THE OTHER WAR

Drug Cartels Are Murdering Each Other - and Americans Are Not
Immune.

The murders Sunday of three American consular workers in Ciudad
Juarez, a Mexican border town, are an outrage and another indication
that the war on drugs is a dismal, violent failure.

The situation is so bad that reports of assassinations by the two main
drug cartels don't even make it into Mexican newspapers. Reporters and
editors are fearful that they, too, will be targeted. by gangs.

More than 2,000 people have been murdered in Ciudad Juarez alone,
according to The New York Times. Thousands more have been murdered
throughout the country. Last weekend 50 more murders were reported
around the country. How many more that went unreported is not known.

The murders of the three Americans should give pause to parents whose
children are heading to Mexico for spring break. Americans are an
especially easy - and lucrative - target for ransom and worse, which
is why the State Department has advised against travel to Mexico.

As it is, families of consular workers (two children were wounded in
Sunday's attack) are sending their families back to the States for
safety. It's puzzling that any American workers would stay in Mexico
while the war rages.

The U.S. has given Mexico $1 billion in the past three years to help
fund the war on drug cartels, whose murder methods include brutal
torture and beheadings. Critics on both sides of the border have
concluded - with Advertisement Quantcast good reason - that the drug
war has been a tragic and dismal failure.

Worse, that war has made its way across the border into American
cities, as the cartels vie for territory. California prisons have a
huge population of gang members, many of whom are involved in
cross-border trafficking.

There is no solution to the drug war as long as Americans' appetite
for illicit drugs makes importing them to the U.S. hugely profitable.
While we think legalizing marijuana would help lessen the drug war,
the other cash cows - cocaine, heroin and ectsasy - will still fuel
outright warfare on Mexican streets.

Meanwhile, our advice to vacationers is to find another place to go -
especially college kids who think they are immune to a kidnapping or a
bullet.

They should be reminded of the massacre of 16 people last January. At
first it was thought that the murders were a settling of scores
between the two cartels. In fact, the 16 were Mexican students at a
birthday party.