Riding Along as Mexico Battles Drug Cartels

ACAPULCO, Mexico, Feb. 18, 2007 — -- Driving along the Acapulco coastline, you hardly get the sense that you're on the front lines of Mexico's new war on drugs.

Resort hotels dot the sprawling beaches, and the Pacific waters are filled with sailboats, jet skis, and swimmers. Acapulco may not be the tourist paradise of decades ago, having been surpassed in Mexico by resort towns like Cancun and Cabo San Lucas, but it's not too shabby.

The city has the same laid-back, no-worries feel you'll find in any place with sun, sand, and temperatures in the high 80s -- that is, until you hit Playa Icacos, about 20 minutes from the airport, a stretch of beaches and resorts along one of Acapulco's main tourist drags.

The beaches are packed with sunbathers, children build sandcastles, and a hotel guest is sprawled-out on a table beneath a palm tree getting a massage. And there, just a few hundred yards away, anchored in the same waters were people are frolicking in the surf, is a massive Mexican naval ship. It is as odd an image as you'll ever find in a tropical paradise, but it's an unmistakable signal of the massive military presence mustering here.

As it turns-out, the ship is anchored at a permanent naval base adjacent to the beaches, but that base is being used as a major staging point in the Mexican president's new war on drugs. Several thousand soldiers and marines have been sent to Acapulco alone to help crack down on the cartels and stop a sickening wave of violence.

But the day we arrived in Acapulco, the military could do little to stop the latest attacks. Gunmen, believed to be linked to the drug cartels, opened fire at two police stations, killing seven cops and support staff. They reportedly videotaped the incident.

Mexico's drug gangs have started posting their grisly handiwork on YouTube to taunt their rivals -- and the police.

When we arrived on the scene of the shooting, just a few miles from Acapulco's tourist center but a world away from the palm-fringed beaches, it was as if nothing had happened. The police station was closed, but there was no blood on the streets, no police tape, no sign of the massacre that had unfolded just hours before. A few neighbors milled about quietly in the dusty streets, while others lined up at a ramshackle hut to by freshly made tortillas hot out of a rickety oven.

We met Maria, along with her two young grandchildren. She had lived in this village -- oddly named Renacimiento, or Renaissance -- all her life. She told us she was terrified when the gunmen opened fire just down the street from her home.

"It was a desperate thing," she said. "There was a lot of it."

Maria said she fears for the lives of her grandchildren, that she worries the violence could strike at any time.

"The could wind up killing a child, and they are innocents," she said. "These days we are all really in danger around here."