ACAPULCO, Mexico - Death surprised Julio Carlos Lopez Soto near the beach as he stepped out of the swanky La Mansion steakhouse, where the meat is grilled on tabletops overlooking the Pacific.

And death came to police officer Raymundo Leyva in the hills that rise above Acapulco Bay, where the working people of this resort city live.

He was shot 11 times.

A spreading conflict between rival drug cartels and the police is bringing the gangland-style violence of Mexico's northern border to the southern states of Michoacan and Guerrero.

At least 200 people have been killed in "narco-violence" in the two states this year, a record number for the region.

The violence is being driven, officials say, by competition over local opium poppy and marijuana plantations, and a growing number of laboratories producing methamphetamine.

The public assassinations are a new phenomenon in a region where the business of cultivating drugs has long been a bucolic activity practiced in the region's verdant mountains while police turned a blind eye.

Now police officers are turning up dead in record numbers, and police stations are being attacked by hit men wielding fragmentation grenades.

"I thought after the first funerals that would be it, but there's been so many more," said Alberto Lopez Rosas, Acapulco's mayor.

Nine police officers have been killed this year in the city. Only one was killed last year.

"We don't have an elite police force here," the mayor said. "Our officers are from the common people."

Across Mexico, more than 2,000 people have been killed as two cartels battle over drug production areas and points of sale, known here as "plazas": the Gulf cartel based in the border state of Tamaulipas and the Sinaloa cartel based in the Pacific state of the same name.

The two cartels appear to have brought their rivalry southward. That worries Mayor Lopez Rosas, who fears more shootings will chase away the tourists Acapulco depends on.

"What Acapulco sells is not just the ocean and the beach," he said. "It sells tranquillity."

By HECTOR TOBAR

Los Angeles Times