MURDER IN MEXICO

'Either the Narcos, or the State.'

In 1985, Mexican drug traffickers kidnapped, tortured and murdered
Enrique "Kiki" Camarena, an undercover American DEA agent working out
of the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara. The Reagan Administration
reportedly hired bounty hunters to bring his killers to justice, in
part because it could not rely on the Mexican government to do so.

Americans are once again being killed by Mexico's narcos. On
Saturday, Lesley Enriquez, an American employee at the U.S. consulate
in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, was gunned down in broad
daylight with her husband, orphaning their seven-month-old daughter.
The Mexican husband of another consulate employee was also killed in
a separate incident at nearly the same time.

But if the brazenness of Mexico's drug lords remains undiminished
after a quarter-century, the attitude of the Mexican government has
changed dramatically. Since coming to power three years ago, Mexican
President Felipe Calderon has declared all-out war on traffickers and
deployed his army to fight the battle. Mexico and the U.S. are also
actively cooperating in the fight-something scarcely imaginable 25
years ago-with the Bush and now the Obama Administration devoting
more than $1 billion in aid to support Mexico's efforts with
helicopters, detection equipment and training. Mexicans are paying a
heavy price for their government's stand. Some 14,000 people have
been killed since 2006. Most of those deaths have been the result of
internecine fights among competing-and increasingly squeezed-drug
cartels. But many of the victims have also been civilians, including
bystanders caught in the crossfire and others targeted in acts of
naked terror. Some have been beheaded, al Qaeda style.

Mexico has also had some notable successes. For starters, it has
killed or captured some of the key cartel kingpins, including Arturo
Beltran Levya last December. It has also prosecuted government
officials complicit in the trade. That's no small thing in a country
that for decades managed its drug problems with a wink-and-nod
relationship between the government and the cartels. As a Mexican
friend told us last year, the current spate of violence isn't
evidence that Mexico is falling apart. On the contrary, it's finally
standing up.

We realize that many of our friends believe all of these problems
would go away if the United States legalized drugs. Enforcement costs
would indeed fall, though at the cost of far higher addiction rates
as cocaine and heroin became routinely available and their price fell
dramatically. If this were a popular or at all politically realistic
tradeoff, we suspect some candidate would have proposed it.

Having encouraged the Mexicans to fight this war, the U.S. needs to
assist it with as much vigor as we support Pakistan's fight against
the Taliban. As Mr. Calderon has said, "it's either the narcos, or
the state." Given the barbarism of the narcos, we vote for the state.