ON THE TRAIL OF THE TRAFFICKERS

Illegal Drugs Are Causing Havoc Across the World. Over Four Articles,
We Look at Attempts to Curb Supply and Cut Demand, Beginning in Mexico

IN RECENT months Mexicans have become inured to carefully
choreographed spectacles of horror.

Just before Christmas the severed heads of eight soldiers were found
dumped in plastic bags near a shopping centre in Chilpancingo, the
capital of the southern state of Guerrero. Last month another three
were found in an icebox near the border city of Ciudad Juarez.
Farther along the border near Tijuana police detained Santiago Meza,
nicknamed El Pozolero ("the soupmaker") who confessed to having
dissolved the bodies of more than 300 people in acid over the past
nine years on the orders of a local drug baron.

Mr Meza, revealing a proper sense of machismo, added primly that he
refused to accept the bodies of women or children.

"Organised crime is out of control," Felipe Calderon declared on
taking office as Mexico's president in December 2006. He launched
45,000 army troops against drug-trafficking gangs.

Since then, some 10,000 people have died in drug-related violence,
6,268 of them last year. Troops and police have fought pitched
battles against gangsters armed with rocket-launchers, grenades,
machineguns and armour-piercing sniper rifles, such as the Barrett
50. But perhaps their most effective weapon is corruption: in
November Noe Ramirez, the prosecutor in charge of the organised-crime
unit of the federal attorney-general's office, was charged with
taking bribes of $450,000 a month to pass information to the Sinaloa
drug mob. Six other officials from the unit face similar charges.

Officials insist that the violence and the arrests are signs that
they are winning.

But many disagree.

An assessment by the United States' Joint Forces Command, published
last month, concluded that the two countries most at risk of becoming
failed states were Pakistan and Mexico.

Mexico? The world's twelfth-largest economy, the United States'
second-biggest trading partner and an important oil supplier?

It has evolved in the past generation into a seemingly stable
democracy. Sure enough, the prognosis was angrily rejected by
Mexico's government. But it came on the heels of a paper circulated
by Barry McCaffrey, a retired general who was Bill Clinton's "drug
tsar". General McCaffrey painted a grim picture in which "the
dangerous and worsening problems in Mexico...fundamentally threaten
US national security." The stakes in Mexico were enormous, he
concluded: "We cannot afford to have a narco state as a neighbour."

If this was intended to press the panic button, it seemed to succeed.
On January 12th Barack Obama lunched for more than two hours with Mr
Calderon in his first meeting with a foreign head of government since
he was elected president of the United States. According to a Mexican
official present, Mr Calderon proposed a "strategic partnership" and
urged the setting up of a binational group of experts to explore
closer security co-operation. That would go beyond a three-year $1.4
billion programme of security aid for Mexico and Central America,
known as the Merida Initiative, which was approved (reluctantly) by
the United States Congress last year. Like it or not, in the cause of
the war on drugs the Obama administration looks likely to be drawn
into a sustained security commitment to a neighbour of the kind Mr
Clinton launched in Colombia.

In both Mexico and Colombia, though in different ways, the drug trade
has exploited weaknesses in the capacity of the state to impose the
rule of law. In Colombia, where an historically fragile state had
long failed to impose its authority over a vast territory of
difficult geography, drug income breathed new life into left-wing
guerrilla movements and begat right-wing paramilitary militias.

As the guerrillas threatened to overrun the army and the cities, Mr
Clinton launched Plan Colombia, under which the United States trained
and helped to equip the security forces at a cost of more than $6
billion since 2000.

In one respect--counter-insurgency--Plan Colombia has been a big
success. The United States added hardware and training to a big
Colombian effort that has strengthened the state and made the country
much safer.

But as an anti-drug programme, it has been much less successful.
Thanks to the adamantine efforts of Alvaro Uribe, Colombia's
president, which included spraying hundreds of thousands of hectares
with weedkiller, the recorded area of coca seemed to fall by more
than half between 1999 and 2006, according to United Nations
estimates. But it has since risen again.

And thanks to productivity increases, total cocaine production in the
Andes remains stable (see chart).

When cocaine consumption first took off in the United States in the
1970s and 1980s, the main smuggling route involved island-hopping
across the Caribbean from Colombia in light aircraft.

It was the success of America's drug warriors in shutting down this
route that brought big-time organised crime to Mexico, as the
Colombians began to send drugs that way. In Mexico, relatively small
gangs had long run heroin and marijuana across the border.

Their move into cocaine made them far more powerful.

Two things helped them grow. The first was proximity to the United
States. They gained control of retail distribution in many American
cities, allowing them to dictate terms to the Colombians. And they
continue to arm themselves with ease in American gunshops and launder
their profits in American banks.

The second factor was the flaws of the Mexican state.

The revolution of 1910-17 gave birth to a seemingly powerful state,
democratic in appearance but authoritarian in nature, in which power
was monopolised by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). One
of the achievements of this system was eventually to take the army
out of politics.

The police were required merely to impose political order, not to solve crimes.

State governors were happy to tolerate--or profit
from--drug-traffickers on their patch provided they kept a low profile.

Partly because the Colombians at first paid their partners in
product, the Mexican gangs began to push cocaine at home. In some
areas, especially in northern Mexico, they acquired de facto control.

The politicians did little to stop them--until Mr Calderon decided to
make security the priority of his government, and a matter of
personal commitment.

Taking Back the Street

The aim, says Eduardo Medina Mora, Mr Calderon's attorney-general, is
not to end drug-trafficking "because that is unachievable." Rather,
it is "to take back from organised criminal groups the economic power
and armament they've established in the past 20 years, to take away
their capacity to undermine institutions and to contest the state's
monopoly of force."

He points to progress.

In the past two years the government has seized huge quantities of
drugs (some 70 tonnes of cocaine, including 26 tonnes in a trawler, a
world record for a single haul), money (some $260m) and arms (31,000
weapons, including 17,000 of high calibre). It has also made more
than 58,000 arrests; and though some 95% of these people are
hangers-on or small-time drug-dealers, they include two-dozen
kingpins and a thousand sicarios (hired gunmen).

Brushing aside nationalist scruples, Mr Calderon has stepped up the
extradition of drug-traffickers to the United States, sending more
than 180 north so far. They can't go on running their businesses from
American prisons, as they can from most Mexican ones. Until recently
the drug lords lived openly in Mexico's main cities.

Now they can show their faces only in remote parts of the Sierra
Madre, says Genaro Garcia Luna, the minister for public security.

The violence, officials say, is a sign that the drug gangs are
turning on each other in a fight to hang on to a share of a shrinking
business. They stress that around 60% of the killings are
concentrated in just three of Mexico's 32 states, and most of these
in three cities: Ciudad Juarez in Chihuahua and Tijuana in Baja
California, both just across the American border; and Culiacan in
Sinaloa. Some four-fifths of the dead are members of criminal gangs
murdered by other criminals.

But more than 800 police and soldiers have also died since December
2006 (some may have been working for the traffickers). The beheadings
(often carried out after the victim is dead) and torture are intended
to enforce discipline within gangs and strike fear into rivals, Mr
Garcia Luna says. Despite the headlines, Mexico's murder rate is
relatively low, at 11 per 100,000 people.

But the violence provokes "bewilderment and surprise" among Mexicans,
says Enrique Krauze, a historian.

After the revolution Mexico became "an island of peace, where
refugees came from all over the world to escape violence." Several
senior police officers, including last year the commander of the
federal police, have been murdered by the traffickers. On September
15th eight people died when grenades were thrown at crowds
celebrating independence day in Morelia, in Michoacan. In Tijuana
ordinary citizens are scared by the violence going on around them.
People are going out less at night, and avoiding the city's better
restaurants after several cases in which gunmen have burst in and
shot a rival, says Jose Maria Ramos, a political scientist at the
Colegio de la Frontera Norte. And few doubt that the violence just
across the border is deterring investment and tourists from the United States.

Mr Calderon's crackdown has inflicted serious disruption on Mexico's
main trafficking syndicates (see map). As many of the historic capos
of these gangs are killed, arrested or extradited, what was an
oligopoly has splintered into warring factions.

This fragmentation is not wholly positive, admits Mr Medina Mora.

The biggest worry is that some drug gangs are starting to diversify
into other criminal businesses. Extortion and protection rackets are
suddenly becoming common.

Shops and bars have been burned down in Ciudad Juarez. Over the past
six months, big businesses, including multinationals, have become
targets, with threats against warehouses and factories if payments
are not made, according to a security consultant in Mexico City. This
is still local and sporadic, but at least one American company has
paid up, he says.

The second growth business is kidnapping. This is not new in Mexico.
It tends to go in cycles.

Many cases are not officially reported.

But the number recorded by Mexico Unido Contra la Delincuencia
("Mexico United Against Crime"), a campaign group, rose sharply over
the past two years before falling off in recent months, according to
Maria Elena Morera, its director.

And kidnaps are tending to become more violent. They account for only
1% of crimes, yet in one poll 46% of respondents say they are scared
of them, says Mrs Morera. The talk among better-off Mexicans is
suddenly of whether they should try to leave the country rather than
risk their children being kidnapped.

The underlying problem in Mexico is not drug-trafficking in itself,
but that neither the police nor the courts do their job properly.

Not only have the police themselves sometimes been a source of crime,
but they are also not accountable to politicians or public.

A survey in 2007 found that seven out of ten crimes are not reported.
"Society and the police don't work together," says Ernesto Lopez
Portillo, of the Institute for Security and Democracy. Mr Garcia Luna
admits that in some parts of the country the traffickers have
established a "social base". The previous two Mexican presidents
tried and failed to reform the police.

Mr Calderon's officials insist that this time they will succeed.

At the headquarters of the public-security ministry on a hill
opposite Chapultepec wood in Mexico City, cranes rise above a vacant
lot where a new National Intelligence Centre is being built.

The government's more immediate innovation is housed in an annexe
next door. A score of police officers dressed in dark suits sit at
computer terminals facing a giant, segmented screen that occupies the
whole of the wall in front of them. They are keying in data for
Platform Mexico, an integrated and searchable national database that
will combine criminal records with police operations' reports and is
due to start up in June. The screens can also display images from
closed-circuit television across the country.

The operators can communicate with every police post and patrol car
in Mexico. Across the city in Ixtapalapa, the police's main operating
base in the capital is now equipped with helicopters and
rapid-response teams. Eventually each state will have similar centres.

The Curse of Federalism

Mexico may lack Colombia's guerrillas, but it also lacks Colombia's
reasonably effective national police force.

That is partly because it is a federal country: each of the 32 states
has its own police force and justice department, and there are more
than 1,600 municipal police forces.

Under the PRI federalism was a legal fiction and the presidency was
omnipotent. Now no state governor feels obliged to submit to Mr
Calderon's policies.

The criminal law is a patchwork: drug-trafficking is a federal crime,
but kidnapping is a state matter. To make matters worse, the federal
government began to forge its own police force from a disparate bunch
of security outfits only as recently as the 1990s. An attempt to turn
the judicial police, attached to the attorney-general's office, into
a Mexican FBI (known by its initials as AFI) had mixed results: the
organisation was corrupted when purged police used legal action to
force their reinstatement.

Mr Calderon's government is making a far more serious effort.

Last June a constitutional reform reorganised the courts and police;
under its auspices, a law signed by the president on January 1st sets
up a new national public-security system.

It requires all police forces at national, state and municipal level
to adopt uniform procedures for recruitment, vetting, training,
promotion and operations. Every policeman in the country is now
supposed to be exhaustively vetted. At the same time, the federal
police force has expanded from 9,000 officers in 2006 to 26,000. Half
of these are soldiers on secondment. But Mr Garcia Luna is now trying
to recruit 8,000 graduates to be the core of a civilian investigative division.

The government has provided extra funds to some local police forces.

And for the first time it can force them to reform.

Another constitutional change aims to improve a hidebound judicial
system, introducing oral evidence and moving towards adversarial trials.

It builds on recent experiments in some Mexican states.

These efforts have inspired American help, especially in the form of
passing on intelligence that has helped in drug seizures and in the
arrest of leading traffickers. Under the Merida Initiative, the
United States will provide extra kit (such as night-vision gear and
metal detectors) and training.

Mexican officials point out that the funds involved are puny ($400m a
year for three years) compared with the $9 billion they are spending
each year. More than the money, Mr Medina Mora says he welcomes the
change of attitude. "We've gone from reciprocal finger-pointing to an
attitude of shared responsibility for a problem that by nature is
bilateral." But he adds that better regulation of the sale of arms in
the United States would have a bigger impact.

He points out that of 107,000 gunshops in the United States, 12,000
are close to the Mexican border and their sales are much higher than
the average.

Thousands of automatic rifles are bought for export to Mexico, which
is illegal.

American officials have promised to do more to stop this.

Mr Garcia Luna says that in the next few months Mexicans will start
to see a difference, as all the work over the past two years is put
into practice.

But there are several big doubts.

The first is whether the government is moving fast enough.

The original plan was to use the army only as a temporary shock force.

But the troops may have to be deployed for another two years or more,
Mr Medina Mora concedes. In late February the government sent an
extra 5,000 troops to Ciudad Juarez, where the police chief had
resigned after death threats.

The militarisation of public security--however inevitable in the
short term--carries the risk that Mexico will still not get the
civilian, community-based policing it needs to prevent and investigate crime.

Turf wars are another problem.

No fewer than six ministries are involved in different ways in public
security, not to speak of the state governors and mayors.

Mr Medina Mora, a former businessman, and Mr Garcia Luna, a career
policeman, often do not see eye to eye, and the army is politically
untouchable. What is needed is to turn the army into a small
professional force for external defence and centralise responsibility
for internal security in the public-security ministry, argues Raul
Benitez, a defence specialist at the National Autonomous University
in Mexico City.

The biggest doubt is whether the government can stop its forces being
infiltrated and corrupted.

One of the most violent of the drug gangs, known as the Zetas, is
made up of special-forces troops who changed sides a decade ago.
Hitherto, the government has been unable to provide its police forces
with sufficient pay and protection to make it worthwhile resisting
the threats and blandishments of the traffickers. Has that changed?

In the end, the state in a country as developed as Mexico cannot lose
this battle. "Mexico is not a failed state, it's a mediocre state,"
says Hector Aguilar Camin, a sociologist. But already there are signs
that the drug business will adapt.

The Mexican gangs have set up operations in South America and are
starting to export to Europe from there, according to Stratfor, a
consultancy based in Texas. And they have moved aggressively into
Central America. Just like Colombia, Mexico is finding that drug
violence is requiring it to modernise its security forces.

That process carries a large human cost. And the drug business, ever
supple, will adapt and survive.