HEADS OF U.S., MEXICO TO MEET AS TENSIONS RISE

Violence From Drug War To Top Agenda As Calderon Visits Obama In Washington

MEXICO CITY - President Felipe Calderon will meet in Washington on
Thursday with President Barack Obama in an attempt to repair relations
at a time when spiraling violence in Mexico's drug war has frayed ties
between the two allies.

The meeting comes just three weeks after a U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement Agent was killed and another wounded by alleged
drug gunmen. Jaime Zapata, the slain ICE agent, was the first U.S.
law-enforcement official to be killed in the line of duty in Mexico in
a quarter century.

Mr. Calderon's visit, announced last week, also comes after a spate of
ill-timed comments by U.S. officials about Mexico's drug violence.
Among them are that Mexican drug gangs could be allied with Islamic
terrorists and that drug traffickers could overthrow the Mexican
state, forcing the U.S. to send troops. Such statements have enraged
Mexican officials, who are notoriously sensitive to any suggestion of
U.S. interference in national affairs.

"I don't recall this kind of bad blood in a long time," said Jorge
Castaneda, a former Mexican foreign minister.

At home, Mr. Calderon has also been feeling political heat. As Mexico
enters its 2012 presidential electoral season, polls show the
government's inability to halt rising violence, even as it kills or
captures drug kingpins, increasingly worries Mexicans. That's a blow
to the president, who has made security the centerpiece of his
government program.

Analysts believe that weary Mexican voters may reject the candidate
from Mr. Calderon's center-right party and vote to bring back the
Institutional Revolutionary Party-anathema to Mr. Calderon-which
controlled Mexico for most of the 20th century and whose presumed
candidate is leading in the polls.

In an interview with El Universal newspaper published last week, Mr.
Calderon lashed out at what he said was the U.S.'s lack of cooperation
in Mexico's effort to curb drug cartels. More than 34,000 Mexicans
have died in drug-related violence since Mr. Calderon took power in
2006 and sent out the army and federal police to recover large areas
of Mexico where drug cartels held sway.

U.S. "institutional cooperation ends up being notoriously deficient,"
Mr. Calderon said. He also lambasted what he said was the disarray in
U.S. interagency cooperation. He said the U.S. should help Mexico deal
with the violence unleashed by drug trafficking by lowering U.S. drug
consumption and cutting the flow of arms, many of which end up in the
hands of cartel gunmen in Mexico. But Mr. Calderon said the U.S.
hasn't been able to make progress towards either goal. "Instead, the
flow [of arms] has increased," he said in the interview.

Relations, in particular with U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual, have
been strained by the publication of embassy cables released by
WikiLeaks that described the alleged inefficiency and lack of
coordination in Mexico's security apparatus, especially in the army.
In the interview, Mr. Calderon lashed out at Mr. Pascual and former
ambassador Tony Garza, who signed many of the critical reports.

In an apparent reference to Mr. Pascual, Mr. Calderon said his
"ignorance" as expressed in the WikiLeaks reports was a "distortion"
of Mexican reality. People close to Mr. Calderon say that when the
Mexican president met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in
Mexico City in January, Mr. Calderon "vented" his frustration and
blamed the U.S. for not cooperating. A Calderon spokesman declined to
comment on the meeting. A U.S. State Department spokeswoman on
Wednesday called the meeting a "frank exchange of ideas."

In a background briefing, Mexican diplomats strove to put the
relationship, and the upcoming meeting in a positive light. "We see a
very productive meeting with positive messages from both presidents,"
said Julian Ventura, Mexico's undersecretary for North America. "The
importance that each country holds for the other will be ratified."

U.S. officials also played down tensions. "This bilateral relation has
matured to a level in which a simple statement or a given event does
not have the power to wreck the relation entirely," said Deputy
Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson in Washington on Tuesday.

Most analysts believe that despite the frayed relations the ties
between the two countries run so deep and are so complex that both
governments realize their interests far outweigh the present ill will.
"There is a shared recognition that the mutual interests are too
important to let tensions overwhelm them," said Andrew Selee, director
of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington.

High on Mr. Calderon's meeting agenda is progress on controlling the
sale of weapons on the border, many of which eventually end up in the
hands of cartel hitmen. Indeed, the arrest Monday of three Dallas men,
one of whom bought the weapon used in the killing of Mr. Zapata, the
ICE agent, could well be used by Mr. Calderon to make his point on the
need to restrain arms sales. Mr. Calderon would also like to see a
bigger U.S. effort to cut down drug consumption.

Mr. Calderon is also scheduled to meet with U.S. House Speaker John
Boehner (R., Ohio) to address the $1.3 billion Merida Agreement, which
provides material and training to Mexico to help in the drug war.