But Operation Michoacan United, announced Monday, so far looks like a bust - and not the kind Calderón had in mind.

A week after taking the oath of office, Calderón ordered more than 6,000 soldiers, sailors and federal police to swarm towns where warring drug smugglers are believed responsible for as many as 500 killings this year. Hired assassins have added beheadings to their repertoire and recently started tossing victims from planes in an apparent effort to shock and demoralize rivals.

Despite the fanfare accompanying Calderón´s anti-drug operation, including roadblocks and air surveillance, the effort had yielded no arrests as of Friday. The operation is concentrated in 13 municipalities in the southwestern part of the state, an area suffering from high illiteracy and poverty rates and site of a third of the state´s homicides this year.

"This operation doesn´t aim to be spectacular," said Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora. "The focus is on territory, recovering geographical space for the public."

Tons of marijuana and cocaine pass through Michoacán each year en route to the United States. Armed drug runners control many roads, which soldiers and police say they are recovering.

But no kingpins were arrested and not much dope had been seized in the highly touted operation, despite, according to Excelsior newspaper, government documents with the names of local drug gang leaders and organizational charts listing their jobs.

One alleged cartel gunman was killed Wednesday after firing on soldiers trying to serve a search warrant on a property in the town of Dos Aguas.

Army personnel found 10 weapons and several hundred rounds of ammunition, cell phones and shortwave radios, a police uniform, and a marijuana packaging device. They also found 1,100 marijuana plants and about 30 pounds of seed.

Port investigators have had better luck working on their own. A week ago Tuesday they turned up nearly 20 tons of pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient for Mexico´s burgeoning methamphetamine labs. The drug can be legally imported, but the container was labeled as another product. No one claimed the shipment.

Government officials said Thursday they planned to expand the operation to other states caught in the deadly struggle over U.S.-bound smuggling routes between Pacific Coast-based and Gulf-based cartels.

The ongoing drug war is believed responsible for an estimated 2,000 deaths nationwide this year. Calderón and his advisers fear the drug war will scare off investors.

Analysts say Mexico has been less aggressive than the U.S. in pursuing a war on drugs, which officials here saw as more of a problem for U.S. addicts and their families than for Mexican citizens. But barbaric killings, including torture and dismemberment, and increased domestic drug use are changing that attitude, analysts say.

The Calderón administration´s idea of winning the war on drugs may be limited, at least for now, to warning traffickers that the Mexican government will interfere with business unless the killings end, say analysts.