U.S. rattled as Mexico drug war bleeds over border

By Tim Gaynor

PHOENIX (Reuters) - Hit men dressed in fake police tactical gear burst into a home in Phoenix, rake it with gunfire and execute a man.

Armed kidnappers snatch victims from cars and even a local shopping mall across the Phoenix valley for ransom, turning the sun-baked city into the "kidnap capital" of the United States.

Violence of this kind is common in Mexico where drug cartel abductions and executions are a daily feature of a raging drug war that claimed 6,000 lives south of the border last year.

But U.S. authorities now fear that violent crime is beginning to bleed over the porous Mexico border and take hold here.

"The fight in Mexico is about domination of the smuggling corridors and those corridors don't stop at the border," Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said.

Execution style murders, violent home invasions, and a spiraling kidnap rate in Phoenix -- where police reported an average of one abduction a day last year linked to Mexican crime -- are not the only examples along the border.

In southern California, police have investigated cases of Americans abducted by armed groups tied to the Tijuana drug trade. One involved a businesswoman and her teenage daughter snatched in San Diego last year and held to ransom south of the border.

In south Texas, a live hand grenade traced back to a Mexican cartel stash was tossed onto the pool table of a bar frequented by off-duty police officers in January. The pin was left in it and the assailant fled.

COPING WITH SPILLOVER

Mexican traffickers have always been violent, but the death toll has soared since President Felipe Calderon took office in late 2006 and sent tens of thousands of troops to fight the country's powerful cocaine cartels.

Soldiers have fought pitched battles with drug gangs in several Mexican towns and overwhelmed police officers have fled municipal forces the length of the border. In many cases, police officers have been paid off by the drug gangs or even joined them.

In a sign of an increasingly desperate struggle to rein in the violence, Calderon this week ordered 5,000 more troops and federal police to Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas.

The cartels have killed 250 people in Ciudad Juarez in the past month, forced the police chief to resign, and shut down the airport with bomb threats.

The struggle by outgunned Mexican authorities to contain the violence was highlighted for Arizona state police last November, when Mexican police officers pinned down in a raging gun battle in Nogales, Sonora, reached out to them with an urgent request for more bullets.

While U.S. authorities stress they have not seen anything like the kind of street battles and horrific beheadings that are now common in Mexico, they are already taking action to curb was has become known as "overspill".