Sinaloa Cartel at War with the Mexico

May 8th, (time)

In February, a Sinaloa operative was killed and another injured during a botched attempt to detonate a bomb outside a Mexico City police headquarters — a portent that the mafias may be poised to unleash the kind of frontal guerrilla assault on law enforcement seen in Colombia two decades ago.

"Each year, the violence takes on distinct new dimensions," says Victor Clark Alfaro, a security expert at the Binational Human Rights Center in Tijuana. "It's like fighting guerrillas — it often defies understanding."

Shortly after taking office last year, President Calderon turned to the military to fight the cartels, deploying 25,000 troops throughout the country to harass the narcos and obstruct their trafficking routes.

The strategy has resulted in the arrest of numerous cartel bosses and triggermen, and forced the syndicates to make costly detours on their trafficking routes. But it has also sparked a backlash: The cartels have retaliated with a new level of savagery, aided by the country's legions of bent cops, that has left a trail of hundreds of murdered police, prosecutors, politicians and civilians.

The cartels "respond like this because they know we're hitting their criminal structures," Calderon insisted after Millan's killing.

But the cost of success appears to have been too much for several local Mexican police chiefs, who, according to U.S. officials, have recently shown up at U.S. border checkpoints requesting political asylum in the U.S.

...And they clearly have reason to be fearful: Already, 10 of the 17 police officers named on a list nailed by narcos to the door of the town hall in the border town of Juarez in January have been murdered.

Millan appears to have been targeted in retaliation for the federal police jailing such top cartel figures as Sinaloa honcho Arturo Beltran.

The accused gunman, Alejandro Ramirez, was waiting inside the police chief's Mexico City apartment early last Thursday morning when Millan, 41, returned home. Ramirez allegedly shot Millan nine times as Millan turned on the lights. Millan's bodyguard was also shot, but managed to subdue Ramirez, who was arrested along with Montes and five other alleged conspirators.

Mexican authorities say Montes, the federal police officer, was collared with incriminating documents, including the license plate numbers of senior federal police and logs of cocaine shipments in and out of Mexican airports.

This week, in response to the Millan killing, Calderon sent 2,700 federal police and soldiers into Culiacan, the capital of the northwestern state of Sinaloa, for new operations against the cartel there.

(Over the weekend, the grown son of the Sinaloa Cartel's chief, Juan "Chapo" Guzman, was gunned down by narco rivals in a Culiacan mall.)

Perhaps in response, 40 men dressed in black, riding in 10 pickup trucks and armed with automatic rifles, attacked the state police station in Guamuchil, Sinaloa, reportedly leaving a civilian dead and a police officer seriously wounded. Mexico's violence may defy understanding, but there is one thing Washington may now begin to appreciate: just when you think it can't get any worse, it does.

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—With reporting by Ioan Grillo/Mexico City