IN MEXICO DRUG WAR, SORTING GOOD GUYS FROM BAD

MEXICO CITY -- Many of the mug shots of drug traffickers that appear
in the Mexican press show surly looking roughnecks glaring menacingly
at the camera. An anticorruption investigation unveiled last week in
the Mexican capital, however, made it clear that not everybody
enmeshed in the narcotics trade looks the part.

There was a gray-haired, grandfatherly type who was pushing 70, as
well as an avuncular figure with a neatly coiffed goatee and
wire-rimmed spectacles perched upon his nose. Some of the five men
who found themselves on the front pages of newspapers on their way to
jail, wore suits, which made them look more like bureaucrats than bad guys.

Among the greatest challenges in Mexico's drug war is the fact that
the traffickers fit no type. Their ranks include men and women, the
young and the old. And they can work anywhere: in remote drug labs,
as part of roving assassination squads, even within the upper reaches
of the government.

It has long been known that drug gangs have infiltrated local police
forces. Now it is becoming ever more clear that the problem does not
stop there. The alarming reality is that many public servants in
Mexico are serving both the taxpayers and the traffickers.

The men in suits, it turns out, were both bureaucrats and bad guys,
officials say, corrupt employees high up in an elite unit of the
federal attorney general's office who were feeding secret information
to the feared Beltran Leyva cartel in exchange for suitcases full of cash.

Their arrest, and the firing of 35 other suspect law enforcement
officials, represents the most extensive corruption case that this
country, which knows corruption all too well, has ever seen. And it
raises a question that is on the lips of many Mexicans: how does one
know who is dirty and who is clean?

"I'm convinced that to stop the crime, we first have to get it out of
our own house," President Felipe Calderon, who has made fighting
trafficking a crucial part of his presidency, said in a speech on
Tuesday, after the arrests were announced.

That house is clearly dirty. There is ample evidence that Mexicans of
all walks of life are willing to join the drug gangs in exchange for
cash, including farmers who abandon traditional crops and turn to
growing marijuana and accountants who hide the narco-traffickers' profits.

There was sporadic evidence in the past that such corruption extended
into high-level government offices. An army general who commanded
Mexico's anti-drug unit was arrested and convicted in 1997 after the
discovery that he was working for a drug lord on the side. In 2005, a
spy working for a drug cartel was discovered working in the
president's office and accused of feeding traffickers information on
the movements of Vicente Fox, then the president.

But the abundance of law enforcement officials now believed to be on
the take has made Mr. Calderon's drug war all the more difficult to
execute. Traffickers often know beforehand when raids are going to
occur. Sometimes dealers plant their people on the teams that carry
out the raids to act as saboteurs.

The traffickers' networks are not foolproof. Mr. Calderon's
government did manage to capture Alfredo Beltran Leyva, a cartel
leader, in January even though the group was receiving inside
information. What appears to have happened, officials say, is that
the army carried out the raid without involving the attorney
general's office, inadvertently keeping the corrupt officials out of the loop.

The cartel's leaders, who operate out of Sinaloa State and have been
implicated in the killing of a top police commander in Mexico City,
were described in local press accounts as being furious that their
government moles had not informed them of the raid.

Still, the reach of the drug networks is so extensive that even
winning a court conviction against a kingpin is not always enough to
claim victory.

Many prison wardens and guards have shown themselves to be corrupt,
allowing prominent detainees not only to operate their crime networks
from their cells, but also to use their illicit drug proceeds to be
as comfortable as possible behind bars, paying for everything from
pizza to prostitutes. The cartel leaders sometimes even use their
money to escape. The most notorious case was in 2001, when Joaquin
Guzman Loera, the country's most wanted drug lord, managed to slip
out of a maximum security prison in a laundry cart.

The porous nature of Mexican penitentiaries has prompted Mr. Calderon
to increase the number of transfers of drug lords to the United
States prison system. The United States has already filed the
paperwork to extradite one of the officials accused last week of
corruption. The official, Miguel Colorado Gonzalez, 68, was a top
manager in the government organized-crime office known by the Spanish
acronym Siedo.

Mr. Calderon is not the first president to try to root out
corruption. President Ernesto Zedillo reorganized the nation's
federal police at least twice; each time traffickers quickly
infiltrated the force and bought off leading officials. His
successor, Mr. Fox, tried and failed to clean up law enforcement as well.

Mr. Calderon's efforts have been sustained enough that the
traffickers have begun a vicious counterattack; so far this year,
about 4,000 people -- including police officers, soldiers, criminals
and civilians -- have been killed in an extraordinary wave of
violence linked to organized crime.

The latest corruption scandal has prompted President Calderon's
attorney general to order a restructuring and purging of his office,
and specifically of Siedo, which was formed from another agency that
was shut down after being infiltrated by drug spies.

The government has ordered more lie detector tests for officials in
delicate posts, beefed-up background checks and better salaries for
underpaid police officers. But the amount of cash that the
traffickers throw around -- which Jorge Chabat, a security analyst,
calls "enough money to buy part of the state" -- makes government
salaries seem laughable. Clearly, the government cannot compete peso for peso.

In some cases, finding out who has strayed from the straight and
narrow should be a simple matter of following the money. Mr. Colorado
Gonzalez is reported to have bought four luxury vehicles in one year.
Expensive jewelry was found in his home. His bank account was bulging.

In Tuesday's speech, a clearly frustrated Mr. Calderon said that the
fight to clean up Mexico depended on citizens putting their country
first and respecting the law above all else. He suggested that the
small bribes so often demanded by the officer on the beat, and
accepted by the public as normal, for infractions real and imagined,
were not disconnected from the government official receiving millions
of dollars in drug profits.

"We need a stronger society, a society that lives the principle of
legality with conviction, that encourages, promotes, spreads and
educates its children with values," Mr. Calderon said. In other
words, there has to be a line people will not cross, even for a
suitcase full of cash.