MEXICO'S BOILING POINT

Mexican Organized Crime Needs Organized Resistance

When the United States sneezes, Mexico gets sick. Conversely, a spike
in organized crime and kidnappings across our southern border provokes
a shiver of apprehension in the United States.

It is a chilling time in Mexico. For years, the rich could mostly
insulate themselves from the street crime and police corruption that
made the poor so powerless.

In the last few years, however, power struggles between
narco-traffickers, a wash of drug money used to bribe authorities and
a president bent on fighting corruption have coincided with soaring
levels of crime against the rich, as well.

The lawlessness, perhaps most corrosive in its invisible forms, has
also taken a horrifying public face. More than 500 police officers -
federal and local - have been killed since Mexico's President Felipe
Calderon unleashed an anti-crime initiative in 2006. The deputy police
chief in Playa del Carmen, a popular vacation destination for Texans,
was killed gangland style this week.

Kidnappings - often incredibly audacious and elaborate - also have
skyrocketed. More than 430 took place in 2007, an increase of 35
percent in one year.

The wave has only gotten worse: The Mexico City prosecutor's office
calculated a 76 percent rise in kidnappings in the first four months
of 2008, compared with the same time period last year.

These numbers almost certainly are too low, because families of many
victims don't report the crimes to police, whom they suspect of corruption.

This is not alarmist paranoia: This month, two police officers and one
civilian were taken into custody in the kidnap-murder of a young boy
from one of Mexico's wealthiest families.

The crime jolted a nation that seemed to have become numb. Fernando
Marti, 14, was riding to school in an armored car with his bodyguard
and driver when they encountered a road block manned by more than a
dozen armed men in the uniform of Mexican federal police.

The driver and bodyguard were discovered bound in a car trunk. The
driver was strangled; the bodyguard lived. Though the boy's family
hired a private investigator and paid ransom, there was no sign of him
until two weeks ago, when his corpse, too, was found in a car trunk.

Outraged, Mexicans have flooded the Internet, publications and
airwaves with protests. A businessman and former kidnap victim, a
friend of Marti family, took out full-page ads in Mexico's newspapers.
"Mexico doesn't deserve this," he wrote.

On Aug. 30th, organizers plan a massive anticrime rally. Though they
may seem only symbolic, in truth such protests have had more effect
than anything else in prodding the Mexican government to act against
crime.

Mexicans held similar, massive rallies in 1997 after more than 1,000
kidnappings occurred in one year, and again in 2004 after the
kidnap-murder of two boys in the same family.

Government officials responded with reforms, prosecuted corruption -
and kidnappings plummeted in the following years. But crimes began to
climb upward again.

It will take far more than periodic street protests to reduce Mexico's
uncontrollable security problems. The worst case scenario would be for
nongovernmental forces to take the job into their own hands. Only by
clamoring insistently, however, can Mexicans provoke the governmental
resolve, at all levels, to end corruption.

There is scant evidence that the organized crime manhandling Mexico
could wreak the same type of havoc in the United States. But many U.S.
executives do business in Mexico; millions of U.S. residents have
family there; many others vacation there.

A developing democracy that shed one-party rule less than a decade
ago, Mexico desperately needs security. Americans also have a strong
interest in it. The economic and social consequences of Mexico's crime
affect the whole region.

Mexico does indeed deserve better.