PRESIDENT-ELECT SAYS DRUG VIOLENCE HAS OVERWHELMED MEXICAN STATES

MEXICO CITY - Mexico's president-elect says murder and mayhem fueled by
drug smuggling have overwhelmed the governments of the nation's capital and
key states across the country.

Felipe Calderon said the wave of bloodshed knows no politics and is
ravaging state governments controlled by each of Mexico's three major
parties. He singled out the capital, Mexico city; the northern states of
Sinaloa and Tamaulipas; the southern state of Guerrero; and his home state
of Michoacan, as being especially hard-hit.

"It seems to me that drug violence has overwhelmed the governments of the
PAN, the PRI and the PRD," Calderon said in a radio interview.

The PAN is the ruling National Action Party, while the Institutional
Revolutionary Party, or PRI, controlled Mexico's presidency from 1929 until
losing to President Vicente Fox in 2000. The candidate Calderon barely beat
in the July 2 presidential election, leftist former Mexico City Mayor
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, hails from the PRD, or Democratic Revolution
Party.

To stop the killings, Calderon called for legislative and law-enforcement
efforts across party lines, saying "we should begin working in a very
coordinated way."

Fox spokesman Ruben Aguilar agreed with Calderon on Tuesday saying "we
coincide completely with the president-elect."

"We are continuing the fight against drug trafficking," he said during his
daily briefing with reporters at Los Pinos, the Mexican equivalent of the
White House. "The fight has not been overwhelmed, but there's still much to
do."

Of Calderon's comments he added, "I agree with them. I reaffirm them on
behalf of the federal government."

Calderon will take office Dec. 1, replacing the term-limited Fox.

The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City has long expressed concern about the
growing wave of violence along the northern border, where men and women,
and even police officers and investigators, are gunned down with automatic
weapons almost daily, and dozens of Americans have been kidnapped.

Narcotics investigators on both sides of the border attribute the spike in
killings to a territorial war between rival Mexican drug gangs battling for
control of lucrative smuggling corridors into the United States. One of the
places most caught in the crossfire is Nuevo Laredo, in Tamaulipas state,
across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas.

But U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza recently extended warning about violence to
include all of Mexico, saying Americans should use extreme caution when
traveling anywhere in the country.

"The bottom line is that we simply cannot allow drug traffickers to place
in jeopardy the lives of our citizens and the safety of our communities,"
Garza said in a statement Sept. 14.

Calderon said uncontrollable drug violence "is generating much more
diplomatic pressure" from Washington, adding that upcoming elections in the
U.S. Congress have made Mexico even more of a hot-button issues than usual.

Mexican drug violence is nothing new, but authorities say this year has
been especially bloody, with more than 1,500 people killed so far.

Nearly every major Mexican drug lord hails from the Pacific coast state of
Sinaloa, home to the beachfront resort of Mazatlan as well as rugged
mountains and isolated, fertile valleys that police and federal authorities
rarely patrol. For decades, Sinaloa has been a key operations hub for
smugglers moving Colombian cocaine, as well as farmers growing marijuana
and poppy, for use in heroin.