MEXICO CITY — In the dark early-morning quiet of a funeral parlor here, with a group of mourners praying before the coffin of a 10-year-old boy, another horror-filled week in Mexico's drug-trafficking wars began.
The boy had died in a drowning accident some days earlier that surely had nothing to do with drug trafficking. But his grandfather was Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, the fugitive founder of the Tijuana cartel.
Just after 4 a.m. Monday, as many as six hooded gunmen interrupted the traditional all-night wake, shooting two people to death.
Before they left, the "commandos" (as one newspaper here described them) had scribbled Zs on the victims' backs, a symbol of the Gulf cartel.
By week's end, at least 46 more people would be dead in a dizzying variety of attacks across Mexico, including hand-grenade assaults and decapitations, mainly targeting police, federal agents and rival drug traffickers.
The killings offer a window into the scope of the violence and the tactics of psychological warfare that are often behind it. Many of the deaths appear to involve disputes between competing bands of traffickers. At least one of those bands appears to be splitting into at least two different groups.
On Tuesday, authorities in Tuxtepec, a city in the southern state of Oaxaca, discovered a severed head with a note nearby. "This is going to happen to all the people who work with the Zetas," the message read, referring to the hit men who work for the Gulf cartel. The message was signed, "Sincerely, the New Blood."
The "New Blood" probably refers to a group of Gulf Cartel operatives who have turned against the Zetas as members of the organization bid to control trafficking routes and local drug markets. Genaro Garcia Luna, Mexico's secretary of public safety, said last month that the Gulf cartel had split into rival bands.
At a recent news conference, Garcia Luna said the wave of extreme violence was part of a plan by drug traffickers to force authorities into a "strategic retreat."
"They are trying to create a climate of intimidation and fear ... in order to gain operational advantages," Garcia Luna said.
If the residents of a rural town or urban neighborhood come to believe that the drug traffickers cannot be defeated, they will refuse to cooperate with the authorities and create a "social space" of support for the traffickers, he said.
