IT HAS been a deadly, but sadly typical fortnight in Mexico. On January 31st, residents found three human heads dumped on the road outside Monterrey. Suspected hitmen collected the heads before the police arrived. The following day gunmen attacked nearby checkpoints, killing two policemen. A day later, the police chief in the city of Nuevo Laredo was shot dead. He had been in the job five weeks.
Last Saturday, in three incidents, soldiers killed 13 suspected hitmen in the northern state of Tamaulipas. The dismembered body of the security chief of Monterrey’s Topo Chico jail was discovered in the trunk of a car. And on Sunday, five mutilated bodies were found dumped on a roadside near Monterrey. A city councillor was murdered in the coastal town of Ensenada near Tijuana.
In Chihuahua, on Tuesday, gunmen assassinated a man who had previously killed three armed men who had sought to extort money from him. On Thursday, gunmen walked into a bar in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, centre of a fierce turf war, and opened fire, killing seven women and a man. More than 3,000 people were killed last year in the city opposite El Paso in Texas. And a shoot-out between troops and armed men killed nine people in Tabasco.
In excess of 34,600 have died in Mexico’s drug war in the four years since President Felipe Calderón took office and threw 40,000 federal police and military at the country’s violent drug cartels, now the dominant force in Latin America’s narcotics business. Last year’s toll of 15,273 deaths was the heaviest yet.
In truth, despite recent signs of a reduction in the rate of killings, and government claims that half of last year’s list of the 37 most-wanted bosses have been captured or killed, Mexico appears incapable of dealing with the scale of the challenge. According to US officials, only about 2 per cent of those charged with organised crime-related offences actually face trial.
The violence is also taking a political toll. As the government faces into six gubernatorial elections this year and the presidential next year – polls show for the first time that Mexicans are more worried about safety than the economy. Mr Calderón, who won narrowly in 2006, is struggling to get drugs war measures through congress and is under fire also over claims of military abuses and unexplained disappearances and deaths. The country’s old opposition Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) is making political hay, preparing a likely historic comeback after 10 years out of office.