Mexican violence has grown more widespread, grotesque and sensational since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the traffickers last year, sending 20,000 troops and thousands of federal agents to drug hotspots. An estimated 4500 people have been killed since, 700 last month. On Thursday alone, 30 people were found dead, including 13 in northwestern Sinaloa state found face-down with their hands tied behind their backs in a bus, riddled with bullets. Last weekend in the border city of Tijuana, 37 people were murdered, including four children. Nine of the adults were decapitated, including three police officers whose badges were stuffed in their mouths. Alberto Capella Ibarra, Tijuana's former police chief, said in a radio interview last weekend the violence was "the consequence of so many years of impunity, so many years of discomposition of institutions, so many years that we allowed this to grow". Mr Capella was sacked last week. Last month, The Weekend Australian travelled to the frontline of the drug wars. In Sinaloa's capital Culiacan, home of at least two cartels and now Mexico's most violent city, multiple murder, torture and beheadings are a daily occurrence and the kidnapping and corruption of police officers is routine. Just after 8.30 one morning, Enrique Gonzalez was having breakfast at a Culiacan cafe. A man got out of a car, walked up behind him and shot him several times in the back with an AK-47 automatic rifle before calmly walking back to the car and driving away. When we arrived just 15 minutes later, his body lay contorted under his chair, three bullet holes bleeding through his white shirt. He was a police officer. Local crime reporter Manuel Inzunza said he had known Gonzalez for 20 years, that he was a good friend, an honest cop - and head of the city's homicide squad. "You know, this is the 10th member of Culiacan's homicide squad to be killed since May, almost the entire unit has been wiped out. The cartels have targeted the homicide squad because they don't want any of the gang murders investigated," he said. "When you see police officers getting killed every day, it means there is no guarantee of safety for anybody."
Culiacan is the nearest city to the wild badlands of the Sierra Madre mountains, where several drug lords originally came from. It is now on a principal drug trafficking route from South America to the US and Europe, a money-laundering centre and a front line in the Government's war on the drug trade. "We are seeing the Colombianisation of Mexico," said one Culiacan journalist. "We are paying the price for not paying attention to this when we should have; now it is out of control."
Mercedes Murillo, a human rights investigator in Culiacan, said 3000 people had died in the state in four years. "Ninety per cent of them are involved in drugs, but the other 10 per cent are killed just like in a war - this is a war."
In Culiacan in one week we saw the victims of at least 16 murders. Five men were executed in scrub 60km north of Culiacan. One had been handcuffed, four had been lined up and clearly shot one by one, a fifth man looked like he had been shot while trying to run away.
The father of two of the dead said he had no idea why they were killed. The code of silence in these areas is complete. "There is so much money (in drugs) that the real problem here is the link between the drug trafficking cartels, people laundering money and building business empires - and then that money being used to back politicians who get into places like the state parliament who then offer the gangs protection," she said. "Until you attack this, the problem is going to continue. There used to be a line between us and them - that line no longer exists." The gangs make $34 billion a year smuggling heroin, marijuana, methamphetamines and most importantly Colombian cocaine to the insatiable West. According to the Australian Crime Commission, Mexico ranks behind only Chile, Canada, Hong Kong and China as the largest source of cocaine shipments into Australia. In 2006-07, the amount of cocaine seized on its way into Australia jumped by more than 600 per cent to 610kg, compared with the 83kg detected the year before.
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