Many Mexicans fear cartels have army outgunned

APATZINGAN, Mexico -- Mexican drug cartels armed with powerful weapons and angered by a nationwide military crackdown are striking back, killing soldiers in bold, daily attacks that threaten the one force strong enough to take on the gangs.

The daily bloodshed includes an ambush that killed five soldiers this month, a severed head left with a defiant note outside a military barracks Saturday and the slaying Monday of a top federal intelligence official.

José Nemesio Lugo Félix had been appointed a month ago to head an intelligence unit specializing in analyzing the activities of the nation's drug cartels, officials said. He was shot in his car just outside an office of the attorney general in the southern Coyoacan district of Mexico City.

Lugo Félix had previously run a unit in the attorney general's office specializing in the investigation of child and immigrant smuggling, authorities said. According to news reports, witnesses said he was driving a sport-utility vehicle when he was ambushed by men in another vehicle. He was shot five times.

In Monterrey, reporter Gamaliel Lopez Candanosa and cameraman Gerardo Paredes Pérez have not been seen since Thursday, Azteca television said in a news release Sunday.

Mexicans were particularly shocked last week by televised images of kindergartners fleeing their school during a grenade-and-gun battle between traffickers and soldiers that lasted for nearly two hours in this small town in President Felipe Calderón's home state of Michoacan.

The unrelenting bloodshed has forced a change in strategy for Calderón, who sent more than 24,000 federal police and soldiers out in December to reoccupy territory from Michoacan's poppy-dotted mountains to the tourist-packed port of Acapulco.

Now, to supplement the massive presence of soldiers and tanks in small towns, he has ordered the creation of an elite military force capable of surgical strikes.

The drug trade is all-powerful in Mexico. Analysts estimate that cartels here make $10 billion to $30 billion a year selling cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine to the U.S. market, rivaling Mexico's revenues from oil exports and tourism. The gangs also make billions through robbery, kidnapping and extortion of businesses and would-be migrants.

The Calderón administration insists the crackdown is working -- the government has already detained more than 1,000 gunmen and burned millions of dollars in marijuana plants. Traffickers are being extradited to the U.S. more rapidly than ever before, and police recently made the world's biggest seizure of drug cash, $207 million neatly stacked inside a Mexico City mansion.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officials say it's too early to judge the crackdown's success. Seizures at the U.S. border indicate the flow of drugs north may actually be increasing -- 20 percent more cocaine and 28 percent more marijuana has been seized in the past six months, compared with the same period a year earlier.

Violence nationwide in Mexico seems to be increasing. The country's three leading newspapers estimate shootouts, decapitations and execution-style killings have claimed the lives of about 1,000 people this year, on track to soar past last year's count of 2,000. The government doesn't count drug-related killings, and a top federal police official has referred to the newspaper figures as the best numbers available.

This month's death toll for soldiers and sailors is the worst for the military in more than a decade -- violence that shows the gangs' desperation, officials say.

On Saturday, drug gangs left the head of a 37-year-old auto mechanic wrapped in a sheet outside an army base near the port city of Veracruz, along with a note that read: "We are going to continue, even if federal forces are here." The grisly message came shortly after the government said it was sending troops to the city to respond to a shooting attack.

Many Mexicans fear even the army is outgunned.

"Calderón's war on drugs has been a big disappointment for us," said Pedro Ortega, a family doctor in Aguililla, a Michoacan farming town at the center of the drug trade. "The reality is that we are scared to go out of houses, scared about what could happen to our children."

Calderón's overall approval ratings remain high -- 68 percent, according to a recent Ipsos-BIMSA poll. But 40 percent blame the military presence for the increasing violence, and 36 percent believe the traffickers are winning, according to the nationwide survey of 1,050 adults from April 26 to May 1, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Like many towns in the heart of drug country, Aguililla is strategically difficult to control, approachable by winding roads on which assailants ambushed and killed 11 state police last year. At night, the paved central plaza is taken over by gun-wielding thugs in SUVs and pickups.

Outsiders are not welcome. A group of Mexican newspaper reporters who tried to cover the killings in Aguililla were blocked by a gang of men bearing automatic rifles who ordered them to leave, said the reporters, who asked that their names not be used for fear of reprisals.

Seven journalists have been killed in Mexico since October, making it the world's second-most dangerous place to report, after Iraq.

Aguililla's mayor, Miguel Avila, said the crackdown won't work unless Mexicans get better jobs as an alternative to growing and smuggling drugs.

"If you don't let people make money in one way, you have to offer them another," Avila said. "All the people in the United States buying these drugs give people a big incentive to produce them."

Information from the Los Angeles Times is included in this report.