Mexican president-elect says drug violence has overwhelmed the capital, key states

By: WILL WEISSERT - Associated Press | Tuesday, September 26, 2006 4:27 PM PDT ∞

MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's president-elect says murder and mayhem fueled by drug smuggling have overwhelmed the governments of the nation's capital and key states across the country.

Felipe Calderon said the wave of bloodshed knows no politics; it is ravaging state governments controlled by each of Mexico's three major parties. He singled out Mexico City, the northern states of Sinaloa and Tamaulipas, the southern state of Guerrero and his home state of Michoacan, as being especially hard-hit.

"It seems to me that drug violence has overwhelmed the governments of the PAN, the PRI and the PRD," Calderon said in a radio interview.

The PAN is the ruling National Action Party, while the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, controlled Mexico's presidency from 1929 until losing to President Vicente Fox in 2000. In the July 2 presidential election, Calderon, of National Action, barely beat leftist former Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the PRD, or Democratic Revolution Party.

Calderon called for legislative and law-enforcement efforts to curb drug violence across party lines "in a very coordinated way."

Fox spokesman Ruben Aguilar agreed with Calderon on Tuesday, saying "we coincide completely with the president-elect."

He said during his daily briefing with reporters at Los Pinos, the Mexican equivalent of the White House, that "The fight has not been overwhelmed, but there's still much to do."

Calderon will take office Dec. 1, replacing the term-limited Fox.

The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City has long expressed concern about the growing wave of violence along the northern border, where people are gunned down with automatic weapons almost daily, and dozens of Americans have been kidnapped.

Authorities say more than 1,500 people have died in Mexican drug violence so far this year.

Narcotics investigators on both sides of the border attribute the spike in killings to a territorial war between drug gangs battling for control of lucrative smuggling corridors into the United States.

But U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza recently extended warnings to say Americans should use extreme caution when traveling anywhere in Mexico.

"The bottom line is that we simply cannot allow drug traffickers to place in jeopardy the lives of our citizens and the safety of our communities," Garza said in a statement Sept. 14.

Calderon said drug violence "is generating much more diplomatic pressure" from Washington, adding that upcoming U.S. congressional elections have made Mexico even more of a hot issue than usual.

Most of Mexico's top drug lords hail from Sinaloa. Drug killings that have included beheadings have occurred in Guerrero, home to the Pacific resort of Acapulco; in Baja California, where the violent border city of Tijuana is located; and in Calderon's native Michoacan state, in central Mexico west of the capital.

On Sept. 6, gunmen with their faces covered burst into a seedy nightclub in the Michoacan city of Uruapan, fired guns in the air and rolled five severed human heads onto the dance floor.

The gunmen left scrawled notes on pieces of cardboard, a tactic that has suddenly become common in Michoacan and elsewhere. The notes made reference to "the Family," while other beheadings in Acapulco and elsewhere have referenced the letter "Z," suggesting the involvement of "Las Zetas," a group of former elite Mexican soldiers now working as hit men for the Gulf drug cartel.

On Tuesday, police recovered the body of a man who had been shot 24 times with machine guns in the Michoacan city of Turicato. Messages had been attached to the unidentified, 35-year-old victim's body, including "Anti Z" and "greetings, Z family. This is for the traitors to their country," the government news agency Notimex reported.

Investigators say Michoacan is a base for powerful cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine smugglers with ties to some of the country's largest and most-violent drug gangs.

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