If this 7.16 N.Y. Times story isn’t a Michael Mann film, I’ll eat my Elph digital camera. Mann can save himself by pouncing on this one right away. If I were him I’d be all over it like a spider. I’d have a screenwriter hired and working on it as we speak.

“Last weekend, the arrest of a senior figure in a Mexican drug cartel known as La Familia led to a wave of coordinated attacks by the cartel against federal police posts and one military base, killing three federal officers and two soldiers,” N.Y. Times reporter Robert Mackey wrote today.

“The range and extent of the violence across the western state of Michoacan led one respected Mexican columnist, Ciro Gomez Leyva, to compare it to the Tet offensive during the Vietnam war. In a column headlined ‘El Tet michoacano y el principio del fin’ (‘The Michoacán Tet and the Beginning of the End’), published on Monday in the newspaper Milenio, Mr. Gómez Leyva wrote:

“In the drug war, July 11 seems like a sort of Tet offensive, the synchronized, Hollywood-style offensive by South Vietnamese guerrillas and the North Vietnamese Army against U.S. troops in late January 1968 that, despite being described as a military disaster, created the perception that Washington’s formerly invincible army would never win in Vietnam.”