DRUG VIOLENCE IN BAJA RISES WITH DEMOCRACY

SOCIAL ISSUES: Many Are Losing Hope That The Government Can Improve Their
Lives

TIJUANA, Mexico- In 1989,the state of Baja California led Mexico into a new
era by voting out the corrupt political machine that had dominated its
politics for six decades.

But despite a decade of reform-minded opposition government, the waves of
drug-related crime that have coincided with more democratic politics are
eroding citizens' faith that any government can improve their lives.

"People don't believe anymore," said Norma Castro, a local homemaker,
describing low the lines at her neighborhood polling place have grown
shorter each year. "They figure, 'What's the point of voting if nothing is
going to change?'"

After years in which Mexicans held to the belief that drugs like cocaine
were a problem that merely passed through their country on their way to
places like Los Angeles and New York, the illicit trade here has begun to
profoundly affect people's lives.

Street crime, fed by an explosion of drug abuse, has risen exponentially.
With the police overwhelmed by drug-related killings and the courts awash in
traffickers' bribes, crimes almost unheard of not long ago - kidnappings,
bank robberies, drive-by shootings -- are commonplace.

For people without the means to hire lawyers or bribe judges, justice has
grown steadily more elusive as the system has buckled. Corrupt police
officers are fired by the score; illegal gun ownership and private security
businesses are booming just the same.

Polls that once showed citizens concerned with street lights and sewer lines
now register public safety far ahead of all other concerns. At the same
time, voter participation rates at record highs in the early 1990s have
quickly given way to some of the highest abstention levels in the country.

"The main source of support for the opposition was its promise to fight
crime and corruption, and people no longer believe in that," said Jose Luis
Perez Canchola, a leftist politician who was Baja California's first
independent human rights ombudsman. "There is a cost to the democracy in
that disillusionment. People don't think anyone can solve their problems."

It has been an article of reformist faith in Mexico that free political
choice would be the ultimate solution to corruption and injustice. With the
end of fraudulent elections and authoritarian rule, the thinking went,
leaders would be accountable to the voters rather than to the system of
patronage and payoffs built by the governing Institutional Revolutionary
Party.

But in Baja California, things have not gone according to that plan. While
public administration has generally improved under the National Action Party
- - known as the PAN, its Spanish acronym - violence, crime and corruption
have redrawn the political agenda.

PAN officials move "emergency" police trailers from one neighborhood to
another, cutting ribbons each time, but never leaving the units in place
long enough to make a difference.

Like the former Communists of Eastern Europe, some local leaders of the
Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, have all but embraced its
authoritarian past, hoping for a comeback by harking back to days when the
criminals with whom they colluded were at least under some control.

The impact of trafficking is disproportionate in Baja California. The state
has long been a conduit into the United States for cocaine, marijuana,
methamphetamine and heroin; it is also the base of the Arellano Felix
brothers' mafia, arguably the most violent Mexico has known.

The confluence of democratic politics and the drug trade, two of the
defining forces of contemporary Mexico, has also posed a conflict that bears
special attention as the country readies for the most competitive
presidential election of its modern history, which is to take place this
summer.

Like the politicians of Baja California and a few other crime-ravaged states
governed by the opposition, the major candidates in the presidential race
all cite the collapsing justice system as a crucial issue in the country's
future.

Under the PRI, drug mafias had generally secured the government's tolerance
by dealing in part with senior officials or their emissaries. After the PRI
was ousted from power, there were fewer government leaders willing to take
drug money, said former officials, so traffickers instead focused on key
positions throughout the criminal-justice apparatus: the state police
homicide squad (to cover up killings), and the car-theft unit (to supply
stolen cars).

In some cases, according to Mexican officials and two Mexican intelligence
reports, the Arellanos made long-term alliances with up-and-coming police
officials and politicians, helping move them into powerful posts.

The wider social impact of the drug trade has rarely been obvious in Baja
California. Cities like Tijuana, and Mexicali and Ensenada brim with new
businesses, and the worst of the fear generated by drug-related violence and
crime tends to concentrate in poor suburbs not seen by tourists.