A DRUG KINGPIN FALLS

The arrest of drug lord Edgar "La Barbie" Valdez Villarreal in Mexico
last week illustrates the good, the bad and the conundrum of
President Felipe Calderon's war on cartels.
Valdez was the third kingpin taken out of commission in less than a
year and the first to be captured alive, offering an opportunity for
intelligence-gathering on the multibillion-dollar drug smuggling
business. Generally speaking, getting rid of crime bosses is good.
It wreaks havoc on organizations that otherwise would be wholly
focused on consolidating their formidable power; Valdez was nabbed in
the midst of a bloody battle to succeed Arturo Beltran Leyva, who was
killed by Mexican troops in December. Yet removing leaders also can
be an endless game of whack-a-mole. It doesn't put the cartels out of
business, and the ensuing turf violence can undermine public support
for the drug war.

Calderon has been unable to forge a national consensus around the
drug war. Mexicans tell pollsters they are unhappy with the security
situation in their country, but they are not optimistic that the
assault on traffickers will succeed. Soldiers, police, prosecutors,
politicians and journalists routinely are killed by traffickers, yet
Mexico's political classes do not seem to regard this as a strategic
threat to the Mexican state. Calderon tried to bolster public support
for the drug war with a national "dialogue" last month, to no avail.
Critics said he was selling his strategy, not listening or
consulting; opposition parties largely boycotted it, more preoccupied
with partisan politics than with forging a unified response to a
national crisis. The media, meanwhile, have accused Calderon of
manipulating Valdez's arrest to bolster his own popularity, timing
the announcement to coincide with his annual state-of-the nation address.

Mexican authorities have trotted out Valdez, handcuffed and smiling,
to the media, prompting speculation that he would be handed over to
the United States, where he is a citizen and might be allowed to cut
a deal for informing on others. Valdez already has told investigators
that leaders of the major cartels met in 2007 to divide up
distribution routes, but that Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman, head of the
Sinaloa cartel, broke the pact, setting off a war among the cartels
that has claimed many of the 28,000 lives lost to drug violence in
the last four years. In video of an interrogation in police custody,
Valdez speaks of having received trailers full of cash from north of
the border. Which gets to one of the weaknesses of the drug war: In
his annual address, Calderon said authorities had confiscated $72
million in U.S. banknotes and $9 million in Mexican pesos in the
previous year -- a drop in the bucket in a business that by some
estimates earns $39 billion a year. Besides nabbing crime bosses,
U.S. and Mexican officials need to find the money. And Calderon must
unify his country around a long-term strategy for fighting drug trafficking.