MEXICO'S LATEST WAR ON DRUG GANGS IS OFF TO A RAPID START

MEXICO CITY -- If any image can sum up President Felipe Calderon's
first eight weeks in office, it would be the sight of him dressed in
military fatigues addressing troops he had sent into the state of
Michoacan to corral narcotics traffickers.

President Felipe Calderon visited a Mexican military base on Jan. 3.

It has been a hundred years since a Mexican president appeared in
military garb, and the choice seemed no accident to most people here.
Even if the fatigues seemed a poor fit for the bespectacled, bookish
head of state, the new president was sending a clear message when he
donned them on Jan. 3. He was declaring war on drug trafficking.

Since he took office on Dec. 1, Mr. Calderon has moved against the
drug cartels with a speed that has amazed officials in Mexico and the
United States alike. He has sent thousands of federal police officers
and soldiers to six states, flooding cities like Tijuana, Acapulco
and Morelia with heavily armed men.

He disarmed the notoriously corrupt Tijuana police. He broke a
longstanding political taboo and extradited 11 men accused of being
important drug dealers to the United States to keep them from
operating from prison.

"This is a permanent fight, in which, unfortunately, many have lost
their lives," he declared at a meeting of governors and top public
security officials, calling for a crusade to reclaim Mexico from drug
gangs. "We are fighting without rest so that these sacrifices will
not be in vain."

It is too early to tell how much of the offensive is a show intended
to persuade the public that Mr. Calderon is serious about attacking
the drug trade or whether it is the beginning of a sustained effort
that will have a lasting impact.

So far the campaign has had limited success. Military operations have
netted only a handful of reputed organized crime members among the
160 people detained. Gangland slayings and kidnappings have dipped
slightly where the federal police and military are patrolling, but
they continue to happen with unnerving regularity.

Officials in the United States from the president down have loudly
praised Mr. Calderon's courage, particularly for the extraditions,
and hope it is a trend. But they acknowledge that only a long-term
campaign can end the violence in Mexico and stop the flow of drugs.

"Nobody claims that these extraditions are the end," said John P.
Walters, the White House drug control policy director. "They are an
enormously powerful step to hopefully bring this violence to an end
more rapidly."

All this has helped Mr. Calderon politically at home and abroad. Yet
skeptics here say rooting out drug trafficking will take more than a
few weeks of roadblocks and highly visible federal patrols in
drug-plagued towns. The roots of the problem, they say, run deep in
Mexican society.

Dealers flush with ill-gotten cash have long corrupted local police
departments, in some cases hiring officers as enforcers and assassins
or paying them to keep silent about what they know.

Prison officials are also easy to seduce with money, as happened when
Joaquin Guzman, one of the most dangerous drug cartel leaders, walked
out of a high-security prison six years ago after bribing guards.

Perhaps more problematic, Mexican citizens generally distrust the
police, and fear of reporting crimes has grown in the last year as
drug gangs have resorted to beheadings to terrorize the public and
their enemies.

Along with the widespread fear comes a certain respect. Big-time
mobsters are treated like folk heroes in their home regions, their
stories told and retold in popular songs.

And some who fear that Mr. Calderon's actions might not succeed point
out that he is not the first to take on Mexico's organized crime. His
predecessor, Vicente Fox, started his own term with a pledge to
dismantle drug cartels and made significant strides. He created an
elite federal force that arrested dozens of kingpins, capos and
lieutenants in the Tijuana, Sinaloa and Gulf cartels.

Yet the arrests only seemed to worsen the situation, unleashing a
underworld war the likes of which Mexico had never seen. More than
2,000 people were killed in drug-related disputes last year alone,
including scores of police officers.

Some criminal justice experts -- even those who praise Mr. Calderon's
actions -- say the key to reducing the power of drug barons in the
long run is purging the local police, courts and city halls of
corrupt officials, as well as changing the judiciary to make judges
harder to bribe.

Some editorial writers and other skeptics have noted that although
the president disarmed the Tijuana police, he has done little to
clean up the corrupt police departments at the heart of the problem.

But other experts on the drug trade are optimistic that he will do
better than Mr. Fox. They note that Mr. Calderon has adopted
strategies that worked in Colombia in the 1990s: using the military
to take back regions where drug dealers control the local
authorities, extraditing top cartel members to the United States and
eradicating crops of marijuana and poppies.

Jorge Fernandez Melendez, who has written extensively about the drug
trade here, said some of these tactics had been tried piecemeal in
the past, but never in such a concerted way with so many resources.

"Of all the strategies used against narcotics trafficking in recent
years, this is the most on the mark and the one with the best chance
of concrete success," he said.