Mexico's drug wars are infused with systematic torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings carried out by the police, army and navy, according to an investigation by Human Rights Watch.

The report, Neither Rights Nor Security, says such violations are endemic in the military-led counter-narcotics offensive launched by President Felipe Calderón in December 2006. Around 45,000 people have been killed since the start of the offensive, with the killing primarily driven by escalating turf wars between different cartels, as well as attacks by organised criminals on civilians. Calderón has repeatedly stressed that this reality means the state must go after the criminals with all the force it can muster.

The report by the New York-based human rights group feeds into long-standing claims that the military strategy has been counterproductive.

The report says that the failure to improve investigation of all drug-related killings, and of human rights abuses by the security forces in particular, is fuelling the violence. Data on the number of drug-war related homicide investigations is notoriously opaque, and the report contains evidence of systematic coverups by the authorities in most of the documented cases of human rights abuses.

José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director of Human Rights Watch, said: "Mexico has paid such a high price in terms of the violence and the abuses, with pretty much full impunity as a result of the war on drugs. We don't see a clear understanding by the Mexican officials at the highest level that this has an impact on [the country's] human rights record, as well as weakening its democratic institutions and the rule of law."

The report researched violations by security forces in five Mexican states: Baja California, Chihuahua, Nuevo León, Guerrero and Tabasco.

The 170 documented "credible" cases of torture include techniques such as beatings, asphyxiation with plastic bags and water-boarding, electric shocks, sexual torture and death threats directed at victims and their families.

Rodrigo Ramírez Martínez was arrested by the army just outside Tijuana in Baja California in June 2009, and claims he was tortured over four days before signing a confession for a kidnapping, which he later retracted. Documents show he was actually in detention in the US awaiting deportation when the kidnapping took place. He remains in jail awaiting trial.

The report cites 39 probable disappearances, including the abduction of the owner of a nightclub and five of his employees in Iguala in the state of Guerrero during a raid by the army in March 2010. Relatives sought information, filed complaints, held demonstrations and obtained the promise of investigations. They also reported receiving warnings from officials to tone things down, telephone threats, and being followed by a vehicle that repeated crashed into theirs. They abandoned their search.

The murder of José Humberto Márquez Compeán in Nuevo Leon is among the 24 cases of probable extrajudicial killings cited in the report. Press photographs of his tortured body found in March 2010 matched those of a man filmed by TV cameras being arrested the day before by the navy and municipal police. The navy said that it opened an investigation, but has refused to give more information.

Calderón has either denied the existence of abuse by security forces or claimed it amounts to only isolated incidents that are dealt with swiftly within a context of absolute respect for human rights. He accepts that rampant corruption is a major problem in local level police forces but argues this only makes the federal offensive more necessary.

"To those who say that the government's public security strategy has made things worse" he said during a meeting with victims of the violence last month, "I say that if we had not intervened, a large part of the national territory would probably be dominated by one cartel or another."