AFP - Mexico's drug violence left 15,273 dead in 2010, the government said Wednesday, making it the deadliest year yet since President Felipe Calderon launched a military crackdown on organized crime.
The announcement came as 2011 began with mass beheadings in Acapulco and scores of gangland-style killings, underlining the daunting challenges for the fifth year of Calderon's offensive.
Government security spokesman Alejandro Poire said around half of last year's killings had been in three northern states, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas and Sinaloa, and that the murder rate had slightly reduced toward the end of the year.
Analysts warn that the current rate of some 1,000 murders per month is set to continue at least in the short term, particularly as gangsters seek to influence several key state elections this year and 2012 presidential polls.
"The cartels would previously kill a local policeman in order to send a signal to the director of police, but now they go after the director of police or the mayor," Alejandro Schtulmann, from political risk consulting firm EMPRA, told AFP. Two small-town mayors have already been killed this year.
The government has lauded a string of drugs hauls and the deaths or arrests of around half of 37 top gang leaders in the past two years as signs of success for the controversial clampdown launched when Calderon took office in 2006.
More than 30,000 people have been killed since then by organized crime, according to official figures, as rights groups increasingly underline complaints of army abuse under the crackdown.
Although authorities acknowledge the record levels of violence, they say it demonstrates the desperation of the gangs.
"There's evidence that this phenomenon is due to conflicts between different criminal groups passing more and more from drug trafficking to activities such as extortion, people trafficking and piracy," Poire said Wednesday.
The worst-hit areas include Chihuahua state, which includes Mexico's most violent city Ciudad Juarez, and Guerrero, home to the beach resort city of Acapulco, where 15 decapitated bodies were found outside a shopping center last weekend.
Violence erupted in northeastern Tamaulipas last year, blamed on battles between the Gulf drug gang and their former allies, the Zetas.
Amid criticism of his military deployment, Calderon has sought to reform the notoriously corrupt police, but critics say his firings of hundreds of officers have led to dangerous short-term power vacuums.
"The crisis at a local level is the decisive factor to explain the country's levels of violence," sociologist Fernando Escalante said in a recent article in Nexos magazine.
The government last year began social programs to try to improve public health and education in poor communities, including in Ciudad Juarez.
But critics said the efforts were too little, too late, and face an uphill struggle given the relentless violence and endemic corruption.
The failure of local, state and federal authorities to work together also presents a major obstacle.
"They're not able to create political decisions and moves so that institutions will fully reform," said Ernesto Lopez Portillo, director of the INSYDE think tank on security and democracy.
"It's important to understand the limits for the country's president."
US Senator John Kerry said Tuesday that the United States -- the main market for Mexico-trafficked drugs -- would look at increasing its anti-drug assistance, which currently includes the three-year, 1.3-billion-dollar Merida Initiative, already set to be extended this year.
"We're going to look very carefully at whether there is more that we're able to do because this is a national security threat to the United States," the Democratic senator said in Washington.
In the latest attempt to increase public solidarity against the violence, Mexican cartoonists this week launched a poster campaign entitled "No more blood."
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