IMMIGRATION GRABS THE HEADLINES, BUT DRUG WAR RAGES ON

RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas - At a Circle K convenience store in this
desolate border town, where drugs and illicit earnings flow back and
forth almost freely, a man parks his black Ford pickup with tinted
windows and begins hawking a live zebra.

The animal, bleeding and abused, usually is found on the African
Serengeti. But in this poor town in one of the poorest counties in
the United States, the asking price is $6,000 cash - no questions asked.

Welcome to the U.S.-Mexico border, where just about anything can and
does happen. The zebra salesman is a grim reminder of the Wild West
atmosphere that prevails along much of the 2,000-mile border, where
drugs, aliens and money are smuggled 24-7.

Before the arrest earlier this week of Javier Arellano Felix, the
alleged leader of Mexico's ruthless Tijuana drug cartel, the national
debate over illegal immigrants crossing the border drove the drug war
off the front pages.

But make no mistake about it, America's drug war rages on. Here in
the Rio Grande Valley sector, cocaine seizures by Border Patrol
agents have more than doubled so far this fiscal year and now account
for more than half of all Border Patrol seizures along the southern border.

Halting the flow of illicit drugs here, much like the flow of illegal
immigrants, is nearly impossible. There are about 1,400 Border Patrol
agents assigned to cover an area that spans 18,584 square miles,
including along the Rio Grande river and the Gulf of Mexico. That's
about one agent for every 13.2 square miles.

On any given day, traffickers smuggle cocaine into and around border
towns such as Roma and Rio Grande City, where 60 percent of the
children live in poverty and only 6 percent of the population has
attended college.

Go west of McAllen and walk along the banks of the Rio Grande -
called the Rio Bravo, or Angry River, in Mexico - and evidence of
illicit activity abounds. On the Mexican side of the river, smugglers
and would-be undocumented workers loiter, waiting for night to fall.
Several have established camps in what appears to be the middle of nowhere.

On the U.S. side, discarded tires, clothes and assorted trash litter
the most remote riverbanks - the byproduct of drug and immigrant smuggling.

"We see a steady flow throughout the whole Rio Grande Valley sector,"
Jose Vicente Rodriguez, a Border Patrol agent and spokesman, said
during a tour of an inland highway checkpoint in Falfurrias.

The vast open spaces and proximity to major U.S. highways make South
Texas a point of preference for the powerful Mexican drug cartels.

"The infrastructure in both Mexico and the United States, mainly the
highway system, allows traffickers quick access for getting their
product through Mexico and into destination cities in the United
States," said Will Glaspy, the head of operations in South Texas for
the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. "Here we have highways, so
it's easy for drug loads to be hidden in with normal traffic on the
highways to get out of Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley."

Highway access is what drug cartels are fighting over a few hours to
the west in Laredo. Drug violence there is spilling over from Mexico
as the Gulf and Juarez cartels, and the Sinaloa cartel, run by
violent fugitive Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, battle for dominance of a
route that feeds into U.S. Interstate 35 and the American heartland.

In the Rio Grande Valley, such violence is rare. The Gulf cartel is
thought to dominate, and its competitors are willing to pay for
access to the collection of ranch state roads that feed into the
interstates that spread out from Houston to the East Coast.

"The Gulf cartel doesn't care if Chapo Guzman is moving a load of
drugs through here, as long as he pays," said a senior U.S.
law-enforcement official, who requested anonymity because of his
ongoing work in the drug war.

For years, Mexicans thought the drug trade was a U.S. problem that
needed to be tackled by quelling the demand of addicts and
recreational drug users.

Today, Mexico is experiencing its own drug plague. It's wrestling
with an alarming increase in drug use among its youth and an
explosion of violence deep in its interior. Existing and
up-and-coming drug gangs are gunning it out for control of entry
routes in the south and domestic distribution.

U.S. officials say Mexico's outgoing president, Vicente Fox, has done
more than any other leader in Mexican history to cooperate in the
drug war. After Dec. 1, the task falls to the country's apparent
president- elect, conservative Felipe Calderon, to reverse the
mounting drug violence and distribution.

"Relations with Mexico have never been better. We're getting
(intelligence) from Mexico that we've never gotten before," said the
law enforcement official, referring to federal-level cooperation.
"Six years ago, we would have gotten, 'You're going to do what with
Mexico?' We're hopeful that we'll be able to build on the progress
we've made with the Fox administration."

During Fox's six-year term, Benjamin Arellano Felix, the alleged
former leader of the Tijuana cartel, was arrested, as was Osiel
Cardenas, the leader of the Juarez cartel.

Calderon has acknowledged that Fox's success in disrupting the
cartels has come with a price: escalating violence within Mexico and
along both sides of the border. On the campaign trail, Calderon has
discussed the idea of a new super-agency to combat drug trafficking.

That sounds a bit like reinventing the wheel to some U.S. officials,
who prefer to see Calderon focus on legal revisions that would make
it easier to prosecute and extradite trafficking suspects.