THE NEED TO HELP MEXICO

Maybe it's time for the U.S. to be something akin to a world cop, at
least in Mexico, working as actively as needed with the government of
President Felipe Calderon to defeat drug cartels that torture cops to
death, assassinate journalists, will slaughter 15 teens partying at
someone's house and even enter funeral homes and kill the mourners.

Americans aren't immune. Two of them recently attended a get-together
for children at the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juarez and were making
their way home to El Paso. Imagine their fright as assailants caught
up with them and their 1-year-old baby riding in the back of their
SUV. The child was spared. Her mother, four months pregnant, was shot
in the head and died. The father was shot in the arm and neck. He died, too.

A Mexican citizen who worked in the consulate was also killed and two
of his children wounded after the event, and we are reminded by all of
this horror that something is going on in Mexico so terrible as to
portend the collapse of Mexican society and government and that there
is no reasonable calculation by which the United States escapes
involvement.

An indication of the peril is that Juarez just may be the murder
capital of the world right now. There were 2,657 homicides there last
year, and very few were solved, it has been noted. The killers are
drug dealers in marijuana, heroin, methamphetamines and cocaine,
selling mostly to Americans.

These killers buy as many of the police and politicians as they can
and do their best to kill any of the rest that give them trouble.
They've been holding their own against Mexican troops sent out to
fight this war by Calderon.

Our interest in all of this begins with 2,000 shared miles of border
and includes facts summed up well by one article I encountered: A half
million people cross that border every day; we get a third of our oil
from Mexico; most of our immigrants, legal and illegal, come from
there, and we sell more exports to Mexico than to any country except
Canada.

Some people say the only answer is to legalize drugs in the United
States, at least marijuana, but this is a hugely complicated issue
domestically and would take a long time to have needed results if it
were done right away and would still leave the drug cartels with other
markets to develop.

Mexico also needs political, financial and social reform, it's said,
and that is no doubt true, but the drug killers make the achievement
twice as hard and, again, time is running out. With the exception of
some doable new policies here and there, you are looking at a long,
extraordinarily difficult process tantamount to reversing history.

Clearly, the United States should continue what it has started: the
$1.5 billion Merida Initiative supplying Mexicans with armaments,
software and technological know-how and U.S. Army training of their
special forces. The Mexican government needs more help with
intelligence, and we absolutely have to give it, and we should be
involved with Mexico strategically if it will allow us to be, as
others have argued. We're at a point where we probably also need far
more National Guard troops on the border, as the Texas governor wants.

Should we start talking about the United Nations helping with U.S. and
other peacekeeping forces if Mexico requests it? Not yet, maybe never.
But the U.S. should do all it can within reason to prevent there ever
being a need for such a decision to be made.