Bodies litter the city of Tijuana and its seaside suburb of Rosarito Beach almost daily.

The Mexican drug cartels are busy murdering the competition throughout Mexico, with bodies being discovered -- sometimes without heads -- in Mexico City, Culiacan (Sinaloa), Ciudad Juarez (across the river from El Paso) and Tijuana.

More than 1,000 people have been killed in this war of Mexican drug lords. That's more than the United States is losing in Iraq and Afghanistan this year -- combined casualties for 2008 were 420 on Oct. 21.

Prominent Mexican business and professional people are fleeing from Tijuana to live in San Diego, fearful of kidnapping by soldiers of the warring drug factions.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon is sending more soldiers to reinforce the thousands of troops already in Tijuana. Nonetheless, the body count grows higher with as many as 40 being found within 72 hours. Shootouts occur on the streets, and soldiers and police attack -- SWAT-style -- "safe houses" of the criminals.

The war rages in battles across the city. So far, however, the only effect on the city's famous Avenida da la Revolucion is to scare American tourists away. The once-booming tourist economy is dead. It may never recover.

Empty storefronts line the avenida in numbers no one can remember since the Great Depression. Where prospective merchants used to wait years for the opportunity to open a tourist-oriented store, there is no wait today. Nor are there many prospective merchants.

Where thousands of Americans used to throng the avenida every day, there are few today. Where San Diego and Los Angeles tour operators used to fill Tijuana streets with dozens of tourist-packed buses, an American bus sighting today is rare.

Luckily for Tijuana residents, most of the shootouts occur at night and in industrial warehouse areas. But, from time to time, shootouts in residential areas occur where innocent people are frightened to leave their homes for any reason at night.

Can the Mexican government win this war? Will higher salaries for local police obviate the corruption so evident in Mexican police departments? Will Mexican citizens themselves rise up?

They'd better, or Mexico will degenerate even further into a giant 100-million-person Killing Field.

The killers want to replace what is left of the Felix Arrellano drug cartel that once controlled the Tijuana gateway to the lucrative California drug market. U.S. and Mexican authorities have done a magnificent job of cutting off the head of the Arrellano Cartel by arresting and jailing the brothers who built it.

Nonetheless, more people are being killed today by imported drug-cartel soldiers from the two other regional and competing drug cartels in Sinaloa and Juarez. They want the territory so they can expand their profits by the leaps and bounds provided by the huge border crossing of Tijuana into Southern California.

With thousands of American private cars crossing the border every day that are not searched, smuggling drugs is easy for the cartels.

As long as it is that easy, bodies will pile up in Tijuana, just across the fence from San Diego for now and, someday soon, in San Diego.

Del Mar Heights resident Raoul Lowery Contreras has operated tour companies to Tijuana for many years.