MEXICAN VOTERS DEFY DRUG LORDS

Election results sign of a healthy democracy, belying claims country
is on verge of becoming a narco-state

As British Columbians know better than most, being a major supplier of
illegal narcotics to the United States comes with a reputation for
gangland bloodshed.

But while the vision of Metro Vancouver that ricocheted around the
world early last year as traffickers knocked each other off with
monotonous regularity was accurate in its detail, the overall image of
this city as a battleground was grossly distorted.

So it is with Mexico and the continuing campaign by the government of
President Felipe Calderon since he assumed office in 2006 to destroy
the drug cartels smuggling cocaine into the U.S.

Since then, an estimated 22,000 people have died in drug-related
murders, though some calculations put the number much higher.

And there are 45,000 soldiers deployed in Calderon's anti-cartel war,
in large part because existing police forces are riddled with
corruption and a new national police force is taking longer to create
and train than anticipated.

These numbers make the situation sound horrendous, but context is
everything.

Mexico's drug wars are confined to limited areas, mostly close to the
southern U.S. border, just as Vancouver's gang killings have a
distinct geographic fingerprint.

The national murder rate in Mexico last year was 10 people for every
100,000 population. That's less than half the murder rate in Brazil in
2009 -- 25 for every 100,000 people -- and close to one-fifth of the
rate in Venezuela, where it was 48 homicides for every 100,000 people.

And the carnage in Mexico's drug wars is nothing like as deadly as it
was in Colombia during the reign of the great Medellin and Cali
cocaine cartels in the 1980s and '90s. Then, the annual murder rate
was often four times last year's 143 people killed per 100,000
population in Chihuahua state, whose Juarez city is the bitterly
contested main corridor for trafficking to the U.S.

Mexico's emergence as the gateway for cocaine trafficking to
Americans, very large numbers of whom seem disturbingly unable to get
through a day without ingesting mood-modifying substances, is largely
a result of the successful campaign to decapitate and dismantle the
Colombian cartels.

And, with the human proclivity for speculation and exaggeration, the
Mexican drug wars have inevitably led to speculation that the country
is on the verge of becoming a narco-state or a failed state, or both.

That's nonsense.

Not only are the numbers deceptive, but the vast majority of the
killings have been -- as they have been here -- between rival gangs
fighting for territory.

Mexican democracy is actually in good shape, in many ways better shape
than might be expected for a country that achieved a functional
multi-party and accountable form of government only a decade ago.

That was when Vicente Fox of the National Action Party, known as PAN,
became president and ended the de facto monarchy of the Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had been in power for more than 70
years.

But the PRI remains a formidable political power, both in the
provinces and in the national Congress, where it has been able to
frustrate most of the attempts at institutional reform by both
presidents Fox and Calderon, who is also from the PAN.

So there was apparently well-founded expectation in the run-up to
elections a week ago, when there were votes in 14 of Mexico's 31
states and the governorships of 12 of them up for grabs, that the PRI
candidates would sweep the board.

That prediction was given added strength by the evident determination
of the drug lords to intimidate voters against going to the polls. In
one of the front-line drug-trafficking provinces bordering Texas,
Tamaulipas, the cartel lords even murdered the PRI candidate for the
governorship, Rodolfo Torre Cantu.

But voters defied the predictions and the cartels.

Turnout was well above what pundits expected and the results suggest
Mexican voters no longer feel bound by the entrenched party-machine
politics that has characterized the country for so long.

On the surface, the old party of dictatorship, the PRI, seemed the
winner. Its candidates won nine of the 12 governorships on offer.

That appears to put the PRI and its likely candidate in the 2012
presidential elections, Enrique Pena Nieto, now governor of Mexico
state, which includes most of the capital's suburbs, in a strong
position to gain control of the national administration.

But the devil's in the detail. The PRI did hold on to six
governorships and won the leadership of three provinces, two from
Calderon's PAN and one from the left-of-centre Democratic
Revolutionary Party.

But it also lost three states -- Puebla, Sinaloa and Oaxaca -- where
PRI rule seemed secure.

So despite the awful image, Mexicans have good reason to take heart in
the evidence that the system is growing increasingly functional and
responsive to popular will.