THE BORDER REPORT

HERMOSILLO, SONORA – The convoy of Humvees passed me on the highway heading into the city, 11 khaki colored machines loaded with 15 to 20 men apiece. Each man wore a flak helmet and carried an AR-15 rifle, the trucks riding close, stopping as a unit, waiting for a lagging deuce-and-a-half to catch up, then moving in.

They were wary, even in this relatively calm city. Two days before, the Army and the Federal Preventive Police had raided the homes of the Sinaloa narco-syndicates in Nogales and Ciudád Obregón, seizing dozens of machine guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. The week before that, three grenade launchers were seized in Nogales. Early Wednesday morning, two men from Tamaulipas were detained near the Governor's Palace and quietly released. Still no word on what they were doing there. Maybe the cops were just being paranoid.

The appetite for weapons caching by the cartels is insatiable. And their propensity for violence has only grown. Last week, seven federal police were gunned down raiding a safehouse in Culiacán. A strong military presence in that city hasn't slowed them down at all. Bodies, kidnappings and levantones are happening every day, same as ever before.

I asked a good federal source later about the Army’s presence, whether they had arrived as part of a normal patrol or to join in on another of those raids that have become so common throughout this region in the past year.

“They’re pissed – and scared,” he says, lighting up a fresh Marlboro. “Everybody is, really.”

I’m beginning to wonder if that same fear is trickling down south to the bosses in Mexico City.

Pres. Felipe Calderón conceded something he may regret having said in the coming weeks.

“It does not gratify us that the fight to regain lost Mexican territory necessarily means periods of violent confrontation,” he said in a speech last Sunday.

The words came across the wire in the context of a Reforma newspaper poll that showed 53 percent of Mexicans surveyed believed the country is losing its battle against the cartels.

Nobody is calling this a war yet, even if the numbers give some credence to the definition. The United Nations defines war as conflict between two sovereign states resulting in more than 1,000 deaths in a six-month period.

Only the especially cynical would call Sinaloa a sovereign state so perhaps civil war would be a more accurate description for this conflict that has taken over northern Mexico.

We have the president of Mexico including phrases “like lost Mexican territory” in his dialogue – hardly words calculated to stir confidence in the administration.

Twenty-five thousand soldiers have been mobilized throughout the country since Calderón took office in 2006, and not to much success.

Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora told The New York Times 449 cops were murdered this year, making up one third of the country's killings related to organized crime.

Convoys of ten, 15, 20 men carrying enough weaponry to wage a successful battle on entire battalions are being popped everywhere from Guadalajara to Ciudad Juárez. The murder rate is nearly 50 percent higher than a year ago, surpassing the U.N.’s war numbers.

Nothing exceptionally new, just a worsening constant.

What have changed are the battlegrounds and the boundaries of this civil war.

In Culiacán, a new character has sprung up, a group of shadowy vigilantes who’ve been publishing their offers for assistance in the local newspapers and Web sites.

“For peace and tranquility in our city, call us. Denounce them,” the announcements say. Some, like my federal source in Hermosillo, believe they’re simply Mexican military, spreading the message however they can. Others, like a Justice Department source I spoke with in Phoenix, believe something else.

“We could be looking at a new player in all of this,” she said.

And that, we really don't need right now.

-- Michel Marizco