FEARS IN U.S. DRUG WAR WILL DESTABILIZE MEXICO

WASHINGTON - -- Concern about a potential failed state - not Pakistan,
not Somalia, but California's neighbor Mexico - is mounting in
Washington as an all-out war involving 45,000 Mexican military
personnel fails to quell rising drug violence that is spilling from
such Mexican cities as Tijuana into the United States. An estimated
6,290 drug-related murders occurred in Mexico last year, six times the
standard definition of a civil war, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a leading
scholar on the issue at the Brookings Institution.

Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, a member of the House Intelligence
Committee, described beheadings of Mexican mayors and police chiefs
and said Mexican drug gangs have infiltrated the cannabis fields on
both public and private lands in Northern California. He said Mexican
villagers are kidnapped and smuggled into the northern coastal forests
to grow pot, leaving environmental wreckage in their wake.

He said a timber company employee had been held at gunpoint by a
Mexican gang, and he worried that hikers could be threatened. There
also have been gang confrontations with firefighters.

"This isn't your '60s hippie growing a little pot on the back 40 to
get through winter," Thompson said.

Two House committees will hold hearings today, and Sen. Dianne
Feinstein, D-Calif., has scheduled a Senate hearing for Tuesday to
determine how to respond. Ideas range from building a stronger border
fence to decriminalizing marijuana.

Mexico "is in the paradoxical situation where the more it intervenes
against the drug cartels, the more it destabilizes the drug market,
which is the reason it's so violent," said Felbab-Brown. "Drug markets
are normally not this violent. This is an aberration. The analogy is
Colombia in the 1980s and early 1990s."

Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Redlands (San Bernardino County), told the
Associated Press this week that the violence in Mexico is "a lot more
important, in my own judgment, than Afghanistan at this moment."

Mexico and Pakistan The U.S. Joint Forces Command called Mexico and
Pakistan the world's two most critical states in danger of failing.
While cautioning that Mexico has not reached Pakistan's level of
instability, it reported that Mexico's "government, its politicians,
police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and
pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels."

The State Department issued a travel warning in February based on
rising violence and kidnappings, especially along the border. It said
innocent bystanders have been killed in attacks across the country.

Many, not least the Mexican government itself, take strong issue with
labeling Mexico anything close to a failed state, though they
acknowledge that the violence is serious and spreading.

"I'm in the heart of Mexico City as we speak, and the buses are full
of people, the metros are running, the shops are open and people are
walking freely," said George Grayson, a Mexico scholar at the College
of William and Mary. "I don't see anything that looks like a failed
state."

He said, however, that some areas have been overrun by drug cartels,
including Ciudad Juarez across the border from El Paso, Texas, and
municipalities in the states of Michoacan and Guerrero.

Others contend that Mexico is in danger of becoming a "narco state"
where drug cartels control large parts of the country and the
government cannot perform its most essential task, ensuring the safety
of its citizens.

"There are different forms of weakening," said Felbab-Brown. Rather
than a collapse of the government, she said, "I am more worried that
you will have internal pressures within the elite and from the larger
society for accommodations with the cartels."

Police corruption remains rampant in Mexico, and she warned that the
government could retreat to what she called the "corporatist" model of
the 1960s and 1970s, when police regulated and protected drug
traffickers.

She said what worries her even more is that the government can neither
defeat nor accommodate the drug cartels, and so "simply retreats,
gives up territory." In that scenario, she said, state presence in
parts of the country would be limited, and the government "abdicates
its responsibility to be the sole purveyor of coercive force. That is
very consistent with the historic trend in many Latin American countries."

Unlike past battles over immigration, Mexico's current problems are blamed
increasingly
on the United States: its enormous demand for illegal drugs and its
availability of
military-style weapons, including bazookas and grenade launchers, that are
smuggled to
Mexico and used to match or overwhelm the Mexican military.

Mexico also let the drug problem fester for decades, tolerating police
corruption. Once established, police corruption is difficult to
eradicate; matters have only grown worse with the rise in the drug
trade. Well-funded gangs make offers of a "bullet or a bribe" and kill
the few who choose the former, along with their relatives.

Drugs and assassinations Grayson said the notorious Los Zetas group
has diversified into assassinations and has begun to target army officers.

Retired army Gen. Mauro Enrique Tello was found tortured and shot last
month near the popular spring-break resort town of Cancun. Tello had
been hired to clean up the Cancun police force, whose chief has been
arrested in connection with the murder.

The former presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico recently called
the nearly 40-year U.S. "war on drugs," begun in the Nixon
administration, not only a failure but a threat to civil society in
Latin America.

"My personal view is, it's us who is more responsible than Mexico,"
said Sidney Weintraub, a leading Latin American scholar at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies. "We're providing profits of
about $25 billion to the drug cartels. That's a lot of money."

About 40 percent of the drug sales are marijuana, he said. "We
imprison more people for marijuana than any other drug. What we have
to do is change our policy and decriminalize marijuana. I don't think
we can do much unless we cut back on the money. As long as they have
all that money, Mexico is in a largely hopeless situation."

Weapons from U.S. Moreover, Weintraub said, more than 90 percent of
the weapons smuggled into Mexico "are sold by our gun dealers to
people they know are sending the guns to Mexico. Against this array of
money, violence, ability to bribe, being able to outgun the military
on any occasion, it's hard for them to do anything. ... Our policy has
to change."

There is almost no chance that either Congress or the Obama
administration will decriminalize marijuana any time soon. Former
President George W. Bush, at a meeting with Mexican President Felipe
Calderon in Merida, Mexico, in March 2007, promised $1.4 billion over
three years to provide technology and training to Mexico. The first
$197 million was allocated last year, but many describe the sum as a
pittance next to drug revenue and say it has focused mainly on
high-tech gadgets such as surveillance planes that are helpful but no
solution.

Some say strengthening the border is a priority, but the cartels have
even resorted to using submarines to evade land barriers.