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They left the man's decapitated body swaying on a rope from an overpass above a busy road in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez. His executioners scrawled a message on a sheet: "I, Lazaro Fuentes, served my boss, the dog******. Look out, The Line." Fuentes' body dangled for hours. People were afraid to remove it. His head was found in the Plaza of the Journalists, a city park, perhaps a warning to reporters. Five journalists have died this year on Mexico's drug beat.
But in the context of Mexico's savage dope wars - a nationwide struggle between drug cartels and law enforcement over the burgeoning multi-billion-dollar trade - Fuentes was just another victim in Juarez, the nation's deadliest city, that grim November day. Three others died.
Headless corpses and boastful "narco-messages" are a macabre leitmotif, to stoke public terror and force the authorities to back down, as escalating violence threatens state stability.
By the middle of December, according to Attorney-General Eduardo Medina Mora, Mexico's chief prosecutor, 5376 people had been murdered in raging drug wars.
That is more than the total US dead in Afghanistan and Iraq. On November 3, the day Fuentes was found, 58 Mexicans were killed, compared with an average of 26 Americans and Iraqis in Iraq each day.
About 1300 people were slain in Juarez, which lies directly across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. Sometimes whole families are slaughtered.
"It is a real fight," said President Felipe Calderon."It is a war."
The carnage began in December 2006 when Calderon assigned 45,000 troops and 5000 federal cops to destroy the cartels. Since then 8150 people - police, soldiers, gangsters and civilians - have died in an orgy of gunfights, assassinations, bombings, kidnappings, torture and beheadings that evoke the Middle East at its worst.
"I don't think we've reached the top of the curve," said Medina Mora. In November alone, 943 people were killed.
As in Iraq, Mexicans with dual US nationality and the financial means have voted with their feet, fleeing with their families to US cities like San Diego and El Paso.
Each day brings death and mayhem. The Los Angeles Times runs an ongoing story "Mexico Under Siege". Last month, the Times printed a series of grainy black and white photographs, taken by CCTV cameras, that showed three gunmen, armed with assault rifles, walk into a Monterrey jewellery store and, in just 23 seconds, murder four people.
Their target was an off-duty policeman who had taken a hard line on cartels - far from normal among law enforcement.
Most killings occurred in the states of Baja California and Chihuahua, close to the US border, and in Sinaloa, the Pacific coastal state where Mexico's drug trade was born. The nation's 13 cross-border cities, such as Tijuana and Juarez, through which drugs are smuggled to the US, are especially violent.
On one day in November, nine decapitated bodies, plus heads, were found on a vacant lot in Tijuana.
Besides shootouts with troops and police, gangsters wage turf battles over smuggling routes - the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels contest Monterrey - or to fill power vacuums when narco chiefs are killed. As in Iraq, a Government victory in one area often pushes violence into another.
Gunbattles have taken place on city streets in full daylight. Many involve automatic fire in clashes the US State Department says are "equivalent to military small-unit combat".
The narcocultura is so pervasive that Mexicans write songs - narcocorridos - that lionise outlaws; gangsters flaunt pendants of the "narco saint" Jesus Malverde (a legendary Sinaloa bandit killed in 1909) and subscribe to various Holy Death cults (La Santa Muerte), while Mexico City boasts a new Museum of Drugs atop the Defence Ministry.
Two weeks ago, a Mexican beauty queen was arrested in a bust. Laura Zuniga, Miss Sinaloa 2008, was found in a truck filled with weapons. She was dating Angel Orlando Garcia Urquiza, a suspected leader in the powerful Juarez drug cartel. The couple were travelling with six alleged bodyguards in Zapopan when soldiers stopped their two trucks at a military checkpoint. Inside, authorities found a large stash of weapons, ammunition and US$53,300 ($93,000). Zuniga has since been stripped of the crown she won in the Hispanoamerican Queen pageant.
Polls show many Mexicans believe the gangs are winning. The cartels taunt the Government, offering troops willing to switch sides jobs in Los Zetas, a once elite anti-cartel unit that crossed over to the dark side, so they can benefit from "good wages, food and help for your family".
Bent policemen - up to 20 per cent of officers in Juarez according to an anonymous official in July - who work for cartels, sometimes as hit men, have exacerbated the crisis. In October, the Attorney-General said at least 35 elite agents from his office had been sacked or arrested for leaking material to a Sinaloa cartel.
"They handed over secret information and details of operations against the Beltran Leyva criminal organisation," Medina Mora said. And, in November, Noe Ramirez Mandujano, who quit as Mexico's top anti-drug policeman in July, was arrested for accepting a US$450,000 bribe in a widening corruption probe.
The situation is so dire that Mexico is pondering whether to reinstate the death penalty, banned almost 50 years ago.
Focused on faraway wars, the US seems oblivious that the meltdown next door threatens its own homeland safety. Yet the carnage on its doorstep - an April gang shootout east of Tijuana, just south of the border, killed 13, spewing 1500 spent cartridge casings on city streets - is seeping north of the line, following the tsunami of illicit cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine that spawned it.
According to a report, released last month, 195 US cities, some as far north as Alaska, have been affected directly by the war in the south. The abduction of a 6-year-old boy in Las Vegas in September - police allege the boy's grandfather had stolen millions from Mexican methamphetamine dealers - was chilling evidence that the US was not immune from Mexican-style kidnapping tactics.
"These groups do not respect the border," John Walters, head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said in October.
Murder, kidnapping and extortion are migrating into the US as Mexico's mayhem intensifies.
In September, the US Drug Enforcement Administration arrested 175 people, allegedly linked to the Gulf cartel, in a dozen US states. In October, 41 people were arrested in Atlanta, a drug transshipment hub, for alleged links to cartels. And, in California, a rogue group from the Arellano Felix cartel, known as Los Padillos (The Toothpicks) ran a San Diego County-based operation, killing, kidnapping and selling drugs in the US to fund their internecine war in Mexico, sometimes using fake US police uniforms and badges.
And, of course, there are direct links between cartels and US street gangs, such as the Mexican mafia. But efforts to eradicate gangs in cities like Los Angeles will always be hampered without success against affiliates in Mexico.
The US response has stressed interdiction. Congress has committed US$1.4 billion in military hardware over the next three years as part of the Merida Initiative. Little has been spent. It is uncertain how effective this will be. A similar US$5 billion US effort in Colombia has halved heroin production but failed to stem coca and cocaine production.
Yet, given the United States' gargantuan drug appetite, intervention alone is hardly likely to work. Despite Mexico's military crackdown, US street prices for cocaine are a third of their 1990 value, evidence that smuggling is unchecked. US drug consumption remains constant, a clear signal that the nation needs to change its decades-old war on drugs strategy.
A National Drug Threat Assessment report, issued by the Bush Administration this week, claims that although cocaine remains the biggest drug threat to the US, increased seizures have pushed up the price by 41 per cent since 2006, from US$87 to US$123 a gram. Nonetheless, critics say eradication without treatment won't work.
In late November, a report from the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said the US war on drugs had failed. The report, co-chaired by Ernesto Zedillo, a former Mexican President, said that interdiction - tackling cartels or destroying crops and drug laboratories - was not enough.
"If we insist only on a strategy of the criminal pursuit of those who traffic in drugs," said Zedillo, "the problem will never be resolved." The report said the US must reduce drug consumption, stress treatment over jail for minor drug offences and stem the flow of guns to Mexico, where more than 90 per cent of firearms seized from cartels come from the US.
Meanwhile, the situation is metastasising into a direct challenge to US homeland security. It is no secret the Bush Administration has neglected Latin America, with Hugo Chavez' Venezuela a case in point.
But the drug wars are a cancer the Obama Administration ignores at its peril. For the worsening security situation could be exacerbated by global recession, as Mexico's economy contracts and the peso tumbles. Drugs are Mexico's fourth source of income, behind oil, tourism and remittances. As oil prices plunge and the recession eats into tourism and remittances sent home by Mexicans who work, legally or otherwise, in the US, the drug trade shows no signs of slackening, even as its tentacles stretch deep across the border into the US.
Mexico is the United States' third-biggest trading partner, after Canada and China, and a signatory of Nafta, a free-trade deal. Yet, amazingly, the vicious power struggle between the state and the cartels, a serious foreign policy issue, never featured in the US presidential campaign.
Last month, Forbes magazine asked if Mexico was a failed state. Despite official outrage at this question, it is a valid one. Fears for the survival of Mexican democracy are real. Well-armed gangs control large areas of Mexican territory, a direct challenge to the state's legitimacy, while their wealth buys them growing political influence.
As the security situation unravels, civilian power is increasingly ceded to de facto military control, with soldiers patrolling 18 out of Mexico's 31 states.
"The consequences for both our countries in the near future and the not-so-near future could not be greater," Walters told Forbes. "The consequences if President Calderon fails and the institutions of government, at least in the northern part of his country, become controlled by terrorist mafias - well, we worry about ungoverned spaces far away from the US and this is right next door."
The last time that happened, in 1916, Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, almost precipitating war. American military efforts to hunt Villa down failed. There is no word yet on whether terrorists are involved with Mexico's drug mafias.
Ironically, there are parallels between Mexico's narco-insurgency and Afghanistan, where opium fuels the Taleban. It took the US a long time to join the dots there too. As the Pentagon moves to recalibrate its emphasis towards asymmetric warfare posed by 21st century challenges - and transnational crime is on the list - Mexico, rent by the most serious challenge to Government authority since the revolution a century ago, is looming as a daunting threat.
