The Los Angeles Times has an article summing up the toll of the drug war currently taking place in Mexico.

From the LA Times:

Mexico is at war.

Helmeted army troops steer Humvees past strip malls in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, some of the 40,000 soldiers and 5,000 federal police officers President Felipe Calderon has deployed to secure large swaths of the country against entrenched drug traffickers.

The No. 2 police officer from Ciudad Juarez dies in a hail of bullets, and his boss resigns after receiving threats over the police force’s own radio frequency.

Criminals unleash machine guns and grenades in urban battles that the State Department describes as “equivalent to military small-unit combat.”

In the year and a half since Calderon launched a crackdown against drug gangs, about 4,100 people have died, the government says.At least 1,400 have been killed so far this year, including 170 in Tijuana, about 400 in Ciudad Juarez and 270 more in the western state of Sinaloa.

Many of the dead were gang members killed by rivals or by the government. Others have been bystanders. But at least 450 police officers and soldiers also have been killed.

“It is a real fight,” Calderon told reporters recently. “It is a war.”