Mexico City - The Mexican government has refused to negotiate with drug cartels, after one gang leader proposed a deal to end the ongoing wave of drug-related violence.

"Criminal organizations must have it clear that the state's offensive is going to continue and that violence ... will only end once they respect the will of authorities," Interior Minister Fernando Gomez Mont said late Wednesday.

The government said it would not "make a deal and it will never negotiate" with the country's powerful drug cartels.

Earlier, a man who identified himself as Servando Gomez Martinez, a leader of the La Familia cartel, offered to talk to Mexican President Felipe Calderon's government.

Gomez Martinez made the offer during a phone-in to a television show in the western state of Michoacan, where Calderon comes from and which is the epicentre of the latest wave of drug-fuelled killings.

The government thinks it was Gomez Martinez who ordered a series of attacks on the federal police, in which 17 policemen and two soldiers have dead since Saturday. The deaths came in a revenge attack for the arrest of a La Familia leader.

Minister Gomez Mont said the government would not give in to "blackmail" from "cowardly criminals without scruples."

"However hard they try to mask their actions behind all kinds of explanations, the only truth behind these groups is that they extort, threaten, kidnap, torture and murder without scruples," he said.

In the 15-minute TV interview, the La Familia leader said: "What we want is peace and quiet ..."

"... Please understand this: You will never be able to end this, and the day I die they will put someone else in my place, and that is how it will go on. This is never going to end, we want to reach a consensus, we want to reach a national deal."

Police and military have been deployed across the country in keeping with Calderon's strategy to combat the drug gangs.

Mexico has become the epicentre of Latin America's drug trade into the United States, with heavily armed gangs battling over the lucrative trafficking of narcotics. Over
3,000 drug-related killings have taken place since January 2009.(dpa)