(CNN) -- Police say that the Mexican drug cartel known as La Familia Michoacana this summer killed 12 federal police officers, attacked several police stations, and plotted to drag a cabinet member's name in the mud.

According to the groups own communications, its members are simply carrying out a divine mission.

La Familia Michoacana has become a priority of Mexican President Felipe Calderon's fight against the drug cartels that have left some 5,600 dead this year alone.

The capture by authorities of two of the group's top-tier leaders in July set off a deadly tit-for-tat that made the central-west state of Michoacan, home of President Calderon, a critical front in the war against the drug trade. The reprisal killings have subsided recently, but La Familia's stated pro-community mission and religious bent make it a unique adversary for authorities.

What's more, a string of arrests of cartel members appears to back the government's contention that it has weakened La Familia, a claim that Mexico cannot make as easily against other cartels in other regions.

La Familia Michoacana announced itself to Mexico like this in 2006: "The family doesn't murder for hire, doesn't kill women, doesn't kill innocent people, only those who deserve to die. Let it be known, this is divine justice."

The message from the drug cartel was written on a piece of cardboard tossed onto the dance floor at a club in the city of Uruapan along with five severed human heads.

It was a violent public debut, but La Familia had already been around for some time, observers said.

"They are an emerging cartel that has been in existence for 20 or 30 years," Ralph Reyes, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's chief for Mexico and Central America, told CNN.

The organization started off as a group of marijuana farmers who consolidated, Reyes said.

Others say that the origins of the group was not in drugs at all, but in protecting the Michoacan communities from illicit trafficking.

"The group did not start out as a drug trafficking organization but as a vigilante group," Fred Burton, vice president for Counterterrorism and Corporate Security for the global intelligence company Stratfor, told CNN.

Regardless of whether drugs were part of the business for La Familia, it is clear that the group, unlike other drug gangs, promotes itself as a defender of its state.

"We created La Familia to protect and safeguard the interests of our town and our family," the head of the cartel, Servando "La Tuta" Gomez, said in a recent call to a local radio station.

More than other drug cartels, La Familia has reached out to the public through phone calls to broadcasters, letters in newspapers, and messages left near their victims.

"We're guarding so that people don't go around killing, so that they don't go around shooting bullets," a person who identified himself as a member of La Familia told the newspaper El Universal.

"To the public they want to be Robin Hoods," Reyes said.

The group also has a religious aspect to their ideology that they use to justify their actions, analysts said.

"That's one thing that makes La Familia so dangerous -- they claim the Lord has told them to kill certain individuals," George Grayson, a professor at the College of William & Mary in Virginia who follows Mexico's drug war, told CNN.

Today, the cartel is very brazen and has found a niche in methamphetamine production and marijuana cultivation, Burton said. La Familia has been spreading its reach outside of Michoacan, but Burton said the group relies on other drug trafficking organizations to transport much of their product into the United States.

The state of Michoacan is operationally appealing to drug traffickers because of the major Pacific port of Lazaro Cardenas. Roads and rail connect the port to the U.S. border and beyond. The mission of La Familia, according to its own statements, is to protect the state from outside drug cartels, particularly the Zetas, a cartel that originally was the protection arm of the Gulf cartel.

Those who have been arrested have told police of a cartel so ingrained into the political and social fabric that no one can sell drugs in areas they control without their permission. The group sees itself as an enforcer of order in an increasingly chaotic Mexico.

Michoacan's violent summer began as federal police and the army targeted La Familia Michoacana in new ways, including corrupt officials who protect traffickers.

"Calderon went after politicians," Grayson said. "So far, they have been intocables " -- untouchables.

In May, authorities arrested 11 mayors across Michoacan for alleged complicity with criminal elements, including La Familia. Another 17 municipal officials, including several area police and security chiefs, also were arrested.

The mayors who were arrested represented all three of Mexico's major political parties, according to data gathered by Grayson for an upcoming book on narco-violence in Mexico.

"That was the big hit. It was unprecedented," Grayson said.

Police are also searching for two politicians who are in hiding, and who are accused of belonging to La Familia. Saul Solis Solis, alias "El Lince," lost a bid for a congressional seat this month and is the cousin of a cartel leader, officials say. The other fugitive politician, Julio Cesar Godoy Toscano, was elected in June to the lower house of congress. He is also the half-brother of Michoacan's governor.

Political enablers of two other of the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in Mexico, the Gulf cartel and Sinaloa cartel, have not been hit in the same way, Grayson said.

Authorities followed up with the arrests of a top La Familia leaders, Arnoldo "La Minsa" Rueda Medina in July. Earlier in the year, another top echelon leader, Rafael "El Cede" Cedeno Hernandez was apprehended.

More than 30 federal police officers were killed in reprisal attacks, including 12 officers whose tortured bodies were dumped in a pile on the side of a highway on July 13.

After the slayings, Gomez, the leader of La Familia, spoke on the radio, telling Calderon that his cartel was not against the government, but only against the federal police, which he blamed for falsely accusing citizens of crimes.

"The radio address was a challenge to the authorities," Reyes said. "They had to respond."

Mexican newspapers are regularly running headlines about the arrests of additional La Familia leaders. Authorities went as far as temporarily detaining Gomez's mother and brother for questioning.

The cartel's overseer of the important port city of Lazaro Cardenas, Marcos Arturo Juarez Cruz, known as "El Chamuco," was arrested last week.

A federal police chief last month said that La Familia Michoacana has been seriously weakened by the arrests of its leaders and seizures of cash.

But the unconventional cartel continues to fight back.

A taxi driver who claimed he was kidnapped along with his passenger in September by the La Familia Michoacana said the he witnessed how the cartel wrote and rehearsed a script for one of the captives to read into a video camera, according to a federal police press release.

The production was supposed to be a fake interrogation where the captive would claim to worked as a courier for a rival cartel, the statement said.

He was supposed to say that he was delivering money to Genaro Garcia Luna, the cabinet member who oversees the federal police.

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