IN PRAISE OF MEXICO'S WAR ON DRUGS

Complacency and corruption are the real enemies.

On a recent trip to Mexico, I asked a family friend -- a professor at
the National University -- whether she thought the government was
collapsing under the weight of the drug war, which has claimed close
to 9,000 lives in the past two years, turned border cities into no-go
zones and elicited comparisons between Mexico and Pakistan.
"Collapsing?" she said. "It's finally picking itself up."

Her point: Mexico's "drug problem" is of very long standing. The rest
of the world is only noticing it now because President Felipe Calderon
has decided to break with his predecessors' policy of malign neglect
of, if not actual complicity in, the drug trade.

The Wall Street Journal has been writing about drug trafficking in
Mexico for decades. In 1967, an intrepid young reporter named Peter
Kann -- later CEO of Dow Jones -- hoofed his way through the high
sierra of Sinaloa, on the trail of poppy growers and heroin smugglers.
The story he filed then could just as easily have run 40 years later:
"In cases where the big traffickers operate with [Mexican] political
protection," he wrote, "U.S. agents content themselves with breeding
hostility between rival traffickers. 'We'll put the heat on one dealer
and then let the word out that his competition is feeding us
information about him. It can stir up a little violence,' says one
smiling agent." Now fast forward to 1985. In February of that year a
DEA agent named Enrique "Kiki" Camarena was abducted outside the U.S.
consulate in Guadalajara, horrifically tortured and murdered. His
kidnapper was marijuana kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero, who was able to
flee Mexico to Costa Rica with the help of officers in Mexico's
version of the FBI.

Anyone who lived in Mexico in the 1980s, as I did, could just as
easily name other drug lords and the politicians who protected and
profited from them. It's an old story. At bottom, the problem isn't
the drug cartels per se. Much less is it -- and here I can sense the
collective blood pressure of the Cato Institute rising -- America's
drug laws.

The problem is Mexico's record of corrupt, weak and incompetent governance,
which has created the environment in which the cartels have hitherto
operated with impunity. The same might be said about other countries in
Latin America: These states did not become basket cases on account of the
drug trade. It is the fact that they were basket cases to begin with that
allowed the drug trade to flourish.

In a recent op-ed in this newspaper, former presidents of Mexico,
Brazil and Colombia called the war on drugs a failure and warned that
the "alarming power of the drug cartels is leading to a
criminalization of politics and a politicization of crime." They also
called for the decriminalization of cannabis and greater emphasis on
education and treatment programs. A beguiling argument, wrong on every
point. Huge sums already go to drug education and treatment.
Decriminalizing pot would do nothing to stem the violence from the
illegal traffic of hard drugs. (Decriminalizing hard drugs would also
send addiction rates skyrocketing, as the British experience of the
1970s shows, with criminal consequences of its own.) As for the
argument about the "criminalization of politics," that story is as old
as Latin America itself.

All this aside, the plain political fact is that drug legalization in
the U.S. is not going to happen as long as a powerful moral and social
consensus opposes it. To make the case for it now while Mexico bleeds
is an exercise in fecklessness. What Mexico urgently needs are
stronger institutions of state, beginning with its army but also
including the judiciary and the police. In 2007, the Bush
administration agreed to the Merida Initiative (derisively called
"Plan Mexico" by its critics, who seem not to have noticed that "Plan
Colombia" actually helped Colombia) with the governments of Mexico and
Central America. The administration offered to spend about $1.5
billion over three years on counternarcotics efforts. So far only
about $300 million has actually been released.

To put the numbers in context, an estimated $15 billion flows annually
into the coffers of Mexican drug cartels. The Calderon government has
vastly increased military and police budgets, but remains vastly
outspent by the cartels. Clearly more needs to be done, and if the
Obama administration had its foreign priorities straight, the $300
million it now plans to spend to relieve Hamas of its obligations in
Gaza would go to our Mexican partners instead. Still, Mexico's
achievements have not been negligible. The government has managed to
spark power struggles within and among cartels, and the vast majority
of Mexico's murder victims are themselves involved in the drug trade.
More important, Mr. Calderon has sent the signal that his government
will not repeat the patterns of complacency and collusion that
typified Mexico for decades. Whatever else might be said about his
government, it's a serious one.

This does not mean Mr. Calderon will win this war. But for those of us
who know Mexico well, it is an astonishing turn, deserving neither of
pity nor sagacious snickering, but of respect.