CRIME IS EVERYWHERE, PUNISHMENT ELUSIVE

TIJUANA - Inconsolable weeping punctures the early evening air. A man
sits on the sidewalk, his head lolling from side to side. "No," he
cries. A woman gently massages his back and tries to lead him away.
The man's brother lies dead on the concrete floor of a car-repair shop
next door, alongside two others, their bodies shredded by bullets.

Some hours earlier, at 5 p.m., four men in a white Nissan pulled up
outside the garage in this quiet neighbourhood of gated homes and
manicured trees. There was a burst of gunfire from AK-47 rifles, known
here as cuernos de chivo, or goat's horns. Then the killers sped away.

Armed police officers in dark balaclavas finish securing the crime
scene with yellow tape, keeping horrified neighbours at bay. "I was
born in Tijuana and I've never seen it this bad," says a 70-year-old,
white-haired man, shaking his head.

It is the sixth homicide so far that day. There will be another three
to come. Earlier, at 3 p.m., a man was executed, gangland-style, in a
drive-by shooting, as he steered his red Dodge pickup along a main
boulevard near the municipal garbage dump. His bloodied body slumped
over his steering wheel, his windshield shattered by more than 60
rounds of bullets, leaving the road covered in a spray of casings.

"It was a quiet day, actually," said Merzedes Quiroz, the city's
co-ordinator of forensic medical services. "We have had far worse."

Violence has reached an almost surreal level in this city bordering on
San Diego ground zero in Mexico's fierce war on drugs. Beheadings,
police officers shot in their beds, videotaped executions broadcast on
the Internet, heads found in buckets, bodies in vats of acid. Dr.
Quiroz has seen it all.

In November, the army moved in. And still the bodies keep coming.
During the last weekend of November, 37 people were killed, nine of
them decapitated, including three police officers with their badges
stuffed in their mouths. The homicides in Tijuana total 700 so far
this year, quadruple the level in 2006.

There has always been a baseline of narco-violence in Mexico. The
illicit activities of drug traffickers were tolerated, not only by
society, but by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ruled
Mexico for 70 years until 2000. A tacit agreement between the party
and the cartels kept the drug lords in business and made many
politicians rich.

But when President Felipe Calderon took office in December, 2006, he
launched an all-out offensive against the organized criminal
syndicates. The Harvard-educated lawyer vowed not only to dismantle
the country's five major drug cartels and root out corrupt police
officers, but also to change a culture of tolerance and persuade
Mexicans they all have a stake in fighting this war. He has dispatched
40,000 federal police and troops and launched 23 anti-drug operations,
even busting three narco-submarines loaded with cocaine along the
Pacific coast.

But instead of bringing peace to Mexico's border cities, Mr.
Calderon's campaign has so far only resulted in epidemic violence as
the cartels fight back with fury. Altogether, the latest government
figures show that 5,376 have been killed across Mexico in the past
year, a 117-per-cent increase from 2007.

Among the recent dead are the decapitated bodies of 12 men found
Sunday near Acapulco. The heads were found separately. Some of them
were identified as soldiers from a nearby military base. A sign nearby
read: "For every one of mine that you kill, I will kill 10."

The death rate from violence is higher in Mexico than in Iraq. Many of
the victims are linked to the cartels, as the government pressure has
triggered battles for survival between the groups.

The car-repair shop was a known drug-dealer's den. One of the men was
a target, the other two collateral damage, police say.

Tijuana resident Manuel de Jesus Ortiz Ampudia doesn't venture out at
night any more and checks in constantly with his wife and children by
phone. "I leave work early and look around to make I'm not being
followed," says the genial plastic surgeon, who recently organized a
security rally, after several doctors were kidnapped.

It is hard to reconcile these images of Mexico with the tourist images
of a sun-baked paradise that draws 1.2 million annual Canadian
visitors, a number that increases by 15 per cent a year. Canada's
partner in the North American free-trade agreement is also our fifth
most important export market - with $22.6-billion (U.S.) in annual
two-way trade. This winter there will be a record 200 flights a week
between Mexico and Canada. More than 50,000 Canadians - known as los
gringos buenos - have retired here.

To be sure, foreigners are not targeted by drug cartels and don't
typically visit border cities. More Canadians are killed every year in
the United States than in Mexico.

And yet, the drug war that threatens to destabilize one NAFTA partner,
threatens them all. Even with the U.S. wall along one of its borders,
violence, criminals and migrants continue to spill across. Mexicans
are applying to come to Canada as refugees in record numbers; some
claim their country can no longer protect them.

Mr. Calderon, from the centre-right National Action Party, knows he
can never eradicate the drug trade or eliminate the corruption of all
public officials. But, with cartels wreaking havoc in regional pockets
of the country and posing a threat to national security, he has no
choice but to fight back. If the rule of law in this country of 110
million isn't re-established, the country could become a narco-state.
Some fear parts of it already are.

Tijuana, a dusty, gaudy, mountainous city of three million, is defined
by the border it shares with San Diego. People and drugs flow north;
weapons flow south.

At the busiest border crossing in the world, SUVs, pickup trucks and
cars start lining up at 4 a.m. to avoid long delays, while migrants
cross on foot to jobs on the other side. The wall separating the two
countries is covered in crude white wooden crosses, commemorating all
those who died trying to go north.

The border story these days, however, isn't about migrants. It's about
drugs and guns. The United States is the biggest consumer market in
the world for cocaine, and 80 per cent of it flows through Mexico.

And U.S. authorities estimate that thousands of illicit weapons enter
Mexico. Most of the assault rifles, Colt AR-15 .223 calibre rifles,
grenade launchers, long-range sniper rifles and machine guns end up in
the hands of the cartels. Just Sunday, police in Tijuana announced
that three suspected cartel hit men had been arrested with six assault
rifles and 3,500 rounds of ammunition between them.

Mexican analysts often blame the country's traditional culture of
impunity on the Spanish conquistadores. It persists to this day in
many forms, from the narco-corridos - ballads glorifying gangsters -
to the legendary popularity of Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman, head of the
mighty Sinaloa cartel and the most-wanted drug dealer in Mexico.

There's even an unofficial patron saint of drug dealers, Jesus
Malverde. This Robin Hood figure, hanged as a bandit in 1909, has a
beer named after him and a shrine built in his honour in Culiacan,
capital of Sinaloa. "The bad guy with the heart of gold has been put
into song and poetry and literature here," notes a Western diplomat.
"But this is a moment when society is saying, 'Enough is enough.'"
Throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s, there was a certain
equilibrium among Mexico's most powerful cartels, as they carved up
the territory along the border and within the U.S. drug market.

But several factors led to a shift in this uneasy truce, including
NAFTA and the greater ease with which drugs flowed across the border.
With the demise of the Medellin and Cali cartels in Colombia, Mexico's
criminal groups grew in importance. Not only did the country transport
Colombia's cocaine to the U.S. market, it also began producing heroin,
methamphetamines and marijuana.

In 2000, when the governing PRI party was swept from office, the
symbiotic relationship between the cartels and the government began to
disintegrate. By 2005, there was a surge in violence as the fight for
the drug market in Michoacan, in southwest Mexico, intensified. The
Zetas, a group of former elite military soldiers-turned-enforcers for
the Gulf cartel, began employing mafia-style control over Nuevo
Laredo, in the north-east.

Then, on Dec. 11, 2006 - a day that is widely considered to be the
start of the current drug war - Mr. Calderon dispatched 6,500 federal
troops into Michoacan. He eradicated poppy and marijuana fields and
arrested 150 suspects. It was just the beginning.

"The government . lost control over portions of its country in a
crisis of governability similar to Afghanistan," writes George
Grayson, a politics professor, in his new book, Mexico's Struggle with
'Drugs and Thugs'. "Even military commanders now worry about losing
sovereignty to these merchants of death."

There is a staggering amount of money in the drug trade. In Mexico
alone, it's worth between $14-billion and $30-billion (U.S.) a year.
The higher number is about the size of Nova Scotia's economy. Every
year, about $10-billion in U.S. cash is deposited in Mexican banks, an
expert in money-laundering prevention told The Globe and Mail - yet
few money-laundering cases are ever prosecuted.

With this immense wealth at their finger tips, it's surprising the
cartels haven't managed to pay off all the country's police officers,
political figures and customs agents. As it is, the newspapers are
filled with headlines noting the latest public figures implicated in
the narcotics trade. Mexico's former drug czar and the head of
Interpol in Mexico were arrested last month, accused of leaking
secrets to drug cartels. The attorney-general's office itself recently
found that numerous officials in its organized-crime unit were
receiving cash payments to tip off the cartels about impending raids.

"The cartels need the politicians, the customs officers and the
financial structures in order that they can function as an
organization. This is the fight you don't see," says Victor Clark, an
anthropologist at San Diego State University and founder of the
Binational Center for Human Rights.

Several recent initiatives do reflect a new willingness to fight
impunity, said Monte Alejandro Rubido, head of the secretariat of Mr.
Calderon's powerful National System of Public Security. Among them:
judicial reforms; a police hotline similar to Crime Stoppers; a
national accord committing unions, business, civil society and the
government to strengthen Mexico's democracy. In his first 23 months in
office, Mr. Calderon has extradited 166 men and women to the United
States, Europe and Latin America, including several leaders of the
Arellano Felix syndicate.

"This is a long-term fight that won't be resolved overnight. The great
challenge for the Mexican state is to ensure that the next generation
won't become victims," Mr. Rubido says, sitting in his office in the
capital, flanked by several red phones and a Mexican flag.

On the front lines, however, people are running out of patience. On
the once bustling Avenida Revolucion in Tijuana, bars and restaurants
sit empty at 5 p.m. "For Rent" signs decorate shop windows. "It has
been so dead lately, we have had to close at night," says Oscar
Martinez, a waiter sitting idly at the entrance of Escape Club restaurant.

Americans used to cross the border every day in the thousands, eager
to shop for everything from cheap plastic surgery to Cuban cigars. But
with the violence, and the U.S. sub-prime lending crisis, tourism has
dried up. The only busy shops these days are the city's 1,400
farmacias, where methamphetamine manufacturers buy legal drugs for
their crystal meth production.

A Tijuana police source explains that since so many of the murder
victims are cartel members or low-level drug dealers, it is nearly
impossible to prosecute their killers. "The police either cannot or
won't make arrests," he says. An estimated one quarter of the city's
2,300 police officers leak information to the cartels. "It can be hard
to say no," he adds. "Sometimes it's either the gold coin, or the bullet."

Adds another security source: "In a lot of towns where the cartels
operate, the municipal police are the eyes and ears of the cartels.
It's hard for Canadians to understand this." Death threats come across
scratchy police radios regularly. About 450 police officers have been
killed in the past two years.

Still, some observers believe there have been important, if
incremental, improvements under Mr. Calderon, who still has a 57 per
cent approval rating. His government has focused on professionalizing
the federal police, replacing 284 commanders across the country with
leaders who have been trained at a new academy and closely vetted for
corruption. Thousands of polygraph, psychological and toxicology tests
have been conducted on officials.

And, in the most significant change of all, the crisis has triggered
new levels of co-operation between Mexico and the United States, as
both countries come to understand what is at stake. The United States
has pledged $400-million (U.S.) to Mexico in anti-narcotics assistance
under the Merida Initiative, money targeted for helicopters,
intelligence and communications support.

A new program aimed at disrupting the cross-border flow of weapons
from Texas, California and other states into Mexico has also been
launched that will see 100 U.S. agents focusing on interdiction of
weapons. This is an "unprecedented move," according to Carlo Dade,
head of the Ottawa-based Canadian Foundation for the Americas.

"The Americans have recognized that the United States is also part of
the problem," he said, "which won't solve the issue, but at least will
stanch what has been a huge, glaring, gaping wound."

Jorge Chabat, a national-security expert at Mexico City's Centro de
Investigacion y Docencia Economica, laughs when asked at what point
Mexico's security situation will improve. "I don't think we will see
any significant change before two years. I would say this is
optimistic. Most people think we'll never see a change, ever."