The appearance of four bodies hanging from a bridge in Cuernavaca serves as a grim reminder that Mexico’s drug war is far from over.

Soon after coming to power, Mexican President Felipe Calderon took the bold step of deploying the Mexican army to restore order in his home province; a region that had been sunk into chaos by drug cartels. In the four short years since first using the army to battle drug trafficking, the situation has gone from bad to worse. A shocking 28,000 people have lost their lives in four years- that’s a rate of about 19 deaths every day. The Mexican government has also been forced to divert valuable financial resources into the drug campaign, translating into a rise in defense spending from 0.5% of the GDP in 2008 to 4% in 2010.

Now, President Calderon finds himself in an exceedingly difficult position. Deploying the army has done little to alleviate the drug-fuelled violence that plagues Mexico; in fact, it seems to have exacerbated the problem. Violence, no longer restricted to the cartels, has spilled into the public space and laid siege to Mexican society. Brazen attacks like that which saw Edelmiro Cavazo, a mayor in a town in northern Mexico, kidnapped and murdered have become increasingly commonplace.