MEXICAN LEADER VOWS TO PRESS FIGHT AGAINST CARTELS

MEXICO CITY -- Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Thursday defended
the deployment of the military in his fight against drug cartels,
vowing that the army would continue to patrol cities until the
country's weakened and often-corrupt police forces were retrained and
able to do the job themselves.

In a speech commemorating the founding of the Mexican army, Calderon
suggested that drug bosses had paid marchers who took to the streets
this week to protest the army's presence in a dozen cities, where
soldiers man roadblocks, search houses and make frequent arrests.

Calderon, who has sent more than 45,000 troops to fight the cartels,
said the military would remain on patrol until the government had
control of the most violent parts of the country and civil authorities
were fully able "to confront this evil." Only then, he said, "will the
army have completed its mission."

Turf battles involving the drug traffickers, who are fighting the
army, police and one another in order to secure billion-dollar
smuggling routes into the United States, took the lives of more than
6,000 people in Mexico last year. The pace of killing has continued in
2009, with more than 650 dead, most in the violent border cities of
Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana. In the past few days, a running gun battle
between soldiers and gunmen through the streets of the northern city
of Reynosa, captured live on television, left five people dead. In
Ciudad Juarez, the assistant chief of the city police department was
ambushed Tuesday and assassinated with three other officers.

For the Calderon administration, the stakes could not be higher. On
Wednesday, Economy Secretary Gerardo Ruiz Mateos said the
administration believed that the cartels had grown so powerful, and
their penetration into society so deep, that unless they were
confronted, "the next president of the republic would be a
narco-trafficker."

Speaking during a visit to Paris, Ruiz said that "this is a serious
problem, so serious that we had to deal with it, while the easiest
thing to do would have been to do nothing, to maintain the status quo."

Although the Mexican army has been used since World War II to search
out and destroy fields of marijuana in rural areas, Calderon is the
first president to deploy so many troops to major cities and to place
them in such a prominent law enforcement role.

"The extreme use of the military really does start with Calderon,"
said Roderic Ai Camp, an expert on the Mexican military and a
professor at Claremont McKenna College in California. "And their use
comes with some risk. The military as an institution in Mexico has a
high level of confidence among ordinary Mexicans. But when the
military comes into an area and the violence increases, which it has,
then that confidence goes down."

Human rights monitors and defense attorneys have reported an increase
in complaints about abuses by the military in its drug enforcement and
police work.

The protests against the military this week, which were generally
small by Mexican standards, began in Monterrey and spread to five
other cities.

The newspaper Reforma reported that the army had arrested a protester
in Monterrey who confessed that he and others had received 200 to 500
pesos each ($15 to $38) to shout and wave signs. Police said many of
the protesters were poor women and children.

"Those who see their criminal structure weakened have tried to provoke
the army's retreat," Calderon told soldiers at an army base in
Monterrey on Thursday. "As cowards, they have even used women and
children for their miserable goals."