CAN WE ESCAPE MEXICO'S DRUG WARS?

Corruption, Murders Underpinning Vastly Rich Cocaine Cartels Could
Cross Canadian Border

They were not the first Canadians to run afoul of Colombian cocaine
or Mexican guns, and it's a fair bet they won't be the last.

But the recent deaths of Gordon Kendall and Jeffery Ivans are another
sign that what began as a Colombian disease and then morphed into a
Mexican malady is now on its way to becoming something of a Canadian
condition, too.

Around midnight on Sept. 27, Kendall and Ivans were relaxing in or
near the condo they shared not far from the Plaza las Glorias in the
Mexican resort town of Puerto Vallarta, a tourist haunt made famous
when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton conducted a very public
romance there while filming The Night of the Iguana in 1963.

Half an hour later, both men were dead - the most recent Canadian
casualties in a bloody conflict that has bedevilled the Mexican
Republic since late 2006 at least.

That was when the country's new president, Felipe Calderon, declared
war on the cocaine cartels that are now doing to his land what their
South American counterparts have long inflicted upon Colombia -
killing its people, sapping its spirit, and crippling its
institutions in an orgy of payola and blood.

Upwards of 15,000 Mexicans have lost their lives in drug-related
violence since early 2007, a spiralling death toll that eclipses most
of the world's other civil conflicts.

Now Kendall and Ivans are dead, both shot repeatedly in the head by
unknown assailants - killed and then "re-killed," as they say in Spanish.

Their fate provides the moral of this tale. Canadians, like
Americans, cannot expect to have their cocaine without suffering its pain.

The cross-border spillover of violence and graft from Mexico is
already a source of mounting American trauma. The U.S. Department of
Justice calls cocaine trafficking that country's "leading drug
threat." Canada has not been affected to the same extent, but that
could quickly change, especially if the squeeze on drug traffickers
in Mexico forces them to change their tactics.

"They're not going to simply evaporate," said Tony Payan, a political
science professor at the University of Texas at El Paso and an expert
on U.S.-Mexico border issues. "The U.S.-Canada border is the next
frontier. That's a very open border."

Put aside the spectre of violence for a moment and consider corruption.

"The Mexicans say, `We're not the only ones with a problem,'" said
Maureen Meyer, a Mexico expert at the Washington Office on Latin
America. "I think we're being idealistic to think that corruption is
not a concern in the United States. We'd be fooling ourselves to
think that the U.S. and Canada are immune from that."

The lure of substantial bribes - say, $50,000 per transaction - is
more than enough to make many a border guard, Canadian or American,
at least contemplate looking the other way.

Not long ago most Colombian cocaine travelled to its destination by
air. Later the cartels shifted their methods, transporting cocaine
mainly by sea to transshipment points in the Caribbean and then on to
Florida. Nowadays, about 90 per cent of Colombia's cocaine travels to
Mexico, mainly by sea, before proceeding across the Rio Grande to the
Western U.S. - nearly $40 billion U.S. worth of cocaine a year. A
considerable portion of that cargo continues north to Canada.

If you are a drug trafficker, all you really need to do is corrupt
one agent per border.

"The No. 1 way to move drugs is at ports of entry," said Payan. "You
just have to break one link in the chain. The drug traffickers prefer
that. It's easy for an agent to just wave a vehicle right through."
It seems hardly surprising then that more than 80 U.S. border
officers have been convicted of corruption charges in the past two
years, according to The Associated Press.

Payan estimates there are 75 new corruption investigations involving
U.S. border guards each year.

He's echoing a point the Mexican president has been trying to drive
home for some time - it isn't Mexicans who are being corrupted here.

"To get drugs into the United States, the one you need to corrupt is
the American authority, the American customs, the American police -
not the Mexican," Calderon said recently. "And that's a subject, by
the way, which hasn't been addressed with sincerity."

Calderon did not include Canada in his remarks, but he easily could
have. In 2004, the Canadian Border Service Agency seized 321
kilograms of cocaine along British Columbia's border with the United
States. Two years later, the haul soared to about 585 kilograms of
cocaine, as B.C. replaced Toronto's Pearson Airport as the country's
main portal for the drug. The seizures haven't abated.

If this much contraband is being seized, then it's fair to assume
even more is getting through. How is this possible without at least
some complicity at the Canadian border?

Meet Baljinder Kandola, 35, of Surrey, B.C., a Canadian border guard
with six years' experience.

Kandola was arrested in October 2007 and now faces half a dozen
charges of importing drugs and weapons into Canada.

Another Canadian guard, Jasbir Singh Grewal, was indicted this past
June by a U.S. grand jury in Seattle and faces a charge of conspiracy
to export cocaine from the United States into Canada.

The U.S. indictment alleges Grewal allowed an RV loaded with cocaine
to enter Canada via the Lynden-Aldergrove border crossing on at least
11 occasions during 2007 alone and was paid an average of $50,000
U.S. each time.

So far, drug-related violence is confined mainly to Mexico, but this
could well go international as well.

A recent assessment by the National Drug Intelligence Center, an
agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, found Mexican cartels now
operate in 230 U.S. cities, up from 50 cities only three years ago.
"Those guys can clash," said Payan. "At some point, they're going to
have interests to protect."

U.S. towns on the Mexican border are havens of tranquility compared
to their sister communities just across the Rio Grande, but
drug-related violence is on the upswing in Southern U.S. cities, such
as Tucson (plagued by home invasions) and Phoenix (regarded by many
as the kidnap capital of the U.S.).

So far, Toronto Police have seen no sign of Mexican gang activity
here. But British Columbia has suffered a spate of killings some
refer to as "Mexico-type" gang violence.

Much of the bloodshed has involved members or associates of the
so-called United Nations gang, centred in B.C.'s Fraser Valley.

In May 2008, Mike Gordon, a B.C. realtor closely connected to the
gang, was shot dead in Chilliwack in what the RCMP calls a targeted
killing. A UN gang member, Duane Meyer, was gunned down in Abbotsford
only a few days earlier.

Just a month before that, in April 2008, two UN members, Elliott
"Taco" Castaneda and Ahmet "Lou" Kaawach, were mowed down at a
restaurant in Guadalajara, Mexico's second-largest city.

Then, late last month, Kendall and Ivans both met their own sad and
bloody end. Neither man was known to have had ties to Canadian gangs,
but they were evidently mixed up in drugs. In Mexico these days, that
can be a death sentence.

Given the state of the Mexican police, plagued by corruption and
incompetence and hugely overworked, it is unlikely anyone will ever
be brought to justice for their deaths - just two more grim
statistics, after all, in a mounting toll.