MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico sent 1,000 federal police and cargo planes loaded with armored cars on Thursday to Michoacan to help quell a flare-up in drug gang violence that is challenging President Felipe Calderon in his home state.
They join an anti-drug force of several hundred troops and federal police in the western marijuana-producing state, where heavily armed traffickers have unleashed a wave of attacks on security forces in recent days.
One attack on the weekend, apparently in revenge for the arrest of a high-level trafficker, left the stripped, blood-smeared bodies of 12 federal police in a heap by a remote highway -- the latest victims of drug gang violence that has killed some 12,800 people across Mexico since late 2006.
The local "La Familia" (The Family) cartel has grown in strength to control many local police and politicians in Michoacan, and its brazen attacks are the latest blow in a drug war that has become a serious worry for investors, tourists and Washington.
Michoacan was the first state to which Calderon sent troops in December 2006, when he launched a frontal army assault on drug gangs immediately after taking office.
But the weekend capture in the state of a top La Familia "capo" or kingpin has sparked revenge attacks, showing the cartel has been little affected by the military crackdown.
The troops are scattered across sparsely inhabited mountains that hide drug plantations and laboratories.
The body armor-clad police reinforcements were expected to spread out in convoys of pickup trucks backed by armored vehicles and three Black Hawk helicopters, possibly targeting cartel safe houses in violence-plagued towns like Uruapan, where hitmen dumped five human heads in a bar in 2006.
La Familia is battling the rival Gulf cartel from northeastern Mexico and its feared armed wing, the Zetas, for control of Michoacan in a war being played out nationally.
The La Familia cartel appears to wield enormous power in Michoacan. Troops rounded up 10 mayors and a string of police chiefs in May accused of working for the cartel in one of the biggest single corruption sweeps of the drug war.
A man claiming to be its operations chief, Servando "La Tuta" Gomez, called a Michoacan television station this week and said the group was willing to negotiate with the government to avoid more killings.
Interior Minister Fernando Gomez Mont rejected the call and said the government does not talk with organized crime.
The Familia cartel follows a quasi-religious code of conduct that bars its members from taking drugs or drinking alcohol and has contacted the media in the past to claim its aim is to protect Michoacan from Zeta hitmen.
(Reporting by Mica Rosenberg; Editing by Eric Walsh)
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