DRUG FIGHTER'S TIMING IS OFF

President Felipe Calderon Comes Out Swinging, but the U.S. Is Now in
Another Arena.

MEXICO CITY -- The U.S. war on drugs has seldom seen a more willing
recruit than Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

Since taking office last month, Calderon has sent thousands of
soldiers to half a dozen states, where they have pulled up pot plants
and opium poppies by the hectare and searched thousands of vehicles
at military roadblocks. He also has fast-tracked the extradition of
men reputed to be among the hemisphere's biggest kingpins.

But unfortunately for the Mexican leader, who put the
drug-trafficking battle at the top of his nation's domestic agenda,
the issue that once was a staple of U.S. political speeches has
fallen so far off the radar that for the first time in years it
didn't warrant a mention in President Bush's State of the Union address.

Drug-related violence, meanwhile, has gone from bad to gruesome in
Mexico, where traffickers have tossed hand grenades at enemies and
left severed heads as messages. More than 2,000 Mexicans died in such
carnage last year, according to media tallies.

Calderon has signaled that he'll ask for millions of dollars in U.S.
aid to continue his campaign and extend it nationwide.

"The Mexican people are demanding that their parks, their streets,
their schools, their neighborhoods be safe places for their families,
where their children can live and grow up in peace," Calderon told a
meeting of Mexico's governors last week.

The war against drug criminals, he added, "is a permanent fight."

But the U.S. war on drugs has been overshadowed by the war in Iraq,
and its urgency has been tempered by historically low crime rates
domestically and statistics that indicate declining drug use among
American teenagers. The Times reported last week that the U.S.
military had cut aerial surveillance over Pacific and Gulf Coast
smuggling routes by more than half and Navy patrols by a third since 2002.

"Mexico is sending a clear message to the U.S., saying, 'We're doing
everything we can, even more than you,' " Mexico historian Lorenzo
Meyer said. "The U.S. ambassador won't be able to moan about Mexico
not fighting crime."

Calderon must find a way to turn U.S. attention back to his
advantage, Meyer said.

Calderon has no such challenge at home, where his crackdown enjoys
broad support, despite the shaky legal ground of his military
roadblocks. Mexicans have the same protections against unwarranted
government searches as Americans do, said John M. Ackerman, a law
professor at the Institute for Legal Research at the National
Autonomous University of Mexico. "The whole thing is of questionable
constitutionality," he said.

Yet no lawmaker in the Mexican Congress, even among opposition
parties, has raised a legal challenge. The newspaper El Universal
published a poll last week showing a third of respondents, spread
equally among all three major parties, approved of Calderon's
actions; a third said it was too early to judge; and fewer than a
fifth were opposed.

But without more U.S. help, Mexico stands little chance of winning a
direct confrontation with sophisticated and brutal traffickers who
have established a near monopoly in the estimated $65-billion U.S.
drug market, analysts say.

Several Texas lawmakers are sponsoring a bill that would pay Mexico
$850 million in federal funds over five years for training police and
prosecutors. It would more than double the $69 million a year Mexico gets now.

"The stars are finally aligned with Calderon, who is willing to work
with the United States, who's extraditing criminals, and who's
willing to send troops into hot spots and take on organized crime,"
U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) said. "U.S. leaders have always
said Mexico needs to do more, and now we have a Mexican president doing more."

Under pressure from the United States, nearly all new Mexican
presidents over the last three decades have taken office with
promises to crack down on smugglers and the government corruption
that keeps them in business. But ties between Mexican officials and
drug lords -- some proven, others not -- have scandalized every
Mexican administration since the 1960s.

Calderon's campaign against Mexico's continuing drug violence, which
makes daily headlines here, has not gone unnoticed north of the border.

Bush telephoned Calderon on Wednesday to commend him. And the U.S.
government's drug czar, John P. Walters, said last week that "the
boldness of the Mexican response here obviously calls upon us to
continue, and to match that with our own boldness at home."

Despite the praise, the U.S. drug war "is nowhere on the political
agenda," said Mark Kleiman, a professor and director of UCLA's Drug
Policy Analysis Program. Kleiman argues that lack of political
attention to drug policy is a good thing. "Politicians are incapable
of dealing with it," he said.

Despite high-profile arrests and record annual seizures, he said, a
steady supply of cocaine, marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine has
been available in the U.S. since President Nixon famously declared
drugs to be America's "public enemy No. 1."

Common sense, Kleiman said, suggests that Mexican law enforcement
ought to attack "the side effects of trafficking" -- the violent
dealers and organizations. Calderon has the right idea, to put
pressure on competing drug cartels until they stop assassinating
police officers, bystanders and one another's members, Kleiman said.
"Make the bad guys keep their head down."