Mexico to widen new crackdown on drug crime

By Staff
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MEXICO CITY, Jan 3 (Reuters) Mexican President Felipe Calderon is extending an army crackdown on drug gangs in western Mexico across the country, in an attempt to halt gang violence in which 9,000 people have been killed in six years.

Calderon, who was sworn in on December. 1 and immediately sent 7,000 troops to round up drug smugglers in his home state of Michoacan, has now sent another 3,300 soldiers to the crime-ridden northern border city of Tijuana.

''We are going to intensify our head-on fight against crime and drug trafficking,'' Calderon said in a New Year's message yesterday.

Some 2,000 people died in Mexico in 2006 in violence related to rival drug cartels' battles over lucrative routes to smuggle cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamines to the United States.

Much South American cocaine passes through Mexico on its way to the lucrative US drug market. The country also produces marijuana, methamphetamines and heroin.

On the last weekend of the year, masked gunmen sprayed bullets at a wedding in southern Mexico, killing seven guests, and police separately discovered five other dead bodies bearing the hallmarks of crime gang killings.

''We will not allow any state to be a hostage to drug trafficking, organized crime or common crime,'' Interior Minister Francisco Ramirez Acuna said.

Once limited mainly to northern border cities like Tijuana, the violence surged and spread south after former president Vicente Fox launched a war on drug gangs in early 2005, intensifying the battle for turf between the Gulf Cartel from northeastern Mexico and an alliance of smugglers from the western state of Sinaloa.

In some of the grisliest incidents last year, five severed heads were tossed onto the dance floor of a nightclub in Michoacan and another was dumped in the Pacific coast resort of Acapulco.

Calderon has announced the creation of an elite force made up of thousands of soldiers and federal police to chase down drug cartels, kidnappers and other organized crime.

Mexico's municipal and state police, poorly paid and badly equipped, are widely perceived as inept and highly corrupt.

Mexican daily Milenio reported during the weekend that 51 per cent of all federal crimes reported last year were linked to drug trafficking.

REUTERS SP RK0845

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