DRUG CARTELS WINNING THE EVIL WAR

Analysts Estimate That As Many As Half of Police Officers Paid by Cartels

MEXICO CITY - President Felipe Calderon has staked his reputation on
wiping out Mexico's drug violence but his campaign is in trouble as
trafficking gangs murder ever more people, target police and openly
recruit hitmen.

Calderon's first move on taking power 18 months ago was to launch a
bold $7-billion army-led assault on powerful drug cartels, vowing to
wrest back control of violence-scarred northern border states.

His army busts have put a string of senior smugglers behind bars and
captured truckloads of cocaine and cash.

But the top drug lords are still free, and disrupting years-old
trafficking alliances and protection networks has sparked an
explosion in killings between rival gangs who dump hacked-off heads
and tortured bodies in public.

The bloodshed has dented Calderon's popularity and left him bogged
down in a vicious war with the odds of winning it stacked against him.

Calderon, 45, has defined success as reducing the violence, but drug
murders have instead soared to more than 4,000 since his offensive
began, and the turf wars intensified this year.

In brazen defiance of Calderon's pledge to gain the upper hand,
cartel hitmen are picking off police from grim hit lists and hanging
banner advertisements on highways offering fat wages for soldiers to
defect and join them.

"They're not scared of him," said Eduardo Valle, a veteran drug
expert who was a top advisor to Mexico's attorney-general in the
mid-1990s and now lives on the Mexico-U.S. border.

Although the army has failed to stop the violence, Calderon cannot
withdraw the troops without conceding defeat for a policy that the
quiet but tough leader himself set as a top priority.

"It's much easier to send the army out on the streets than bring them
back to barracks. He can go neither forward nor backward," Valle said.

Cartels typically surrender turf temporarily when the army moves in,
but experts say it doesn't hurt their underlying business because
they just switch to other smuggling channels.

Calderon is the latest in a string of presidents to try to tackle the
gangs that took root in the 1970s and eventually took over from
Colombian cartels as Latin America's dominant trafficking groups.

But he is the first to use the army on a massive scale, with some
25,000 soldiers and federal police deployed across the country.
Dramatic car chases, daylight gun battles and raids of safe houses
are all part of the military offensive.

Some Mexicans in smuggling hot spots protect drug barons who bolster
local economies and reward loyalty with lavish street parties, but as
police murders have leapt Calderon has urged Mexicans to stand
together to "confront this evil."

Yet the cartels run their multibillion-dollar businesses shrewdly
with intricate underground networks of contacts and huge arsenals of weapons.

The army raids have made some prominent captures, hurting the east
coast Gulf cartel and accelerating a split inside the Pacific coast
Sinaloa cartel, but the cartels seem able to quickly replace those
arrested or killed.

Border training camps provide a stream of new recruits from youths
who associate trafficking with glamour and wealth, and robust U.S.
and European demand for cocaine and other drugs keeps the illicit
rewards worth the risks for many.

While the army grapples to keep control, escalating violence has
killed more than 1,400 people this year alone, including some children.

Severed heads and trussed-up bodies have been dumped in public, often
with warning notes, as far from the border as Mexico City and the
Pacific beach resort of Acapulco.

Most victims are gang members and the violence has yet to scare off
foreign investors or tourists, although they are more careful about
where they go in Mexico. But 500 police have been slain over the 18
months and panic sown by hoax e-mails warning of public gun battles
shows Mexicans are frightened.

"They are accelerating the violence. We've never had this kind of
conflict in the country," said Samuel Gonzalez, the head of Mexico's
anti-organized crime unit in the late 1990s and now a professor at
Mexico's ITAM university.

"The cartels have an infinite capacity to recruit hitmen. The
violence will keep rising with one extra factor -- the state is
losing force all the time as it spends money on the army, while the
others are getting income from drugs," he said.

Attorney-General Eduardo Medina Mora and U.S. officials say the surge
in violence proves Calderon is squeezing the cartels, but critics say
they would regain any secured turf within days of troops leaving.

"They're basing this on territory, not structure. It's a kind of game
that encourages competition between cartels," said Valle. "When the
army leaves the bad guys will come back."

Insiders say the only way to weaken cartels is to attack the
organized crime and money-laundering cells that support them, cut off
their supply of smuggled U.S. weapons and weed out their protectors,
from traffic cops to judges.

As many as half of Mexico's police are estimated to be in the pay of
cartels. Drug lords also fund municipal and state political
campaigns, analysts say.

"Military solutions alone never work," said Gonzalez. "The government
needs to start fighting corruption, which is something we're not
seeing at all."