MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -- High-profile killings show Mexico is experiencing new levels of drug-related violence as the country's increasingly powerful drug lords flex their muscles, experts said Friday.
In the latest in a string of murders raising fears of heightened violence around the upcoming presidential election, Oaxaca police chief Javier Orlando Guzman Monforte was shot about 25 times with AK-47 rifles by at least six assailants Wednesday.His killing came more than a month after Tijuana police chief Alfredo de la Torre died in a hail of bullets. At least three other federal agents and police officers have been murdered in recent months in execution-style killings.
"It is clear that the drug lords are sending a message that they are strong enough now to face the Mexican government," Mexican newspaper columnist Sergio Sarmiento told Reuters. "They never felt so strong in the past. Just the fact they can kill police officers so easily is an indication."
De la Torre was murdered two days after President Ernesto Zedillo visited Baja California and vowed to crack down on drug traffickers, and analysts said that and other slayings may have come in direct response to the government's tougher stance toward the drug trade.
"This is a frontal struggle between the government and an increasingly powerful enemy -- the drug trafficker," political analyst Jorge Chabat said. "What's new is that the Mexican cartels have become stronger since the mid-'90s and this new climate of violence is not likely to disappear soon."
Analysts agreed the the violence could contribute to political instability around the July 2 election, although they discounted any direct effect on the process or the outcome as in previous election-year crises, such as the 1994 assassination of presidential candidate Donaldo Colosio.
"This is a very specialized crime wave involving the assassination of law enforcement officials involved with drugs, different from an ordinary crime wave where you have real fear and loathing on the streets," said political scientist Federico Estevez of Mexico City's private ITAM University.
"Three or four more bodies in the Tijuana dumps don't change much the mood in that city," he said. "This doesn't appear to have the makings of a full-blown political crisis."
But the killings have served to muddy electoral waters and could serve as campaign fodder as questions persist surrounding the alleged involvement of high-level government officials in the drug trade and related violence.
In addition to investigating a small, local drug cartel, Guzman was probing government and police collusion with drug traffickers, an investigation that had landed several agents in jail, Mexico's Attorney General's Office said this week.
"The rumor mill in Mexico is about all we have to go on," Estevez said. "The government will argue that precisely because it is dealing heavy blows to drug lords these things occurred, and the rumor mill transforms that into something no one can get a grasp on -- that they're all involved, they're working for the drug barons."
But such rumors are nothing new to voters. The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), facing in this year's campaign one of the stiffest challenges of its 71 years in power, is widely associated with corruption.
"It doesn't much change the population's perception of the PRI as a party with high levels of corruption and involvement with criminals, suspected or proven," Chabat said. "Rather, the killings reinforce that opinion, developed over years."