Mexicans Unflinching in Face of Drug War's Carnage CADEREYTA JIMÉNEZ, Mexico - Couples were walking hand in hand. Children were frolicking. Just down the road in this northern Mexican town, 49 bodies, headless with their hands and feet severed off, had been found, then cleared away. Francisco Umberta, alarmed by the latest in a string of unimaginably gory crimes linked to Mexico's drug war, dealt with it by heading out on a date. A half-hour drive from where the torsos were discovered, he stood in line on Monday near a crowded Chili's restaurant, waiting to buy movie tickets for "The Avengers." "Of course it is all scary," he said of the massacre, which sadly set no record for carnage here, "but what are you going to do?" He had heard about the bodies on the radio shortly after they were discovered on Sunday, but said the regional soccer playoffs drew more public attention. "It's not like we're all paralyzed," said Mr. Umberta, 31, an office clerk. ¨We still need to live while they do what they do." With mangled corpses turning up on street corners and inside restaurants, hung from bridges, and buried in mass graves, Mexicans seem to have grown inured. Outrage, fear, anxiety, sadness - it is tough to muster such emotions again and again, especially with 50,000 people dead in drug-related killings since President Felipe Calderón began his assault on traffickers six years ago. Other countries, of course, have gone through some version of this collective numbing: Israel in 2003, after a series of bus bombings; Iraq in 2006. But Mexico seems to have fallen to new depths of deliberate distraction this year, and many Mexicans are increasingly disturbed by their own attitude. They are equally depressed about its cause. After all, crime experts and psychologists say, the apathy - during a presidential campaign, no less - is really just a learned response to repeated trauma, and impotence in the face of horror. Mexicans in city after city have grown used to death tolls that climb continuously. Protests, marches and public art projects honoring the many victims have done little to alter reality. Every day, families and children walk by newsstands with tabloids showing graphic photographs of the latest corpses to be found. Most barely notice. "We know nothing is changing - it just goes on," said Imelda Santos, 17, who was out enjoying a fast-food hamburger with friends. We try not to worry too much because we are not involved. That perception - it's them, not us - appears to play a large role in people's ability to remain disaffected despite the carnage. "For a lot of Mexicans, the big impulse is "Well, that's just too bad, but at least we got rid of the bad guys," " said Jorge Castañeda, a former presidential candidate. That contributes to the jadedness. In the case of the 49, perhaps some were on the wrong side of the law. The authorities said several had tattoos of Santa Muerte, the unofficial saint of death often favored by cartel assassins. Mexico's interior secretary, Alejandro Poiré, said Monday that the Zetas, a drug gang known for its ruthlessness in a country known for it, too, appeared to be responsible for the killings. Security experts have surmised that the high-profile dumping was a response to mass killings by the Sinaloa cartel. The two groups are Mexico's most powerful criminal competitors. They are also regional and cultural opposites. Sinaloa has been moving drugs north from the ranch country of western Mexico for generations; the Zetas are newer arrivals, founded by former special forces soldiers who had been enforcers for the Gulf cartel on Mexico's more urban eastern coast. They are battling each other, invading each other's territory and leaving behind bodies to intimidate their rival. The latest wave of violence seems to have started, or intensified, in September when a group identifying itself as the Zetas Killers dumped 35 bodies on a highway at rush hour near a mall in the Gulf Coast city of Veracruz. Two months later, 26 bound and gagged bodies appeared in downtown Guadalajara, a Sinaloa stronghold. Then, on May 4, 23 people were found dead in the Zetas" border state of Tamaulipas. Fourteen were decapitated. Nine were hanging from a bridge. "This is tit for tat," said Alejandro Hope, a former senior intelligence officer. For Sinaloa, it's a way of bringing down these upstarts, and for the Zetas, it's about protecting their reputation for extreme violence, which is their main asset. Karla Zabludovsky contributed reporting from Mexico City.