Lawmakers in Mexico to Debate Drug Fight

MEXICO CITY — President Felipe Calderón plans to invite legislators to participate later this week in his continuing discussions with all of Mexico’s political establishment about how to win the war against the drug cartels, his office said Wednesday.

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Times Topics: Mexican Drug Trafficking | MexicoWith the pace of killings rising, officials have backed off their effort to persuade Mexicans that the mounting death toll was proof that the government was succeeding in disrupting the cartels. Instead, Mr. Calderón set up the high-level forums in an effort to show that the Mexican government was willing to engage its critics and listen to suggestions.

“What I ask, simply, is for clear ideas and precise proposals on how to improve this strategy,” he said during one of the meetings last week, when he heard from governors, judges and mayors. On Tuesday, Mr. Calderón’s office said letters had already gone to the legislators, requesting a Thursday meeting. But on Wednesday, the office said that details of the meeting, including the timing, were still being negotiated, and that the letters had not yet been sent.

In any case, for the people on the front lines, particularly in northern Mexico, the discussions of money-laundering, police reform and efforts to steer young people away from gangs are distant.

The government said earlier this month that 28,228 people had been killed since the government began its crackdown on drug cartels at the end of 2006. Of those, 2,076 were local, state or federal police officers, according to the Public Security Ministry.

The past few days have offered only more violence — murders that the police and prosecutors are unlikely to solve.

On Tuesday, newspapers gave prominent coverage to a video, released by the Public Security Ministry, in which a suspected member of the Ciudad Juárez drug gang La Línea, Rogelio Amaya Martínez, says that his gang is recruiting attractive young women to carry out killings. “They are pretty, good-looking adolescents, to fool our adversaries more,” Mr. Amaya Martínez said.

In the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa, five prisoners were found dead Tuesday in the state prison in Culiacán, the capital. So far, 26 prisoners have been killed in the jail, according to the prison director, Carlos Suárez.

In Ciudad Juárez, the border city that has been ground zero of the war against the cartels, a bloody weekend left 51 people dead between Friday and Sunday, according to a state police spokesman, The El Paso Times reported.

Among the dead were six people who were killed when gunmen burst into a private party and began shooting.

In the northern state of Nuevo León, gunmen kidnapped Mayor Edelmiro Cavazos of Santiago, a colonial town that is a weekend getaway for Monterrey residents. He was taken from his house at midnight on Sunday. Mayor Cavazos had been trying to clean up the town’s corrupt police force, said Nuevo León’s governor, Rodrigo Medina.

Then on Wednesday, news agencies reported that Mexican security forces found the mayor’s body. He had been bound and dumped on a rural road.

Monterrey, Mexico’s third largest city and its industrial capital, spent much of the weekend paralyzed by roadblocks set up by rival drug gangs after a shootout to prevent the police from pursuing the gunmen. Local news media reported that gunmen forced motorists from their cars and drivers from their trucks so they could use the vehicles to close off the roads.

In Oaxaca, seven bodies were found Sunday piled atop the bed of a pickup truck. The state secretary for public security said the victims, all men, were going hunting when they were surprised by an armed group.