ON THE DRUG WAR'S FRONT LINE

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - He was happy to see shoppers, the Ciudad Juarez
tourist official made it clear, and yet the fact that he had time to
sit down for a beer with us in the middle of the day made him morose.
It was the week between Christmas and New Year's, and in happier
times, his city would have been swarming with tourists from El Paso.
These days, the sight of two lone gringos walking across the bridge
had brought him scurrying, waving his ID card like a flag of peace.

"Hardly any Americans come anymore," he sighed. "They're afraid. And I
suppose they should be. Yesterday, a bus driver was shot in front of
his passengers. The mayor of Juarez, they've tried to kill him three
times. Or maybe it's five. He sleeps in El Paso at night. We're more
dangerous than Baghdad. Can you believe that?"

Welcome to Ground Zero of the collateral damage of the American war on
drugs. Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon obliged his friend
George W. Bush three years ago by vowing to shut down the drug
pipeline into the United States, Juarez has turned from a festive
tourist magnet into a killing field.

Murders - mostly committed by drug cartels clashing with police and
one another - jumped from 300 in 2007 to 1,600 in 2008 to 2,600 last
year. Though its streets teem with rifle-toting soldiers - the
despairing government long ago turned law enforcement over to the army
- - Juarez's homicide rate is 33 times as high as that of New York City.

The day after my girlfriend and I visited, 26 people were murdered.
I'm sure it didn't surprise the tourist official. "You don't even buy
the paper anymore," he told us. "You know what's in it."

Though some Mexicans now refer to Juarez as Murder City, its lethality
is by no means unique. Ten students on their way to pick up financial
aid were blown to pieces with hand grenades on Palm Sunday in the
north-central state of Durango. The week before that, the chopped-up
parts of two police officials were found stuffed into shopping bags in
the southern state of Guerrero.

In Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas, so many journalists
have been kidnapped or murdered that local newspapers and TV stations
have stopped covering narcoviolence. But there's no fear of an
uninformed populace: New media have filled the gap. Video of
narcotrafficker tortures and executions are routinely posted, deleted
and reposted on YouTube.

Both sides of this war are being funded from the United States. The
so-called Merida Initiative, the pact with which Bush enticed Calderon
into this mess, has provided the Mexican government with $700 million
in counternarcotics funding the past two years, and the Obama
administration has asked Congress for another $450 million in 2010.

But those seemingly big bucks pale beside the money generated by
America's bottomless appetite for illicit drugs. Government estimates
of the wholesale value of the U.S. drug trade range from $13 billion
to $48 billion a year, a major chunk of which winds up in Mexico, the
transit point for most cocaine, marijuana and heroin consumed in this
country.

For more than four decades, the United States has been trying to fight
its war on drugs on the cheap by laying off the cost in human blood on
other countries. First Colombia, then Peru and now Mexico have been
turned into murderous free-fire zones that we would never have
tolerated here. The result: "Overall, the availability of illicit
drugs in the United States is increasing," the U.S. Department of
Justice reported in February.

The war on drugs has been like squeezing a balloon: It just pops up in
another place. And the next place may be inside our own borders. In
alarmingly unnoticed testimony to Congress last year, Homeland
Security Secretary Janet Napolitano warned that more than drugs may
soon be flowing across the border. "We must guard against and prepare
for the possible spillover of violence into the United States,"
Napolitano said.

You might think that after four decades of this futile war, we'd be
willing to talk peace - as California voters are seriously
considering, with a ballot initiative that would legalize marijuana,
depriving narcotraffickers of a significant chunk of their war chest.

Instead, the Obama administration wants to up the ante. Napolitano
told Congress that her office is drawing up plans to put the U.S.
military into action against drugs, not in some far-off Third World
jungle, but here in America. We have seen the future, and it is Ciudad
Juarez.