Right: A message from your friendly neighborhood drug cartel: “The pain of Michoacanos overwhelms us. No more crimes against innocent people. The Zetas will pay for their terrorist acts. Sincerely, La Familia.” In recent days, signs like this one have appeared in major intersections across Michoacan, including a few in Zamora.

IT ALL STARTED SEPTEMBER 15, when Mexicans all over the country crowded into town squares to hear the official grito – a commemoration of Miguel Hidalgo’s cry for independence in 1810. It’s a big party, complete with churchbells, fireworks, and drunks – just like any good national celebration anywhere.

But during the celebration in Morelia, the capital of Michoacan, someone lobbed a grenade into the crowd, killing eight and injuring about 100 in what was instantly pegged as an act of narco terrorism.

Mexican narco traffickers routinely kill each other and police officers in territory fights, and these acts are usually buried in the back pages of newspapers under small headlines that read something like “Five More Tortured Bodies Discovered.”

Yawn. What else is new.

But exploding grenades in a public square full of obviously innocent people – in President Felipe Calderon’s home town no less – is really upping the ante. While in the U.S., the story took a backseat to the economy, in Mexico, especially in Michoacan, it dominated the front pages and the newscasts. Something big had happened. Really big. But what?

Everyone is assuming that this is the fault of the narco traffickers. Three men taken into custody over the weekend allegedly have ties to the business. But that’s the first draft of what happened, and we’ll have to see if it sticks.

In the information vacuum after the bombing we got updates on the victims and incredibly detailed background information on the drug gangs. One graphic in the Guadalajara daily broadsheet Mural helpfully showed a map detailing which municipalities in Michoacan are controlled by which cartels. (Zamora and neighboring Jacona are controlled by the Golfo Cartel.) Next to the map - this is deep inside the paper, mind you – another article spelled out the influence of the cartels in Michoacan. According to federal government reports, seven mayors are in the tank for the gangs, as well as numerous police chiefs, judges, and other current and former political authorities.

This is the sort of information that, in the U.S., is displayed only at the press conference in which the attorney general announces that dozens of people have been arrested in pre-dawn raids. But there was no such raid, leading to the obvious conclusion that the federal government is helpless to do much more than write reports about the situation

It kept getting worse. Elsewhere in that same newspaper, there was a large photo of Michoacan Governor Leonel Godoy in front of a crowd that included every mayor in the state. He was giving the unity and solidarity speech that leaders must give after tragedies. He did not include any harsh words for the mayors standing behind him who are on the take from the people who likely committed the crime.

Things got even weirder last weekend when large signs started appearing on bridges claiming to represent the views of the organized crime organization La Familia. The signs blamed the bombing on the rival cartel Las Zetas.

“We are repulsed by this terrorist act that occured on September 15, committed by Las Zetas,” read one sign.

“We are Mexicans and Michoacanos and do not accept that Las Zetas use fear to destabilize the country. They want to spread terrorism in Michoacan,” read another.

A few of these signs appeared in Zamora, and one a few blocks from my old house, posted on a pedestrian bridge over a very busy street.

A few days later, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the head of the much bigger Sinaloa Cartel, (and half of the reason why you should buy life insurance before going to Juarez) issued a statement of his own blaming La Familia and Las Zetas.

“Don’t forget that the Sinaloa Cartel always moves forward. Now begins the battle; we have never killed innocent people, much less at public events,” he said.

The situation has all the ingredients of a horror movie, but with some farce thrown in for good measure. Things were not great before, but they just got much, much worse. Before, not being involved in a drug gang was usually enough to keep a pulse. Now, nothing is sacred. And drug cartels – yes, drug cartels – are scrambling for the moral high ground.

But none of the usual remedies that we would count on in the states will work here, and this insecurity is constantly rubbed in Mexican faces.

The Feds? They know where the dry rot is, but they can’t do much about it. Arresting three people is a good start, but it will likely be an end as well. There are questions about the efficacy of the judicial system. And the police? Up to 80 percent of them work for the bad guys, according to one estimate I saw in the liberal Mexico City daily Milenio.

And what of La Familia, or El Chapo’s cry plea for a new war on terrorism, with the slightly less odious terrorists taking on the really bad ones? La Familia talks of vengeance for Michoacan, and they are a powerful armed group that knows how to get things done, but they are also responsible for 17 decapitations here, according to another one of those ever-helpful federal reports.

What, at the end of the day, is worse? The fact that an organization dedicated to selling drugs, corrupting cops, killing opponents, and extorting money out of businesses has the balls to feign patriotism? Or the fact that this organization can post large signs over the busiest intersections in the state without fear of arrest?

The situation has that grim walls-closing-in sort of feeling to it that inspires Americans – not just politicians - to anger and action. You could feel something in the air after September 11, and after Oklahoma City. We were all hell bent on rising up and destroying whoever did that.

Yet here, there seems to be little more than indifference and sadness. After all, on that day when everything changed for us Yanks, we had a world-class law enforcement operation backing us up, and the most powerful army the world has ever seen, just incase we happened to need it.

But Mexico is now in that horror movie where things just got worse and there is no way out.

Not that Mexicans don’t want to do something about this – they do. The question is only a matter of what and who.

The other day I was joking with a friend of mine that when I come back to visit Mexico one day I expect her to have personally solved this insecurity problem.

“Yea, I’ll kill them, she said, chuckling a bit.

Then she stopped treating it as a joke. “I will cut off their heads in the cathedral to teach them a lesson,” she said.

This wasn’t anger. It was one of those fantasies that you have to distract yourself from a hopeless situation.

“Every morning Mexican papers announce yesterday’s deaths,” wrote the columnist Juan Villoro in Mural on Sept. 19. “To cope, we relegate the drama to a detached box: The narcos kill each other. This denial is now impossible. The violence has come to the land of innocents.

“The danger is diffuse. Who attacked? This astonishment is followed by another: Who is going to defend?”