Mexico & Nafta - February 2011 (ISSN 1741-444

February has got off to an awful start for the government of President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa. The centres of the country's second and third biggest cities, Guadalajara and Monterrey, looked like war zones as drug gangs challenged the authorities on 31 January and 1 February. The national employers' organisation, Coparmex, says that the violence is now running at intolerable levels.

The gangs seem to be responding to the Calderón's administration's claims that it is finally getting on top of them and bringing down the murder rate. The government argues that it is successfully decapitating the gangs and corralling the violence. The outbursts in Monterrey and Guadalajara and elsewhere undermine this claim. To date this year, 121 people have been killed in Monterrey. On 1 February the first federal police officer was killed, though 20 state and municipal police officers have already been killed by the gangs, who have started to attack police checkpoints with grenades. As we report inside, the death toll in Baghdad, at 22 per 100,000 inhabitants, is considerably lower than in the most violent cities in Mexico.

Alarmingly, the violence is spreading. In January, 57 people were killed in gang-related violence in the state of Jalisco, whose capital is Guadalajara. In 2010, 545 were killed in Jalisco, more than twice the 2009 toll of 212. Before the government launched its 'war' on the country's drug gangs on 1 December 2006, the gangs were much less murderous. In 2006, 45 people were killed by gangs in Jalisco. In Guadalajara, the criminality appears to be morphing into outright terrorism. Gang members have started to seize buses and other vehicles simply to set them on fire. The Guadalajara state government claims that this terrorism is a reaction to the arrest of two gang leaders in the city.

According to 'tweeting' eyewitnesses, gang violence has also arrived in Zacatecas, where “only" 21 people were killed by gangs in 2010. So far this year, six people have already been killed.

On 2 February the Confederación Patronal de la República Mexicana (Coparmex) issued a statement saying that the violence had reached intolerable levels. Coparmex blames the government for allowing the violence to get out of hand because it has failed to coordinate its response with state and municipal authorities. It forecasts that business investment will fall because of this failure. The confederation's outspokenness follows the kidnapping and murder of several of its leaders in 2011: the most notorious was the kidnapping and murder of Jorge Arturo Pérez Gavilán León, the Coparmex president, in Mazatlán.