| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico 
Mexico Ends Deadliest Year of Drug Crackdown
 Jennifer Gonzalez - Agence France-Presse
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December 31, 2010
| | Military police secure a murder scene in Juarez, Mexico. (AFP/Getty Images/Spencer Platt) | |
Mexico City – With more than 15,000 murders blamed on Mexico's criminal gangs, 2010 was the deadliest year yet under President Felipe Calderon's controversial military offensive against organized crime.
Calderon vowed to fight the country's powerful drug gangs when he took power after disputed elections four years ago, deploying tens of thousands of soldiers to help underfunded and often corrupt police.
Gruesome killings, including beheadings, hangings and mass killings, have spread across the country since then, as the gangs have fought back and broken into splinter groups.
"The tendency in Mexico is toward deterioration and not improvement," Edgardo Buscaglia, an organized crime analyst and professor at Mexico's ITAM university, told AFP.
Arms and human trafficking as well as extortion were also on the rise, he said.
Almost 1,000 areas of the country lacked formal State control, according to studies conducted in May 2010, in what Buscaglia compared to Afghanistan.
"We really fear that this deterioration will carry on and weaken the State," he said.
In November, some 400 families fled the small town of Ciudad Mier, in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, where violence has raged between one of Mexico's oldest drug gangs, the Gulf cartel, and its former hitmen, the Zetas.
The favorite candidate for state governor was gunned down before July elections.
Daytime shootouts meanwhile added to a growing climate of fear in Monterrey, a northern city and business hub, while the popular weekend retreat of Cuernavaca, near Mexico city, saw roadside hangings and threats to civilians as drug traffickers battled in the area.
Officials insist the situation is under control.
"The Mexican State controls all its territory: 80 percent of murders blamed on organized crime were committed in only 162 of Mexico's 2,456 municipalities (administrative divisions)," Alejandro Poire, the government's security spokesman, told AFP.
The government points to successes including the arrests and killings of a string top drug traffickers as well as drug seizures, such as the record haul of 134 tons of marijuana in Tijuana, on the US border in October.
But near daily killings continues.
"The results are not what were hoped for yet," said Raul Plascencia, president of the National Commission of Human Rights.
The commission is one of several to underline alleged military abuses under the crackdown, as well as increasing civilian deaths.
The army should not be doing police work, Plascencia said.
Meanwhile, the drug gangs are still protected politically, economically and socially, according to experts such as Buscaglia.
"Political corruption at the highest level is the mother of all crime problems," Buscaglia said.
Gangs, such as the mysterious La Familia based in western Mexico, garner support and offer protection to communities neglected by the state, as well as carrying out extortion on scores of businesses.
Despite recent small measures to counter money laundering, Buscaglia estimated that more than 77 percent of Mexico's economic sectors were partially in the hands of criminal groups.
Mexican drug traffickers use billions of dollars of mainly US profits to enrich their organizations each year.
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