MEXICO CAUGHT IN MIDDLE

CUERNAVACA, Mexico - Despite the 84 degrees F., despite the delights
of the swimming pool, there is trouble in paradise.

It's hard to complain from this pleasant town of some one million, at
5,000 feet high between Mexico City (world's largest city at 26
million) and the lush resort of Acapulco on the Pacific shore, once
the retreat of all the Hollywood stars.

It's where Hernando Cortes, the Spanish explorer, selected for his
palace. That's after his fleet of 11 ships crossed the Atlantic,
following one Christopher Columbus who as we know discovered the
Caribbean islands in 1492.

Cortes, having conquered Cuba, reached the shores of Mexico, then the
capital of the Western World, with 400 men and 17 horses. It was Nov.
18, 1519. He was just 24 years of age.

He faced off in Mexico City with the Aztec king, Montezuma, who,
taken hostage, was dead within a year. Cortes's forces killed some
15,000 native Indians in their sweep across the length of Mexico in
search of that fabled gold, supposedly hidden in the mountains.

His palace here is now a museum, filled with stunning murals -
revenge is the best dessert - by Mexico's finest artists throughout history.

So much for yesterday's bad guys. Today, we have larger problems, a
lovely country trapped between two conflicts between supply and
demand - the United States to the north and South America to the south.

One country - supposedly the most sophisticated realm on the globe -
has an insatiable demand for drugs. Poor nations down south grow the
stuff and feed their economies on it. Innocent Mexico is the conduit
to smuggle the junk into the Yankee mouths. Or noses. Wherever it goes.

Last week, in a story that pushed even Anna Nicole Smith off the
front-page headlines, eight guys dressed in military uniforms walked
in brazen daylight into the office of police investigators in
Acapulco and asked if those inside had any weapons and would they
hand them over.

Request obliged, they then shot and killed five police officers and
two female secretaries. They were seen later, dumping their fake
uniforms and fleeing wearing T-shirts and shorts.

In another situation, two women got caught in the crossfire and were
shot in the legs in their hotel lobby. And then there is the Canadian
boy who was killed in front of a disco nightclub. (The Mexicans have
another version).

This was just after newly-elected President Felipe Calderon had sent
7,000 troops into the Acapulco area in an attempt to calm the wars
between the Sinaloa and Gulf drug cartels, both of which have tried
to corrupt local police.

The problem, as always, is the porous Mexican-U.S. border, where all
the cocaine from Columbia makes its way to California and Arizona and
thence beyond. To the cocktail parties in New York or wherever.

The solution? Dubya Bush thought he had it, with a threat to erect an
electrified fence across his entire southern border - accompanied
(post 9/11) by putting heavily-armed patrol boats to guard the
American side of the Great Lakes from the suspicious Canadians. A
goofy idea that thankfully was quickly shot down by innocent boaters
and fishermen.

The problem, says Gabriel Padilla Maya, is that "Americans don't like to work."

Gabriel, a friend of several years, is chief-of-staff to Mexico's
Minister of Agriculture, a handsome 36-year-old civil servant who has
survived the transition from the disappointing reign of president
Vincente Fox, the former head of Coca-Cola Mexico who ran out of gas
in his six-year term.

What Gabriel means is that the reason there are 10 million illegal
Mexican immigrants in California is that the Californians don't want
to cut their own lawns, or pick up the garbage, or do the junk jobs
in hamburger joints for little pay - far more than the Mexicans could
earn at home.

Mexico, for all its charms, has a strange problem. By its
constitution, each president is allowed only one six-year term. Which
has resulted in there not being a president until now who has not
been a millionaire on leaving.

Which is why the country - until 2000 - was ruled by one party
(somewhat like our dear Liberals) for 70 consecutive years, the
strangely-named PRI, as in "People's Revolutionary."

New President Calderon, slightly to the Left, was elected very
narrowly. And now the police are shooting the police. Good luck, amigo.