."

Alberto Capella Ibarra, Tijuana's former police chief, said in a radio interview Sunday that he believed the violence "is the consequence of so many years of impunity, so many years of discomposition of institutions, so many years that we allowed this to grow." Capella was fired this week after the deaths in his city.

In the past, many drug lords sought to be portrayed as tough-guy Robin Hoods, as godfather mafia dons who donated soccer balls and coloring books to schoolchildren and paid for the beer and bands at town fiestas. Now the cartels and their enforcers, who include former police and military deserters, are marketing themselves as dealers of chaos and death.

"This is psychological warfare," said Jorge Chabat, an expert in drug trade at the Center for Economic Research in Mexico City. "These beheadings serve to stun. Because most of them, from what I hear from my sources, take place after the guys are dead. They cut them off to show us what they are capable of."

Chabat said, "We're not used to this type of violence. The heads."

Law enforcement officials in Mexico and the United States say the spasm of violence is born of overlapping struggles. The cartels, and the cells within them, are fighting each other, dealing with traitors inside the organization and competitors outside, which in many cases may include crooked cops who work for the cartels. The traffickers are also fighting the police and military.

"It is three-dimensional chess," said Bruce Bagley, a drug trade expert and a professor at the University of Miami. "Where an amazingly lucrative drug trade fuels this brutality, that serves multiple functions -- for payback, for revenge, to send messages, to scare the hell out of the public and, of course, to win. Remember, these guys will do anything to win."

The cartel killers communicate to one another and to society not only by murder but also message. In October, eight bodies were dumped facedown in an empty lot near a day-care center in Tijuana. Their hands were tied and a message read: "Here are your people."

State prosecutors in the western state of Michoacan, where the small drug cartel La Familia is based, discovered a head in an ice chest in the port city of Lazaro Cardenas. Tape covered the eyes and an attached message read: "From the Gulf Cartel." Two weeks ago, someone left funeral wreaths along the streets in the northern city of Hermosillo. State police say six of the wreaths included hand-lettered posters signed by the Gulf drug cartel. One of the signs read: "This is a message for the entire state police force, if you mess with us we are going to kill you and your entire family."

Messages also appear to be traded over the Internet. In Ciudad Juarez, local crime reporters troll a site on YouTube that hosts a music video translated as "Off the Pigs," which shows photos of slain police officers and crime scenes, accompanied by a bouncy narco-corrido ballad praising Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. The video has been watched more than 250,000 times. But what the reporters say they are interested in is not the music video itself -- a now-common tool for cartels or supporters or wannabe singers and gangsters -- but the chat that accompanies it.

"A lot of this is just the usual blah, blah, blah, back and forth, as people argue online. But some of it? Some of these people who post seem to know what they're talking about. They seem inside," said Pedro Torres, editor of El Diario newspaper in Ciudad Juarez, where the crime reporter slain last month worked.

"Mexico is a strange country of truths and untruths, where reality and conspiracy blend together," said Tony Payan, the author of two books on the Mexican drug trade and a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, across the river from Ciudad Juarez. "I am sure some of the people committing these sensational crimes have access to computers and the Internet, and so it is possible they are boasting online."

Payan added one more reason for the extreme violence. "From what I am told, these things occur while they are consuming their product. They are not sober. They are operating in a group, they are drugged up, and they are operating with a sense of absolute impunity," Payan said. "These are not criminals who shoot you and run away. No, they take you away and tear you apart. And then? Then they very calmly dump you wherever they like. That is what is so terrifying."