But the violence is not limited to cities along the U.S.-Mexico border. In Apatzingan, in the central state of Michoacan, four men were killed and a police officer and four bystanders wounded in an Aug. 18 shootout between rival drug gangs that involved dozens of paramilitary gunmen in 10 vehicles.
Two weeks earlier, police in nearby Uruapan, also in Michoacan, had arrested a group of 10 suspected drug gang members armed with AK-47s and AR-15s.
Cartels also are using increasingly brutal methods to intimidate their enemies. The Rosarito Beach beheadings followed the decapitation in April of a police commander in Acapulco, whose head was found in a public plaza.
Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, the top organized crime prosecutor in the Mexican attorney general's office, has taken over the investigation of the Baja California beheadings. In an interview for today's editions of the Mexico City newspaper El Universal, Santiago said the abductions and beheadings were characteristic of the brutal Central American-based Mara Salvatrucha gang, which has become increasingly involved in the Mexican drug trade.
"Acts like the ones we have just seen are manifestations of groups related to the Maras," he said. "We have seen the phenomenon of decapitation in El Salvador, a brutal act of intimidation that is occurring here as drug gangs are worn down and resort to recruiting this kind of group."
Jeffrey McIllwain, a criminal justice professor at San Diego State University who studies border security issues, believes the violence is a sign that pressure from law enforcement is affecting the cartels' bottom line.
"The fact is that it has hurt operations, severely in some cases
In Baja California, the crime wave could signal an escalation of the fierce war to control the lucrative Tijuana smuggling corridor, which traditionally has been controlled by the Arellano-Felix cartel. Several top-ranking members of the cartel have been killed or arrested in recent years, and other cartels may be sensing weakness, experts say.
Some recent attacks were shocking for their audacity, experts say. Last month, three men armed with AK-47s stormed into the Mexican federal attorney general's office in Tijuana and shot two agents, killing one. In December, assailants attacked the Tijuana home of a state police commander, killing two of his bodyguards. In October, Tijuana's chief of homicides narrowly escaped an attack by assailants who fired more than 50 bullets at his car.
"It's a more aggressive form of violence, with new ingredients," said Victor Clark, a border expert and director of Tijuana's Binational Center for Human Rights.
*
Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux in Mexico City contributed to this report.
