MEXICO CITY, May 25 (UPI) -- Mexico's two dominant drug rings -- the Sinaloa and Zetas cartels -- are resorting to increasingly extreme public violence, Mexican and U.S. authorities say.
While the overall homicide rate is slowly falling in Mexico, the war between the drug runners is escalating with massacres becoming larger, more gruesome and punctuated by public dumping of bodies in an apparent attempt to intimidate not only their rivals but authorities and the public, The Washington Post reported Friday.
The violence, which has included mass beheadings with videos of the aftermath posted on the Internet, has left wide swaths of the country off-limits to tourists and instilled fear in local citizens, the newspaper said.
"What was once viewed as extreme is now normal. So these gangs must find new extremes. And the only real limit is their imagination, and you do not want to know what is the limit of psychopaths," said Alejandro Hope, a security analyst with the non-partisan think tank Mexican Institute for Competitiveness.
Interior Minister Alejandro Poire called the violence "despicable inhuman acts" and said they are "part of an irrational struggle mainly between two of the existing criminal organizations and their criminal allies."
Jorge Chabat, an expert on drug trafficking at the Center for Research and Teaching on Economics, said the point of the killings is to provoke the media and the government to bring the military into play.
"They have never been very careful about who they kill. They just kill," Chabat said.
Forays by members of one cartel into the other's territory are meant as a show of force, said Martin Barron, a security expert at the National Institute of Criminal Justice.
"They tell the world, the government, their opponents, that 'I am alive! You have not defeated me. I still am here.' They show muscle," Barron said.
"Now why have things gone so far? Such brutality? Why cut off the heads, hands and feet? Previously, these organizations settled matters with a bullet in the head. Not anymore. Now there is a psychopathology at work. Some of these people obviously enjoy this, and they are teaching their surrogates, teenagers, to enjoy it."
U.S. law enforcement and Mexican experts say the escalation of violence is not intended to directly impact the July 1 presidential election, the Post said. Still, front-runner Enrique Pena Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party said his priority is lowering violence more than wiping out the drug trade.
