A busy week in the drug wars

The growing intensity of Mexico's drug wars, and its spread to new corners of the country, has been covered extensively in all of the country's major dailies this week. Twenty-one people were killed on Monday alone: from the state of Quintana Roo in the south, to Baja California and Sonora in the north. It was the bloodiest day so far this year.

Perhaps most disturbing has been the news of a wave of violence sweeping through the northern city of Monterrey, part of Nuevo Leon state and considered by many Mexico's business capital. Mexicans are used to hearing about drug shootouts in border cities like Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo, and even in Acapulco, but not in corporate-dominated Monterrey.

El Universal reports on the battles taking place between the so-called Gulf and Sinaola cartels--and perhaps within the Gulf cartel itself--over the right to control the drug trade there. So far this year, 18 police officers have been killed by suspected drug bands in the Monterrey metropolitan area.

In March, El Universal columnist Raymundo Riva Palacio wrote that officials in the federal Attorney General's office have linked "high officials" in the government of Nuevo Leon Gov. Natividad González Parás to traffickers. The officials are said to offer protection to one band of traffickers. Riva Palacio offers a highly detailed and chilling account of the battles going on in Monterrey, which has reportedly become a center of the retail drug trade and of arms trafficking.

Posted by Héctor Tobar in Mexico City