MEXICO PAYS DEAR IN DRUG WAR

MEXICO CITY -- On the day I arrived here, as part of a group seeking
greater protection for journalists and punishment for their killers,
an editor in the provinces found a message outside his newspaper.

"You are next," said the note. It was attached to a severed human head.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Mexico has become
the most dangerous country in the hemisphere for journalists -- worse
even than Colombia. The biggest reason is the drug trade, which
passes through Mexico on its way to the United States. The gangs who
control the business are ready to kill anybody who gets in the way.
The violence recalls the gangland warfare in the United States during
the days of Prohibition, except American mobsters typically
considered journalists off-limits.

By CPJ's count, 21 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2000,
and another seven have gone missing during the last three years. In
Tijuana, an editor was shot to death through the driver's window of
his car, with his 11-year-old son and his 9-year-old daughter in the
back seat. Four years later, no one has been charged in the murder.

To their credit, the Mexican authorities received our delegation at
the highest levels and seemed to share our concerns. A meeting Monday
included the president, the foreign minister, the interior minister
and the attorney general. The president promised to push new laws
that would give federal authorities power to prosecute crimes against
journalists, typically left now to the states.

Still, President Felipe Calderon emphasized that crimes against
journalists are only one front in a broader war between the drug
syndicates and a society struggling to enforce its laws. As dangerous
as it is to be a reporter in Mexico, it is even more risky to be a
police officer. More than 300 have been murdered, the president said.
One of the country's highest-ranking police officials was
assassinated inside his own home.

"We have paid a very high price" in the drug war, Calderon told our
group. "The greatest threat to freedom of expression is the same
threat for the general population of Mexico -- organized crime."

While Americans worry about drugs and migrants crossing north into
the United States, the Mexican officials, including senior federal
prosecutors, complained to our group about the "river of weapons"
flowing in the other direction.

The drug cartels are shopping in the United States for firepower,
including assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and even antitank
missiles, said Calderon, often leaving Mexican police overmatched. If
the United States wants to stem the drug trade, the Mexicans
suggested, it could help turn down the trade in armaments.

From the relative safety of Tampa Bay, violence and anarchy in
Mexico can seem quite distant, with the courage of some martyred
journalists and police officers to be admired from afar. Except for this:

On the same day the Mexican editor found a human head outside his
newspaper, a man in Tampa shot his estranged wife and two of her
friends to death, and in St. Petersburg, a police officer fatally
shot a 17-year-old boy who may have carried a pistol to a high school
graduation party.

It would be noble for Americans to care about two Mexican children
who will carry the memory of their father's assassination, and to
calculate how their country's appetite for drugs and guns contributed
to his murder.

But we need not look so far to find the warning signs of what happens
when order starts to unravel, and when violence and weapons become
ordinary facts of life.