TIJUANA — The caller painted an ominous scene: A convoy of 40 vehicles carrying 70 heavily armed and masked men was prowling the streets of Rosarito Beach on Tuesday evening. The three police officers who arrived were quickly abducted. The next morning, their mutilated bodies turned up in an empty lot.
Their heads were found in the Tijuana River later that day.
The assault is believed to be one of the largest in Baja California, and is the latest in a series of precisely executed paramilitary operations that have beset Mexican cities as drug cartels escalate their battles to control key smuggling routes.
With Mexican authorities relying more heavily on the military to combat drug smuggling, traffickers have responded in kind, forming large forces of assailants and arming them with frightening arrays of weaponry.
In April, nearly two dozen heavily armed men tried to assassinate Baja California's top-ranking public safety official in a shootout on a Mexicali street. The attackers fired grenades and more than 600 rounds from assault weapons, wounding three bodyguards.
Over the last year, commando-style raids have been regular occurrences in Tijuana, with convoys of masked gunmen snatching victims from restaurants and street corners in brazen daylight raids.
"It's a disturbing manifestation of the latest drug war frenzy.... The militarization of the drug war in many ways on the side of law enforcement has corresponded with the militarization of tactics and personnel on the criminal side," said David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.
The situation, Shirk added, "has heightened the competition and raised the stakes in a way that has led to extreme violence, at a level we have not seen before in Mexico."
In Nuevo Laredo, on the Texas border, a raging turf war between the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels has killed more than 230 people in the last 18 months.
The defection of an anti-drug commando unit, the Zetas, from the Mexican military to the Gulf cartel in the late 1990s paved the way for military-style assaults, experts say.
Federal officials say they killed or captured the original group, but they believe jailed Gulf cartel leader Osiel Cardenas still has at least 120 cadres trained by the Zetas at his command as recently as last August, and increasingly is using them to battle the rival cartel led by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.
