WITH CALDERON IN, A NEW WAR ON MEXICO'S MIGHTY DRUG CARTELS

Mexico's New President Is Tackling Some Of The Country's Toughest
Problems, But What Will It Take To Succeed Part 1 Of Three.

LAZARO CARDENAS, MEXICO - They leapt off the helicopters in seconds:
35 Mexican soldiers, touching down softly on the soil and fanning out
across a marijuana field.

As the men yanked out tidy rows of plants perched on a mountainside
in the western state of Michoacan, other military choppers circled
like hawks, ready to battle hiding snipers. Two hours later, the only
hint of a narcotrafficking base was a smoldering fire.

It's a scene familiar in Colombia, but new here in Mexico. This small
victory is part of President Felipe Calderon's massive military
effort to crack down on one of Mexico's most entrenched problems:
drug trafficking and organized crime. But as most of the helicopters
pulled away, the sight of soldiers pulling up remaining plants one by
one in this tiny field - one of 38 in this isolated region alone -
underscored the enormity of targeting Mexico's vast illicit drug
trade, which includes poppy fields, meth labs, and cash-flush
criminals who control entire communities.

An Escalating Scourge

The number of drug cartel-related murders topped 2,100 last year,
nearly double the average over the previous five years, and the
problem is spilling over the border with the US, which asserts that
90 percent of drugs coming from Latin America enter through Mexico.

The more than 17,000 federal troops and police Calderon has deployed
to the drug war's front lines so far are the stars of his mission to
show that he's in control of the escalating scourge. He's lavished
praise on soldiers - at one point even donning military fatigues to
thank them. But it's not Calderon's willingness to deploy so many
troops in a country wary of the military playing too prominent a
public role that will determine success, say analysts. Real results,
they say, depend on whether he can maintain a focus on the tougher,
less visible fight to simultaneously root out corruption in local
police forces and improve the court system.

"He is making decisions. But if you don't make reforms at all levels
at the same time, it won't work," says Jorge Chabat, a drugs expert
at Mexico City's Center for Economic Research and Teaching. "You can
be very efficient capturing one criminal, and then he goes free
because some judge was given some money. Or maybe you can capture the
criminal, the judiciary works well, and then a drug lord escapes from
a high security prison."

While the number of cartel-related murders across Mexico has
increased from about 1,000 in 2001 to more than 2,100 last year,
according to government figures, so, too, has the ferocity of the
killings. Human heads were propped on a fence outside a government
building in Acapulco. A mass grave was found. In the most gruesome
incident, gunmen in September stormed a nightclub and hurled five
heads onto a dance club in Uruapan, Michoacan.

Most of the bloodshed has been restricted to cartels, but police and
journalists have also been targeted, and feuds have migrated from
Mexico's northern border with the US to the entire Pacific corridor,
as the dominating Gulf and Sinaloa cartels - as well as their
subsidiaries - battle for billion-dollar routes and territory.

Time To Send In The Troops

Days after taking office Dec. 1, Calderon announced Operation
Michoacan by sending 7,000 military and federal officers into his
home state. "This is a very difficult battle,"said Army Gen. Manuel
Garcia Ruiz, who heads Operation Michoacan, at the airfield of the
Lazaro Cardenas Airport before a recent drug raid. "It will last as
long as it is necessary."

Last month, a small group of journalists was invited to witness the
raid in Michoacan, where choppers flew over mountains, cut with rocky
ravines snaking through sparsely populated valleys. The marijuana
field on which they landed was ringed with an irrigation system fed
by a rushing creek and thousands of yards of tubing. Footpaths led to
at least two other such fields and a recently abandoned shack, with
half-eaten tamales littering wooden benches.

Authorities in Operation Michoacan have arrested dozens of people,
including suspected drug lords. They have seized firearms,
bulletproof vests, antennas, and telephones, and destroyed more than
a thousand acres of marijuana fields. The goal, says General Garcia
Ruiz, is to disrupt both the cartels' economic means and modes of
communication.

This past weekend, Calderon was praised by US officials for taking
key steps toward that goal with his decision to extradite four major
drug traffickers - including the alleged head of the notorious Gulf
cartel, Osiel Cardenas - to the US. Mexican and US officials say this
will end Mr. Cardenas's ability to conduct turf wars against rivals
from his cell in a maximum-security prison near Mexico City.

Calderon has also opened new fronts in the border city of Tijuana and
the Pacific resort town of Acapulco. He sent 3,300 soldiers and
federal police to Tijuana and 7,600 troops and police to Acapulco this month.

The US has, thus far, voiced optimism. "We certainly are supporting
[Calderon's] moves to try to do something about the issues of drug
trafficking; not only does it affect his country but it affects the
US as well," says Christy McCampbell, the deputy assistant secretary
in the US State Department's Bureau for International Narcotics and
Law Enforcement Affairs.

In a besieged country, many Mexicans also support Calderon's
deployment of troops. "Calderon came in as a law-and-order president
and wants to show he is capable of reasserting state authority to
convince the Mexican people, as well as the US, that he is, in fact,
in charge," says Bruce Bagley, a drug-war specialist at the
University of Miami.

Calderon Breaks From The Past

Yet outgoing President Vicente Fox also declared the "mother of all
battles" against drug cartels, and made high-profile arrests of
suspected gang leaders. In 2005, he launched Secure Mexico, in which
federal police fanned into border cities and later hot spots like
Acapulco. But violence escalated under his watch.

Unlike Mr. Fox, who used the military only in support roles, Calderon
has made them the centerpiece of the effort - in part to control
organized crime that has tainted many local police forces. "There is
no question that the military is, relatively speaking, the most
professional institution when it comes to law-enforcement agencies,"
says Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, director of the Mexico Project at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Calderon has transferred 10,000 military personnel to the federal
police, and promised raises to the lowest paid members of the armed
forces. His plans are much larger in scope than Fox's, with a more
coordinated effort between institutions such as the attorney
general's office, the military, and the federal police, says Garcia Ruiz.

Other leaders have, in general, been loath to use the military, which
many attribute to the fallout from a 1968 student protest in
Tlatelolco, Mexico City, in which the Army was sent to quell dissent
and then fired on the crowd. "Mexican society is still in the midst
of transitioning from looking at the use of force as political
oppression versus seeing it as enforcement of the rule of law," says
Mr. Peschard-Sverdrup. "I think Calderon sees that ... using force
for the sake of enforcing the rule of law can actually strengthen
Mexican democracy."

Unprecedented Role

But many caution against embracing the military's new role. "This is
really unprecedented.... What distinguishes Mexico from other Latin
American countries is precisely the limited political role of the
military. We have never had a coup in Mexico because of this," says
John Ackerman, a legal expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Others are concerned that the highly regarded military will become
corrupt - just as the police force and local governments have - while
combating drug cartels. "I agree that the Army may be corrupted in
the fight against drug trafficking ... but what option do you have?"
says Chabat.

Tackling Corruption Is Key

Mr. Ackerman says that displays of force are less important than
combating the corruption that pervades so many levels of society. He
just worked on the Mexico evaluation for the 2006 Global Integrity
Report, which gave judicial accountability, law enforcement, and rule
of law the lowest rankings.

Calderon has promised to root out corruption, particularly among the
local police. In Tijuana, for example, the 2,300-strong local police
was made to relinquish their arms when the military moved in to
patrol streets and set up checkpoints.

"Without a doubt, one of his greatest challenges is corruption in the
government," says Ms. McCampbell. I think it's going to take time.
But the president is committed to making it happen."

One of the reforms Calderon has floated is to unite police forces
under one federal unit, says Ana Maria Salazar, a national security
expert in Mexico City who was the former deputy assistant secretary
of defense for drug enforcement policy and support in the Clinton
administration. Another reform being discussed, she says, is to give
police more responsibility in exercising investigative power.

Calderon has also voiced support of an overhaul to the legal and
penal systems, cleaning up legal codes and stiffening criminal
sentences, and moving toward oral trials to bring more transparency
to the judiciary, says Ackerman. Currently, almost all trials are
written, making them more secretive and vulnerable to corruption.

Jose Antonio Ortega, the head of the Citizen's Council for Public
Security and Criminal Justice in Mexico City, says he has faith that
Calderon will be more adept at tackling organized crime than Fox.
"President Fox did not recognize the magnitude of the problem," he
says. Instead, Mr. Ortega says, he touted arrests made but denied
that the problem had spiraled out of control. Calderon, on the other
hand, has told troops to prepare for a long fight.

The magnitude of the problem will also force Calderon to act. In
September, US Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza warned that violence
would hurt both business and tourism.

"[Calderon] understands that if he doesn't tackle security,
everything else becomes moot," says Andres Rozental, Mexico's former
deputy foreign minister from 1988-94.

Last week, Calderon told the Financial Times newspaper that the US
must do more to help Mexico achieve success. "The [US] is jointly
responsible for what is happening to us ... in that joint
responsibility the US government has a lot of work to do."

Michael Shifter, vice president of policy at the Inter-American
Dialogue, points out parallels between Calderon's efforts and those
of Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe, who has received more than $7
billion from the US in recent years for his country's war on drug
trafficking. "Uribe tapped into a real sentiment that was widely held
in Colombia, where insecurity had just become intolerable for
people," Mr. Shifter says. "Somebody had to take charge. Calderon
senses the same thing in Mexico in 2007."

Calderon has already started trumpeting security improvements. "Today
Mexico has more peace and certainty than at the beginning of my term,
and that fills me with satisfaction," he said recently at a press conference.

Long Fight Ahead

In Michoacan, where drug-related violence has disrupted residents'
lives, many accept a heavy military presence if their sense of safety
is returned. "When you leave your house anything could happen," says
Rosalba Sanchez, who lives in Patzcuaro, west of the state capital,
Morelia. She described a shootout last month in which a local store
owner was caught in the crossfire and died. "Hopefully with more
security [drug cartels] will be more afraid."

But Mr. Bagley from the University of Miami says that the scale of
the problem is among Calderon's biggest obstacles. "His problem
doesn't only lie in Michoacan. Nuevo Laredo is a slaughterhouse.
Tijuana, all across the northern tier, is suffering massive
drug-related violence," he says. "[The troop deployment] is a stopgap
measure ... that's unlikely to have enduring impact. Within a few
months I fully expect a renewal of the struggle."

Abraham Alvarez, a security officer at a department store in Morelia,
remains skeptical that this administration will prevail. "It's going
to take a long time; it's not going to be just solved by Calderon,"
he says. "The presidents that follow him will have to carry on the fight."