FEAR RULES IN THE DEADLY BORDER TOWNS OF MEXICO

The top cop in this unhinged city across the border from Texas has
300 openings on a 600-member police force, and his fearful greeting
gave a big clue why.

"Please, please don't use my name or take a photograph," the interim
chief said.

One police chief was killed last year, a second quit in the spring
and no one else appears brave or foolhardy enough to work this side
of the law in Nuevo Laredo.

Mexican President Vicente Fox quietly withdrew the federal police
that he had dispatched with great fanfare last year to bring peace,
leaving the city virtually unprotected in a smuggling war that's
claimed 170 lives since January.

This isn't the only border city where law and order are on the ropes.

In Tijuana, the rate of kidnappings ranks among the world's worst,
and some state police officers have refused postings after the
killings of more than a dozen officers in paramilitary-style ambushes.

Organized crime is out of control, Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon said
this month.

As Mexico prepares for the inauguration of Felipe Calderon on Dec. 1,
the president-elect must take stock of the country's 2,000
drug-related slayings this year, residents and officials say.

"Calderon needs to apply the law or reform the law," said Nuevo
Laredo resident Ana de la Cruz, mother of two teenage daughters. "We
urgently need help."

The drug problem that bridges the United States and Mexico neither
starts nor ends in these two border cities.

But a healthy chunk of U.S.-bound dope lumbers past each day.

"The number of addicts is growing," said Adan Rosa Ramos, 24, a
recovering methamphetamine user who works at a rehabilitation house
in Nuevo Laredo. "There's a lot more drugs on the street."

The proximity of these cities to the United States is a blessing and
a curse. The Tijuana-San Diego frontier is the world's busiest border
crossing. At Nuevo Laredo, trucks and trains ferry more than 40
percent of the goods traded between the neighboring countries.

The two cities also account for the hemisphere's most lucrative
smuggling routes. The tons of cocaine, marijuana, heroin and
methamphetamine seized by authorities each year make up a fraction of
what barrels past -- in trucks, cars, planes and underground tunnels.

Here's the arithmetic, said Daniel Covarrubias, the director of
economic development in Nuevo Laredo: "The U.S. checks maybe 10
percent of the trucks that pass. Any more than that, and it slows
commerce. You run 10 trucks and take your chances."

Battle for control of the Nuevo Laredo corridor pits the Pacific
Coast Sinaloa cartel against the Gulf cartel, whose top gunmen
defected from an elite Mexican army task force.

Officials in Nuevo Laredo say about 200 people will be shot, burned
or garroted this year in the drug war. That would make up 10 percent
of the drug-related homicides in Mexico, though the city's 380,000
people account for about 0.4 percent of the nation's population.

With government all but ceding control of the border, civil society
has fallen into disarray or been cowed into silence. Newspapers in
Nuevo Laredo have stopped reporting drug killings under pressure from
advertisers, the government and drug dealers.

Residents take pains to dodge the menace of drug trafficking. Some
deny it exists.

"If you behave on the streets, you won't get into trouble,"
Tamaulipas Gov. Eugenio Hernandez Flores told potential investors
during a recent business forum in Nuevo Laredo.