MEXICAN OFFICER ACCUSED OF WORKING WITH CARTELS

MEXICO CITY -- Mexicans got new word Saturday of the narcotics mafias'
relentless efforts to infiltrate the government here when authorities
accused a midranking army officer in the elite presidential guard of
selling information about the whereabouts of President Felipe Calderon
to the drug lords.

The officer, Maj. Arturo Gonzalez Rodriguez, was taken into custody,
and a judge authorized his provisional detention for 40 days, giving
prosecutors time to collect evidence that he accepted thousands of
dollars from traffickers in exchange for reports on President
Calderon's movements, the federal attorney general's office said Saturday.

The communique announcing Major Gonzalez's arrest did not clarify the
motives the cartels might have had in buying the classified
information, and a government official interviewed about the arrest
late Saturday was not more specific. But Mexican newspapers quoted
officials as saying that Major Gonzalez was paid $100,000 for
information about the president's movements so that the traffickers,
who move in heavily armed convoys of S.U.V.'s, could avoid crossing
paths with his security detail.

Mr. Calderon, a technocrat from Mexico's center-right party who began
a six-year term in 2006, has used thousands of army troops and federal
police officers in an offensive aimed at curbing the traffickers'
increasing violence. There have been some 5,000 grisly killings this
year, and a wave of kidnappings for ransom. Many of the murders have
resulted from turf wars between rival cartels, but the drug lords have
also carried out terrorist attacks of a type little known here
previously, seemingly intended to defy the power of the Mexican state
head-on.

These attacks have included a grenade explosion on a crowd of
Independence Day revelers in the capital of Mr. Calderon's home state,
Michoacan, in September that killed eight people and wounded more than
100.

And on Dec. 21, traffickers kidnapped at least seven army recruits as
they left a garrison in the state of Guerrero for a Christmas leave.
After torturing and decapitating the unarmed soldiers, the killers
left their heads on public display with a message warning the military
to discontinue antidrug operations.

The terrifying proliferation of the drug war is spurring a strategic
debate. This month, Ruben Aguilar, the former spokesman for President
Calderon's predecessor, Vicente Fox, said publicly that the drug war
was unwinnable, offering to legalize some forms of drug commerce if
the cartels would end their attacks.

"Narcotics trafficking is not going to end," Mr. Aguilar said. "What
we can do is diminish the violence."

President Calderon said days later that he would never negotiate.
"Using the entire force of the state, we will confront and defeat the
enemies of Mexico," he said.

Major Gonzalez's detention was not the first of its kind here. In
2005, authorities detained a former travel coordinator for
then-President Fox, accusing the staff member of selling information
to traffickers. But a judge threw out the charges.