AS DEATH TOLL IN DRUG WAR RISES, MEXICANS SHORT OF FACTS AND TRUST

As the death toll has climbed from drug-related violence in Mexico,
it's fallen largely to newspapers to keep the count.

Two weeks ago, a government report that legislators leaked spoke of
22,700 deaths over little more than a three-year period, a far higher
body count than the 18,000 or so given by El Universal, a leading newspaper.

President Felipe Calderon's aides won't confirm the report, and some
political analysts have seized on the lack of transparency as an
element in the Mexican leader's difficulties in rallying the nation in
the campaign against heavily armed narcotics syndicates.

"It was not their intention to share this information," said Elena
Azaola, an investigator at the Center for Advanced Studies and
Research in Social Anthropology in the capital, adding that it was
symptomatic of tight handling of crucial data.

"There is a vacuum of important official information in very many
areas," she said. "And there's also a lack of credibility. People
speak as if there were censorship, a covering up of
information."

That might seem like an odd allegation, given that displays of more
than two dozen different daily and weekly papers cover newspaper
kiosks in the capital, but Azaola isn't alone in criticizing the
government's tight hold on information. Other analysts said that
suppressing the data hindered Mexicans' ability to evaluate the
Calderon administration.

"It asks for an act of faith from the public that its secret policies
are correct," said Edna Jaime, a political scientist at a policy
institute, Mexico Evalua.

Immediately after Calderon came to office in late 2006, he deployed up
to 50,000 troops in a frontal battle with narcotics cartels, a move
that drew widespread praise for its courage. More than three years
later, the pace of killings is soaring and public security worries are
beginning to affect the tourism industry, which employs nearly one out
of eight Mexicans.

Calderon has earned high praise in Washington, where he'll travel May
19-20 in a visit that will include an address to a joint session of
Congress and a state dinner at the White House, only the second one
that President Barack Obama has hosted.

Mistrust of government is deeply entrenched in Mexico, and it hampers
Calderon, who came to office with less than a 1 percent margin of victory.

"President Calderon is never going to have the approval of most
Mexicans in the war on drugs," said Tony Payan, an expert on Mexico at
the University of Texas in El Paso. "Mexicans are very skeptical and
very cynical of the government."

Earlier in April, Calderon made several gaffes, political analysts
said, coming off as insensitive to deaths of innocent civilians and
out of sync with the fears of ordinary Mexicans, mistakes that he has
sought to amend.

Calderon said repeatedly in mid-April that 90 percent of the victims
of violence were drug traffickers or gunmen linked to them. Of the
rest, about 5 percent are soldiers and police, and the remainder
innocent bystanders, he said.

The veracity of the assertion hasn't been questioned, although it's
hard to judge without an official death tally. A spokesman for the
Interior Ministry, which keeps tabs on public security, said the
estimate of 22,700 deaths came in "a confidential report." The
spokesman, who asked not to be identified because he wasn't authorized
to talk to journalists, would say nothing further about it.

That secrecy has cost Calderon public support.

"Civil society stopped believing in him," said Ghaleb Krame, a
security consultant and scholar at Alliant International University's
Mexico City branch. "He has surrounded himself with loyal people but
not the best people. They are covering up the real magnitude of this
war."

There are several cases in which soldiers shot and killed innocent
people, at first claiming that they were part of drug gangs. Two
notorious cases occurred in northeast Mexico:

- -Soldiers shot and killed two graduate students at the prestigious
Tecnologico de Monterrey on March 19, later claiming that the victims
were cartel gunmen.

- -Soldiers opened fire on a vehicle that was taking a family for an
Easter outing to the beach in Matamoros, killing Bryan and Martin
Almanza Salazar, 5 and 9 years old.

Calderon visited Monterrey, the industrial hub in the northeastern
state of Nuevo Leon, on Wednesday and offered an apology of sorts for
civilian deaths. He said, however, that it would be a perilous error
to pull the army from the fight against narcotics cartels.

"I am aware that one of the events that has most infuriated and
affected Nuevo Leon and all of Mexico ... has been the lamentable loss
of innocent civilian life," he said.

He promised to "amend many errors."

One of Mexico's more prominent civilian activists, Maria Elena Morera,
said soldiers hadn't been properly trained for their role in combating
cartel gunmen, especially as the battles moved into cities.

"They shoot at cars passing through roadblocks," she said. Many
soldiers don't know that "you shoot at the tires of the car, not at
the people inside."

Jaime, the political scientist, said Calderon's aggressive campaign
against the cartels hadn't brought results that were tangible to most
Mexicans.

"There's starting to be a lot of concern. We're seeing innocent
victims and human rights violations and we're not seeing an
improvement in public security," she said.

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