Outside a Mexican federal police barracks in the state of Michoacán, where three police officers were killed during an attack by a drug cartel on Saturday, July 11.

The Fall of Mexico, the Tet Offensive of Mexico's Drug War

WASHINGTON (By Robert Mackey, NYT) July 16, 2009 — Last weekend, the arrest of a senior figure in a Mexican drug cartel known as La Familia led to a wave of coordinated attacks by the cartel against federal police posts and one military base, killing three federal officers and two soldiers.

The range and extent of the violence across the western state of Michoacán led one respected Mexican columnist, Ciro Gómez Leyva, to compare it to the Tet offensive during the Vietnam war. In a column headlined “El Tet michoacano y el principio del fin” (”The Michoacán Tet and the Beginning of the End”), published on Monday in the newspaper Milenio, Mr. Gómez Leyva wrote:

In the drug war, July 11 seems like a sort of Tet offensive, the synchronized, Hollywood-style offensive by South Vietnamese guerrillas and the North Vietnamese Army against U.S. troops in late January 1968 that, despite being described as a military disaster, created the perception Washington’s formerly invincible army would never win in Vietnam.

The Police bases across Michoacán were attacked by gunmen.

Mr. Gómez Leyva noted in many of the places the cartel struck on Saturday and Sunday, government officials who are accused of protecting them are now in jail. As my colleague Elisabeth Malkin reported, Mexican President Felipe Calderón recently “made Michoacán the front line in a new phase of the drug war when federal authorities arrested 10 mayors and 17 government and police officials, accusing them of protecting drug cartels.”

In the last line of his column, Mr. Gómez Leyva pointed out the Michoacán cartel “is just one of the four cartels against which the Mexican military and police are fighting in a war that, as of July 10, had claimed 12,800 lives.”

The violence has not abated this week.

My colleague Marc Lacey reported in Wednesday’s paper the authorities determined “twelve mutilated corpses discovered late Monday along a mountain road in Michoacán State were off-duty federal police officers.” A caption beneath a shocking, graphic photograph from the crime scene accompanying an article in The Los Angeles Times explains, “The federal police officers found slain in Michoacán state, 11 men and one woman, had been tortured and shot.” A BBC video report on the wave of violence also includes images of the slain officers, who were ambushed when they were off duty, kidnapped and killed.

The Los Angeles Times reported Mexico’s president said on Tuesday, “We cannot, we should not, we will not take one step backward in this matter.” According to a report from The BBC, Mr. Calderón promised: “The criminals will not be able to intimidate the federal government.”

The L.A. Times notes:

Mexicans seem skeptical. In a new poll, more than half of respondents said they believe the government is losing the war. Only 28% said it is winning, according to the survey, published Tuesday in the daily Milenio newspaper.

On Wednesday, Reuters reported similar scenes were played out in the country’s north, where the mayor of a ranching town was fatally shot in revenge for the arrest of members of a drug cartel:

Gunmen shot dead Hector Meixueiro in his S.U.V. as he drove to work in Namiquipa, Chihuahua State, in the latest brazen killing to challenge President Felipe Calderon’s army-led clampdown on drug cartel violence. The killing came the same day drug gangs hung banners in the nearby border city of Ciudad Juarez blaming Meixueiro and the state attorney general for the arrest of 25 cartel hit men last month.