The Mexican city of Culiacan lived under drug cartel terror for 12 hours as gang members forced the government to free a drug lord’s son, but in many parts of Mexico, the government ceded the battle to the gangs long ago. The massive, rolling gunbattle in Culiacan, capital of Sinaloa state, was shocking for the openness of the government’s capitulation and the brazenness of gunmen who drove machine-gun mounted armored trucks through the streets. But in state after state, the Mexican government long ago relinquished effective control of whole towns, cities and regions to the drug cartels. “They are the law here. If you have a problem, you go to them. They solve it quickly,” said a young mother in the town of El Aguaje, in western Michoacan state. El Aguaje is so completely controlled by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel that the young wife of lime-grove worker – who would not give her name for fear of reprisals – can’t turn to police: They are too afraid to enter the town. When a convoy of Michoacan state police did make a rare appearance in El Aguaje last Monday, they were ambushed and slaughtered by Jalisco cartel gunmen. Thirteen state police officers were shot or burned to death in their vehicles. When police returned to recover the burned-out patrol vehicles the next day, they were in such a hurry to accomplish their task that they left behind the crushed, burned, bullet-pierced skull of one of their colleagues lying on the ground. In the neighboring town of El Terrero, meanwhile, the rival New Michoacan Family cartel and its armed wing, the Viagras- who control that side of the river – have daubed their initials on houses and lamp posts, and last week burned several trucks and buses to block the bridge and prevent a Jalisco cartel incursion. In some cases, the government has even defended cartel boundaries, apparently as part of its strategy of avoiding bloodshed at all costs. For example, in the Michoacan town of Tepalcatepec, police line up every day to man a checkpoint at a highway leading into Jalisco state to prevent an armed incursion by Jalisco cartel gunmen. The problem is that the government force is working in coordination with a vigilante group allied with a drug cartel. The vigilantes are posted on a nearby hilltop where they can watch over the highway, armed with .50 caliber sniper rifles. In Guerrero state, to the east of Michoacan, soldiers and state police man checkpoints between rival gangs of vigilantes, many of which are allied with drug gangs. Soldiers allow vigilantes armed with assault rifles to roam freely, but not to invade each other’s territories. And in the northern state of Tamaulipas, when the United States began returning asylum seekers to wait for hearings in Mexico, the government knew it couldn’t protect the migrants from the Zetas drug cartel in the border city of Nuevo Laredo and so it simply bused them out of the city. Now known as the Cartel of the Northeast, the former Zetas control Nuevo Laredo so completely that they recently ordered local gas stations to refuse to sell gasoline to army vehicles. In many regions, cartels enriched by drug profits have held extensive control for at least a decade, buying off or cowing law enforcement and building huge arsenals, along with networks of informants to protect narcotics routes from the government or rivals. The cartel grip in Tamaulipas was so firm by 2011 that Zetas gunmen were able to kidnap almost 200 people from passing buses and kill them even as the passengers’ unclaimed luggage kept piling up at local bus stations. Nobody reported the crimes for months. In this context, the government’s decision to release drug lord Ovidio Guzmán – son of imprisoned capo Joaquin Guzmán Loera – after the Culiacan shootouts was striking only because the government so publicly dropped even the pretense of enforcing the law. “It’s not unprecedented for Mexican authorities to pick up a major capo and then release him; that’s actually unfortunately too common,” said David Shirk, a political science professor at the University of San Diego. “But what’s really unprecedented is to openly acknowledge that the state does not have the capacity or the stomach for keeping a major capo behind bars because of the potential consequences.” “But what message does it send to people who are under the yoke of criminal organizations all over Mexico?” Shirk asked. “I think the message is, ‘You’re on your own. We’re not going to come in and rescue you because you could get killed in the process.'” The message to soldiers in the Mexican army is also pretty clear: The Defense Department blamed a military squad for the “rushed” operation to arrest Ovidio Guzmán that set off the Culiacan gun battles and pledged to investigate and punish the leaders of the squad. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office less than a year ago, has repeatedly urged military restraint, saying his predecessors’ hardline confrontation strategy in gang-controlled areas “turned this country into a cemetery, and we don’t want that anymore.”