Is bloody car bomb turning point in Mexico drug war?

In Ciudad Juarez, located just across the border from El Paso, Texas, the bomb deepened fears that bloodshed will begin to claim more lives of people unrelated to the drug trade.

Almost 6,000 people have been killed since Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, Mexico's most wanted criminal and head of the Sinaloa cartel, sent hitmen into the city in early 2008 to force the Juarez cartel, headed by archrival Vicente Carrillo, out of business.

Conservative estimates put annual revenues from Mexico's highly organized, savvy smuggling rackets at between US$25 billion and US$40 billion, more than the country's 2009 oil export earnings.

One former police official in Ciudad Juarez sees a clear business motive behind the growing violence. “When you have a business, when do you invest in it? When you see conditions that are going to allow it to make money,” he said.

The car bomb attack is bad news for Calderon. Struggling to turn Latin America's second biggest economy around after a crippling recession in 2009, the drug war has hurt his image and weakened his conservative National Action Party, which now faces an uphill battle as it seeks to hold on to the presidency in 2012 elections.

While the violence in Mexico makes daily headlines, the government says they paint an inaccurate picture and that the country's murder rate is still lower than Brazil's. Even as cartels here grow bolder, Mexico is still far from the chaos of Colombia two decades ago.

Still, the threat is real in Ciudad Juarez, where graffiti scrawled across a wall this week issues a clear threat: “If in 15 days we don't see those corrupt federal police arrested, we are going to fill a car with 100 kilos of C-4 (explosive).”

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