Mexico's Calderon bogged down in bloody drugs war

By Catherine Bremer - Analysis

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - President Felipe Calderon has staked his reputation on wiping out Mexico's drug violence but his campaign is in trouble as trafficking gangs murder ever more people, target police and openly recruit hitmen.

Calderon's first move on taking power 18 months ago was to launch a bold $7 billion army-led assault on powerful drug cartels, vowing to wrest back control of violence-scarred northern border states.

His army busts have put a string of senior smugglers behind bars and captured truckloads of cocaine and cash.

But the top drug lords are still free, and disrupting years-old trafficking alliances and protection networks has sparked an explosion in killings between rival gangs who dump hacked-off heads and tortured bodies in public.

The bloodshed has dented Calderon's popularity and left him bogged down in a vicious war with the odds of winning it stacked against him.

Calderon, 45, has defined success as reducing the violence, but drug murders have instead soared to more than 4,000 since his offensive began, and the turf wars intensified this year.

In brazen defiance of Calderon's pledge to gain the upper hand, cartel hitmen are picking off police from grim hit-lists and hanging banner adverts on highways offering fat wages for soldiers to defect and join them.

"They're not scared of him," said Eduardo Valle, a veteran drug expert who was a top advisor to Mexico's attorney general in the mid-1990s and now lives on the Mexico-U.S. border.