MEXICO CITY — Shortly after sunrise last month in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, police found 14 butchered bodies in a van outside city hall, a salvo in a seesawing battle of horrors between Mexico’s two most-powerful drug cartels.
Soon after, nine people were hanged from a bridge in Nuevo Laredo. Fourteen heads were left in coolers outside city hall. Eighteen mutilated bodies were dumped by a scenic lake in western Mexico. The decapitated bodies of 49 people were dumped outside a small town 75 miles from the U.S. border.
The man who appears likely to become Mexico’s next president says he can ease the waves of violence consuming the country by changing the focus of its six-year offensive against organized crime.
The administration of President Felipe Calderon has targeted the top ranks of the country’s drug cartels, deploying thousands of troops to capture crime kingpins and seize their drugs and weapons, often in close coordination with the U.S.
Enrique Pena Nieto, who has a double-digit lead five weeks before the July 1 election, says his top security priority will not be arresting the leaders of the organizations that move hundreds of millions of dollars of narcotics each year into the United States.
Instead, he and his advisers say, they will focus the government’s resources on reducing homicide, kidnapping and extortion — the crimes that do the most damage to the greatest number of Mexicans — by flooding police and troops into towns and cities with the highest rates of violent crime.
“This doesn’t mean that we don’t pay attention to other crimes, or that we don’t fight drug trafficking, but the central theme at this time is diminishing violence in the country,” Pena Nieto said in a recent interview.
Pena Nieto’s campaign said drug cartels could still be attacked, particularly if they carry out murders, kidnappings and extortion, but arresting their leaders will no longer be the focus of government efforts.
“Each administration chooses its operational objectives, and the objective per se is not the extradition or capture of big bosses, or the burning of seized drugs,” said Pena Nieto’s campaign coordinator, Luis Videgaray.
Some observers say that a strategy to reduce violence above all else could mean that drug dealers who conduct their businesses discreetly will be quietly left alone.
“I think that it’s very clear that he’s moving in the direction of concentrating the resources that the federal state has (toward) fighting crime and violence that affect people in Mexico … as opposed to concentrating the resources on combating drug trafficking,” said former Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda. “If you have scarce resources and you’re focusing them on A, you’re not focusing them on B.”
Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, known by its Spanish initials as the PRI, ruled Mexico for 70 years until it lost the presidency in 2000, and high-ranking party figures and their relatives were often accused of striking deals with cartels in exchange for political protection. Opponents have been quick to say that Pena Nieto will go back to that old PRI model.
“They’ve shown themselves to be absolutely tolerant of organized crime,” Josefina Vazquez Mota told Spanish newspaper El Pais in a recent interview. Vazquez Mota is running on the presidential ticket for the National Action Party.
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Hurricane weakens off coast• PUERTO VALLARTA, mexico —Once-powerful Hurricane Bud weakened to a tropical storm Friday as it headed toward a string of laid-back beach resorts and small mountain villages on Mexico’s Pacific coast south of Puerto Vallarta.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami said that maximum sustained winds that were once blowing at 115 mph had slowed to 70 mph Friday night. Forecasters said the storm would continue to weaken and the center would move over land late Friday or today.
Earlier Friday, heavy rains and 6-foot-high waves pelted Melaque, a beach town about 60 miles east of the sparsely populated stretch of coast where the storm’s center was expected to come ashore.
Mexican authorities canceled school in 11 communities in Jalisco state, and emergency workers were preparing emergency shelters, many of which would be in school classrooms.
Rafael Galvez, the manager of the Hotel Bahia in Melaque, said his staff was preparing to board up windows in preparation for Bud’s arrival.
“For me, really, this is my fourth hurricane. I went through Wilma in Cancun,” which hit as a Category 4, Galvez said. “This is a little less severe.”
A separate storm was pounding much of Cuba and the Bahamas on Friday. Cuba’s civil defense agency reported that a French citizen, Alain Manaud, and Silvestre Fortun Alvarez of Cuba were missing after trying to cross rain-swollen rivers, according to the government’s Prensa Latina news agency. A search for them was continuing. The Associated Press
