Despite boasts by Mexico, drug cartel remains strong

Now, for the first time, Mexican officials are declaring that a major cartel is on the brink of collapse.

But if the government sees victory at hand, the reality in the hot farmlands and mountain hamlets in the western state of Michoacan feels very different.

Wary locals say little has changed. Their state continues to resemble an occupied zone. Three municipal police chiefs have been executed in Michoacan this year, the most recent three weeks ago.

Military units and gunmen lighted up the night with a firefight at an isolated village Tuesday, leaving four dead. On Wednesday, the naked, tortured bodies of four people were found dumped on a roadside.

With 18 months left in his six-year term, President Felipe Calderon is desperate to show that his US-backed strategy of sending thousands of soldiers and police against the traffickers is working and that his government can calm the storm of gruesome violence that has killed more than 35,000 people and threatened the nation’s stability.

In December, when Mexican and US agents heard on their wiretaps that bosses of the La Familia drug cartel and hundreds of their followers were gathering to party at a ranch south of this busy farm town, authorities gave the order: capture or kill.

What followed was the most aggressive assault seen in four years of Mexico’s drug war. Over two full days, 800 federal agents in helicopters and armored vehicles battled cartel gunmen through lemon groves and along rural roads, as residents barricaded themselves indoors.

By the end, government forces said they had shot dead Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, the La Familia’s founder and a messianic folk hero known as “El Mas Loco’’ (the Craziest One) who had become the largest supplier of methamphetamine to the United States.

“We gave La Familia the biggest blow in their history,’’ a triumphant Calderon declared.

A month after the December raids against La Familia, banners hung from highway overpasses announcing the cartel was disbanding.

It was a lie. La Familia is still very much here.

At the fire station here in Apatzingan, where La Familia was born, supervisor David Olivera described how he still must call ahead to ask La Familia representatives for permission to send ambulances to gather the sick.

Olivera is also the managing editor of a local newspaper, La Voz de Michoacan, and said his reporters cannot cross the river to cartel-controlled towns without a military escort.

According to Calderon’s security officials, the death of “the Craziest One’’ and the killing or arrest of top crime bosses of other cartels in the last year is proof they are finally winning the war against the cartels. Their evidence: 20 of the 37 most wanted drug lords in Mexico are dead or behind bars.

But the list was assembled in April 2009, an eternity in the abbreviated lives of drug traffickers, and those removed in the last two years have been quickly replaced by new leaders.

With few options and less time, Calderon’s government has emphasized a strategy of killing or capturing cartel bosses.

But they have been slow to fulfill earlier promises to overhaul the judicial system, clean up state and local police, pursue money launderers, build better prisons, and find ways to redirect poor and poorly educated young people away from a life of crime.

At a storefront drug treatment center here filled with toothless, tattooed men lounging on bunk beds, director Ulises Silva said that in the three months after Moreno’s killing, nothing has changed in Apatzingan.

“The narcos will never go away,’’ he said. “The truth is that the people like the narcos more than the government.’’

Compared with more powerful Mexican crime syndicates such as the Sinaloa cartel and Los Zetas, La Familia is a regional franchise, characterized by a penchant for antigovernment propaganda and a peculiar brand of evangelical Christianity, forbidding drug use in local communities while reaping millions from narcotics sales and lopping the heads off rivals.

La Familia recruited heavily at rehab centers, and here the men offered visitors signed copies of the book written by “El Mas Loco’’ himself, titled “Thoughts.’’ It was sprinkled with aphorisms such as “if you can dream it, you can do it.’’

Along the southwest border, seizures of methamphetamine — La Familia’s signature export — nearly doubled last year, even as the Mexican government poured tens of thousands of troops and federal police into Michoacan.