THE LONG WAR OF GENARO GARCIA LUNA

When Genaro Garcia Luna, Mexico's top police official, arrived in
Tijuana in January, the city was in the middle of a storm of violence
that he found, as he put it to me with clipped understatement soon
after his visit, "surprising." First, three local police officers were
murdered in a single night, apparently in retaliation for a bust that
a drug-cartel boss warned them not to carry out. A few days later,
federal police officers tried to storm a trafficker safe house in a
quiet Tijuana neighborhood and ended up in a shootout.

Five gunmen held off dozens of police officers and soldiers for more
than three hours.

By the time the police made it inside the house, six kidnap victims
from a rival cartel being held there had been executed. The
traffickers had skinned off some of the victims' faces to conceal
their identities.

The attacks on the police officers were particularly worrying for
Garcia Luna, who as secretary of public security is one of the
officials in charge of implementing President Felipe Calderon's
decision to aggressively wage war on drug trafficking. Just before
Garcia Luna's visit to Tijuana, a police officer's wife and
12-year-old daughter were murdered in their home there, in violation
of a longstanding code of combat that is supposed to safeguard the
families of cops and traffickers alike.

In a further gesture of defiance, cartel assassins were issuing death
threats over the police force's own radio frequency, and the cartel
seemed to be getting inside information about police operations. The
gunmen in the Tijuana shootout had a cache of automatic weapons,
including AK-47's, the traditional weapon of choice for the cartels.

During the shootout, the police, unsure of their ability to control
the crossfire, evacuated hundreds of children from an adjacent
preschool. "People are saying, 'There are children fleeing here, like
it's Iraq,' " Garcia Luna told me later.

What was "surprising" to him, however, was not the firepower or
brutality of the traffickers; the surprising thing was that in
Tijuana, the government was supposed to be winning.

Over the previous few years, the city's dominant drug cartel, known as
the Arellano Felix cartel, after the family that runs it, had been, as
many of Garcia Luna's top aides told me, practically dismantled. One
of the Arellano Felix brothers was shot, another arrested by Mexican
special forces and a third seized by American agents as he fished in
the Pacific from a boat called the Dock Holiday. U.S. and Mexican
authorities shut down several "narcotunnels," elaborately engineered
smuggling passages that run as deep as 100 feet below the fence that
separates Tijuana from the United States. Stash after stash of
cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana was seized in town or
intercepted at the border.

But by the measure that matters most to the average citizen --
security -- the situation was as bad or worse than ever. Even as the
Mexican government was sending fleets of security officers to Tijuana,
there were at least 15 drug-related killings there the week of Garcia
Luna's visit.

This pattern has become common in Mexico. Since the end of 2006, the
Calderon government has sent more than 25,000 soldiers and federal
police on high-powered anti-drug "operations" to combat drug cartels.
It has initiated sweeping plans for judicial and police reform.

It has extradited several top cartel figures to the United States,
earning praise and a package of anti-drug aid from the U.S.
government. Yet this year is on pace to be the bloodiest on record for
Mexico's drug war, surpassing by almost 50 percent last year's toll of
more than 2,500 deaths.

Soon after the Tijuana shootout, the police got a tip about another
building nearby -- a plain-looking house with pale yellow walls and a
basketball hoop outside.

They raided it and found an underground chamber that they called an
"assassin training school." A policeman in a black ski mask gave me a
tour, guiding me down a wooden ladder hidden beneath a fake bathroom
sink. It went down into a long room with a low ceiling and lined with
thick black insulation. There was heavy equipment for outfitting and
repairing guns, and an estimated 30,000 rounds of ammunition were
neatly organized by caliber on gray plastic shelves.

Used shooting targets were pinned up to metal cans filled with scraps
of tire, and hundreds of shells littered the floor. "It is incredible,
facing these weapons," Garcia Luna told me later, shaking his head.
"It is truly astonishing, in terms of quantity, in terms of caliber.

Before, the most powerful weapon we would find was the cuerno de
chivo" -- the goat's horn, Mexican slang for an AK-47. "Now we're
finding grenades, rockets."

Since taking over as Mexico's top cop at the end of 2006, Garcia Luna
has repeatedly said the situation with the drug cartels would get
worse before it got better.

But when I spoke to him after his visit to Tijuana, even he seemed
startled at just how bad the violence had become -- especially since
the narcos had started turning their weapons on the state instead of
on one another.

One of Garcia's Luna's top lieutenants, the federal police chief Edgar
Millan Gomez, told me in March, "We are seeing a response to our
operations: more attacks on police." A month and a half later he, too,
was dead.

A few weeks after the Tijuana bust, I went with Garcia Luna to a
meeting of state commanders and some local police chiefs outside
Acapulco. The city has suffered its own bouts of drug violence in
recent years.

It is a major entry and distribution point for Colombian cocaine, and
for much of last year two rival cartels were fighting for the turf.
Acapulco has became famous for beheadings. In one notorious case, the
heads of two police officers were deposited in front of a government
building, along with a hand-lettered sign that read, "So that you
learn some respect." We traveled to the site of the meeting, an
upscale beachfront hotel filled with American tourists, under the
guard of gunmen in armored black S.U.V.'s.

Although he was just 38 when Calderon tapped him for his current job,
Garcia Luna had already spent almost 20 years in the security
services, much of it monitoring organized crime and drug trafficking.
By his late 20s, he was considered something of a wunderkind. Trained
as an engineer, he was savvy about and comfortable with new technology
at a time when those skills were becoming valued in security circles,
and he rose quickly through the ranks.

In the late '90s, as Mexico began to emerge from 70 years of one-party
rule, Garcia Luna became a central player in efforts to reform the
police. He helped found a new "preventive" police charged with keeping
order throughout the country, then headed up the new Federal
Investigation Agency, or AFI. Both these organizations are now
functionally under his command, and if he has his way they will become
an integrated federal police force in the coming years.

Raul Benitez Manaut, a security analyst at the National Autonomous
University of Mexico, calls Garcia Luna's task "the hardest job in the
country." For now, in carrying out many of the biggest operations
against the cartels, the government has relied on the Mexican
military. But militarization carries risks.

The military worries about increasing corruption and a growing number
of soldiers deserting their units to join the traffickers; others have
warned that militarization will lead to major human rights violations.
Garcia Luna recently announced that the military should be heading
back to the barracks, and a new and improved police -- better-armed,
better-trained, less corrupt -- should begin fighting on its own by
the end of this year. Before that can happen, though, he will have to
build a kind of cohesive and effective federal police force that
Mexico has never had.

At the meeting in Acapulco, the police chiefs, tough-looking men with
mustaches and wearing guayabera shirts, were waiting for Garcia Luna,
their boss, in a conference room. With his square jaw, squat build and
crew cut, Garcia Luna cultivates the image of a cop in a world of
politicians, a doer in a world of talkers, and after a cursory welcome
he quickly moved to the matter at hand. He wanted to discuss, he said,
"combating corruption through the systematic purging of the police
corps." That would mean "cleaning up" the forces controlled by some of
the men in the room -- with their help if possible, "by force if necessary."

Local police forces -- which make up the vast majority of police in
Mexico -- are the "Achilles' heel of Mexican security," as Jorge
Chabat, a security expert close to the government, puts it. In much of
the country the police are popularly viewed as abusive, incompetent
and corrupt -- a perception not helped by periodic scandals, like the
recent appearance of videos showing Mexican police officers being
trained in torture methods.

In some of the main trafficker strongholds, the police are the
protectors of the cartels; U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
officers on the ground refuse to even interact with local police
departments for fear that doing so will put them at risk. David
Zavala, a federal police commander running Garcia Luna's operation in
the border city of Juarez, told me: "When we arrived, we first had to
get the municipal police out of the way. A lot of them are involved in
trafficking. Sometimes they'll tell us, 'There's nothing over there.'
That's the first place we look."

The system of local law enforcement in Mexico has been "abandoned,"
Garcia Luna told me. "There is no strategy.

Wages are very low. There is no trust." Corruption among police
officers, he went on, "is part of their everyday life." Garcia Luna
has resorted to a variety of measures to bring the nation's police in
line, and he was explaining them to the police chiefs in Acapulco. To
get their share of the $300 million the government has for improving
local law enforcement, he said, the local departments will have to
start working with a new national crime and intelligence system and
subject their officers to a regimen of "trust tests" -- polygraph
exams, financial audits, psychological evaluations. Until then, as
many of the chiefs knew from experience, Garcia Luna would not
hesitate to use more extreme measures, including forcibly disarming
suspect officers.

After the meeting, I joined Garcia Luna as he went to the hotel bar to
have a beer with a police commander.

Garcia Luna said he thought the meeting had gone well, but he seemed
more interested in talking about bomb design.

The week before, a homemade explosive device had gone off in the
center of Mexico City, killing the man carrying it and wounding a
woman who was with him. The word was that the bomb was intended for a
police official's car as retribution for a series of strikes against
the so-called Sinaloa cartel -- signaling, many feared, a new phase in
the drug war. Mexican security experts were talking about
"Colombianization" or "the Pablo Escobar effect" -- the idea being
that, as with Escobar in Colombia in the late '80s and early '90s, the
cartels were responding to the crackdown with a no-holds-barred
assault on the state. "Now, in 2008, we are reaching terrorist
violence," Samuel Gonzalez Ruiz, a former head of the Mexican attorney
general's organized-crime unit, told me the day after the explosion.
"It is an escalation in their fight against the authorities."

But escalation was not the cartel's only tactic.

Reports were filtering out of Tijuana that, in the wake of the
shootout there, representatives of the Arellano Felix cartel had
offered police and military officials a pact: the cartel would agree
to control violence if the authorities would agree to let the cartels
do business.

The offer leaked to the press, prompting speculation about whether the
government might negotiate.

The mere suggestion of a negotiation made Garcia Luna angry. "Look,
I'll tell you with all forcefulness, we are not going to make a pact
with anyone," he said. "We are obligated to confront crime.

That is our job, that is our duty, and we will not consider a pact."
And with that, he changed the subject.

Until quite recently, however, pacts between the government and the
cartels, spoken or unspoken, were the norm. For most of the 20th
century, Mexico was ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
The P.R.I. was authoritarian and corrupt, but these traits offered
certain advantages when dealing with the drug trade.

Political power was centralized and tightly controlled. For a cartel,
buying off a key figure in the P.R.I. was enough to guarantee
dominance on a patch of territory.

In exchange, the cartel had to keep the killing at a tolerable level
and to stay off other cartels' turf. Having accepted the drug trade's
existence, the government could act as an arbiter and as a check on
violence.

These arrangements were what Garcia Luna refers to as "the historical
laws of corruption" -- and they are precisely what he sees it as his
task to break.

"In some cases," Jeffrey Davidow, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico in the
final years of the P.R.I., told me, "there was absolute corruption, in
the sense that the cartels would go to the governor or a mayor and
say, 'Here's the money, don't bother us.' In other cases, and this
might have been more common, the cartels would say, 'Look, we're going
to do business here -- don't bother us, and we won't bother you.' It
was a matter of reaching accommodation. There were reports that if the
cartel had to kill anyone, they would take that person across state
lines and kill them in the neighboring state."

In the latter half of the '90s, Mexico's one-party political system
started to open up, and in the 2000 presidential election, the P.R.I.
lost power to Vicente Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive running under
the banner of the National Action Party. The transition to democracy
was a moment of great hope for Mexico. But it also undermined the
system of de facto regulation of the drug trade. "What happened,"
explains Luis Astorga, a Mexican scholar who studies the history of
drug trafficking, "is that the state ceased being the referee of
disputes and an apparatus that had the capacity to control, contain
and simultaneously protect these groups.

If there is no referee, the cartels will have to resolve disputes
themselves, and drug traffickers don't do this by having meetings."

Garcia Luna became a key player in Mexico's antidrug efforts while
this transition was taking place. "When we went in, we staked
everything on taking on the heads of the criminal structure, going
after the bosses," he told me. The government has captured or killed
some of the top figures in the Mexican cartels -- several of the
Arellano Felix brothers of Tijuana, Alfredo Beltran Leyva of Sinaloa
and Osiel Cardenas Guillen of the Gulf cartel, which dominates the
border towns abutting southeastern Texas. "The idea," Garcia Luna
said, "was that by taking off the head, the body would stop
functioning." Instead, he noted ruefully, "the assassins took control."

Rather than destroying the cartels, the government's high-level
strikes transformed the cartels from hierarchical organizations with
commanding figures at the top to unruly mobs of men vying for power.
The cartel's hit men and hired muscle began shooting and slaughtering
their way into the upper ranks of the organizations. "The government
has gotten rid of some of the old bosses, but now we've got ourselves
new leaders who are less sophisticated and more violent," a top
Mexican intelligence official, who was not authorized to speak
publicly, told me.

There have also been changes in the drug trade itself.

As Mexico has grown more prosperous, domestic drug use -- driven in
part by cartel employees who are paid in product -- has grown
considerably. Trafficking patterns have shifted as well. As Colombian
cartels were weakened by a U.S.-backed government crackdown starting
in the 1990s, and Caribbean routes became riskier for traffickers,
Mexicans started taking over -- just as a Nafta-induced trade boom
made it easier than ever to get drugs across the border.

The Mexican cartels long ago replaced the Colombians as the dominant
players in the global cocaine trade. Now, according to U.S. government
figures, about 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States
enters by land from Mexico.

When I met Garcia Luna in Washington in January, soon after the
shootout in Tijuana made headlines in the United States, he was
carrying with him a manila envelope full of color photographs. The
photographs were grisly full-color shots of dead Mexican police and
narco gun caches -- a police officer bleeding on the ground; the
aftermath of the shootout; the underground firing range.

Garcia Luna thought of them as a sort of secret weapon of his
own.

Garcia Luna was in Washington to make the rounds of U.S. government
agencies and Congressional offices -- visiting those who would have to
approve and implement the Merida Initiative, a $1.4 billion package of
counternarcotics aid that the Bush administration proposed. (Congress
has since authorized $400 million worth of aid to Mexico for next
year, including equipment and technical support for Garcia Luna's
police.) Seeming out of his element in the government buildings and
think tanks -- unlike many powerful Mexicans, he does not speak much
English (all of my interviews with him were conducted in Spanish) --
Garcia Luna met with government officials and diplomats and gave a
stilted power-point presentation to policy experts. He seemed more
interested in the photographs he had brought, his way of making a
blunt point about a touchy aspect of U.S.-Mexican relations: the vast
majority of weapons in the cartel's arsenals (80 to 90 percent,
according to the Mexican government's figures) are purchased in the
United States, often at loosely regulated gun shows, and smuggled into
Mexico by the same networks that smuggle drugs the opposite direction.

Garcia Luna has a hard time concealing his anger about the fact that
U.S. laws make it difficult to do much about this "brutal flow" of
firepower. "How is it possible," he asked me, "that a person is
allowed to go buy a hundred cuernos de chivo" -- AK-47's -- "for
himself?" In the United States, he said, "there was a lot of
indifference."

In meetings with U.S. officials, Garcia Luna passed around the
photographs, with little fanfare or preface.

Davy Aguilera, the Mexico attache for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms, who was present for one of Garcia Luna's presentations,
said that the images of gun violence "made a real impression inside
the Beltway." Many U.S. officials have come to share Garcia Luna's
frustration. "You take the guns away and you'll win," a senior Senate
staff member who worked on the Merida Initiative (and who is not
authorized to talk publicly about legislation that came out of his
committee) said to me. "But if you can't deal with the issue of guns,
you're not going to see much progress.

They're finding unopened boxes of AK-47's."

Garcia Luna told me that "the most important thing is
co-responsibility" -- an acknowledgment that the United States owes
Mexico its support in a long and difficult war. The point of this
acknowledgment is not just symbolism.

The narcos, he explained, "terrorize the community to build their own
social base through intimidation, through fear, so that they can carry
out their criminal activities with impunity." U.S. support would help
bolster the message that the good guys will not back down. Projecting
toughness and resolve, as Garcia Luna sees it, may be the most
important weapon of all.

The cartels seem to understand this way of thinking, and they try to
send the opposite message: the bad guys will never back down, either.
In 2005, they started posting videos of gangland executions on
YouTube. It was, Garcia Luna and others have argued, a gimmick copied
directly from insurgents in Iraq. "It was truly brutal.

There was postproduction, editing, special effects," he pointed out.
"These were not just videos meant to show what had happened." They
were, rather, shots in the media war, meant to grab headlines and
persuade the Mexican people that resistance is futile.

It did not help the government's cause that some of the videos seemed
to show the involvement of the police in cartel executions --
including police officers operating under Garcia Luna's command.

Garcia Luna generally wins praise for acknowledging just how central
police corruption is to the drug trade.

He has ordered a substantive overhaul of the police, including new
educational requirements and higher salaries for incoming officers.

He has removed almost 300 federal police commanders, replacing them
with trusted officers trained at a new police academy.

U.S. counternarcotics officials tend to view the key people under
Garcia Luna's command as an honest core that can be trusted with
U.S.-acquired intelligence. That improved intelligence-sharing has led
to some high-profile successes in the past year: the seizure of more
than 23 tons of cocaine, the biggest bust ever; the arrest of a
legendary cartel figure known as the Queen of the Pacific; the
discovery of $207 million in supposedly methamphetamine-related cash
stashed in the walls of a Mexico City home. "The intel sharing has
been key in all of those," Steve Robertson, a D.E.A. special agent who
works on Mexico, told me.

Still, the sheer amount of money involved makes some police corruption
as well as other high-level corruption almost inevitable. U.S. and
Mexican observers alike are quick to hedge their praise of Garcia
Luna's efforts, often with a bit of history.

In 1997, Mexico's newly appointed drug czar, an army general named
Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was arrested for working with the Juarez cartel.

For months before that, he was celebrated as the tough, honest new
face of Mexican counternarcotics.

"In Tamaulipas, you never know who is with you and who is against
you." Edgar Millan, the federal police chief, made this pronouncement
as we drove through a scrubland of farms, factories, fast food and
truck traffic in the state, which lies just across the border from
South Texas. Conveniently for the cartels, Tamaulipas also has a major
port on the Gulf of Mexico. Cocaine comes to Mexico by sea, stashed in
cargo from South or Central America, and then is smuggled into the
United States in one of the millions of private vehicles or shipping
containers that cross every year. In a single day, thousands of cars
and trucks enter the United States from Tamaulipas alone. Enough
cocaine to supply American demand for a year, a market worth some $35
billion, might fill a dozen or so tractor-trailers.

Tamaulipas has been one of the bloodiest fronts in Mexico's war on
drugs for several years.

And as in Tijuana, this year started out on a bad note. "We had to
show the cartels that the Mexican state was not going to back off,"
Millan told me as we rode along the U.S. border in an armored pickup
truck.

We were in the middle of what is considered the stronghold of the
Zetas, a group of former Mexican special-forces operatives who formed
a paramilitary cell for the Tamaulipas-based Gulf cartel.

The Zetas had become the most feared force in Mexico. "For them, this
zone was untouchable," Millan said. "We practically couldn't come
here." Several years ago, Mexico captured the Gulf cartel's boss,
Osiel Cardenas, and proclaimed a major victory.

But that only left the Zetas to run the business on their own and made
the rival Sinaloa cartel think it might have an opportunity to move
into Tamaulipas. As a result, the Zetas were warring among themselves
for control while also trying to fend off Sinaloa operatives.

When we got to the small border town of Rio Bravo, Millan directed his
driver to go to a former cartel safe house, near where the police
engaged in a lengthy shootout with Zeta gunmen at the beginning of
this year. Millan pointed out locations where bodies had fallen and
grenades had landed.

He hardly thought it worth noting that the safe house is directly
across the street from the local police station. When I asked him
about it, he shrugged. "The power and money of the cartels allows them
to recruit police at every level," he said. "Local police forces have
the most contact, the most presence in the streets, so they are the
most infiltrated." Local taxi drivers also serve as a statewide
surveillance network for the cartels, Millan explained.

Despite the poor start to the year, by spring Garcia Luna was holding
up Tamaulipas as evidence of what his strategy could achieve.

Millan agreed that, after months of a heavy federal police and
military presence -- of checkpoints on the main highways, of targeted
raids on suspected cartel houses, of "neutralizing" corrupt local
police commanders -- things had improved. "We have retaken the area,"
Millan told me. We stopped at a police checkpoint, where officers
searched cars while half a dozen men with assault rifles looked on.
"It continues to be dangerous, it continues to be difficult," he said.
"But our commitment is clear.

We are going to win this war." He summoned the commander overseeing
the checkpoint, who explained how the police presence has affected the
behavior of the cartels. "Now they are operating with a lower
profile," he said. I asked him what that meant. "It doesn't mean they
are stopping their business," he responded. "They are always looking
for new strategies." The police have driven them off the main roads,
so "they are using the dirt roads in the fields" to continue
trafficking.

Later, I asked Garcia Luna if this was an acceptable definition of
success in the war on drugs: violence down, the police seemingly in
charge, the cartels operating less conspicuously and less violently.
He ducked the question but did not dispute the implication. "Given the
temptation," he said, "there are people who are always going to play
the game, whether by airplane or helicopter, by land, by sea, because
there is a real market. ... There is no product like it in the world."
(When I asked David Johnson, the assistant secretary of state for
International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, about the reason for
mounting drug violence in Mexico, he said, without prompting, "In
significant measure, it grows out of violent people taking advantage
of the continuing strong demand in the United States.") Garcia Luna
mentioned Colombia, invoking an analogy that Mexican and U.S.
officials generally resist.

Colombia has received billions of dollars in U.S. anti-drug aid under
Plan Colombia, and violence has fallen significantly in the past
several years. "Do you know how much the amount of drugs leaving
Colombia has gone down?" Garcia Luna asked me. "Check," he said with a
smile.

And indeed, by all evidence, there has been no significant decrease in
drug flows out of Colombia or in the availability of cocaine or heroin
in the United States -- and yet, Colombia is considered a success story.

In a recent interview with a member of the editorial board of The Wall
Street Journal, Mexico's attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora,
acknowledged that the objective "cannot be destroying narcotrafficking
or drug-related crime." "Trying to get rid of consumption and
trafficking," he said, "is impossible." Jorge Chabat explained to me:
"The strategy of the government is to turn the big cartels into lots
of small cartels.

If you have 50 small cartels instead of four big cartels, first you
have less international pressure, and second, you will have violence
in the short term, but in the long term you will have much less violence."

Achieving even that goal means changing the balance between the
government and the cartels -- and that may be a much bloodier task
than Garcia Luna and many Mexicans anticipate. The police have
uncovered plots against top law-enforcement officials in Mexico City
involving grenades and rocket launchers.

The attorney general's office recently released statistics showing
that under Calderon's government, almost 500 law-enforcement personnel
- -- some of them clean, some of them surely corrupt -- have been killed
in drug violence. One border police chief even sought asylum in the
United States. And in recent polls, Mexicans have expressed growing
doubt that the authorities are up to the fight: 56 percent say they
believe that the cartels are more powerful than the government, while
just 23 percent say they believe the government is more powerful than
the cartels. But Garcia Luna and his men contend that they will not
back down until the cartels have been broken.

As Millan told me in Tamaulipas, "They think we will step back, but on
the contrary, we will attack them harder."

A few weeks later, Millan was shot to death in an apartment in Mexico
City. A disgruntled former federal cop had reportedly sold information
about Millan's movements to the Sinaloa cartel.

Two other federal police officials close to Garcia Luna were also
killed around the same time; another senior officer and his bodyguard
were gunned down in June while eating lunch in Mexico City.

I asked Garcia Luna recently whether the fight was worth it, for him
personally and for Mexico. "This has been my life," he said,
suggesting that such a calculation was not possible for him: he will
fight because that is what he does. "I have been chosen to live this,"
he went on. "I have 20 years of it, and this position is the summit of
my career.

I feel a personal obligation." Garcia Luna argues that Mexico is in a
moment of violent transformation and that the only way through is to
keep pushing forward.

To Americans, he likes to bring up the example of the Mafia, to show
that this has nothing to do with Mexican incompetence or corruption.
"That is how it has been all over the world," he said. "Look at
Chicago, New York, Italy."

Garcia Luna had begun repeating the same phrase Millan used, which has
turned into something of a mantra -- ni un paso atras, "not a step
back." When I asked him about when violence would begin to decline, he
became frustrated. "Is it costly?" he said. "Yes, it is costly. You
have to face it." Over his shoulder was a small statue of Don Quixote,
which he keeps on a shelf behind his desk.