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, 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.