MEXICO'S WIDENING WAR

Mexico City - In my country we've been learning under extreme duress
to live in a different nation from the one we grew up in. Some 30,000
people have died in Mexico in the last four years in a grotesque
carnival of shootouts, beheadings and mutilations; the city of Juarez
has emerged as a worldwide symbol of lawlessness and horror; tens of
thousands of children have been left orphaned and permanently
embittered against the state. But what happened in August and unfolded
throughout September and the fall was something else.

In the northern state of Tamaulipas, on an abandoned ranch some 100
miles south of the American border, a young Ecuadorean man escaped
from beneath a pile of bodies to tell his story. The previous day he
had been on a bus with 73 other people traveling north to the United
States, most from Central America, a few from Brazil and Ecuador. The
bus was hijacked and driven to the abandoned ranch. There, the
migrants - young men, for the most part, but quite a few young women
as well - were tied up in groups of four and systematically murdered.
Only the young Ecuadorean and a Honduran man escaped.

The victims were reported to have been killed - on a whim? for
practice? - by members of a particularly bloody group, the Zetas,
which got its start as an enforcement gang for a powerful drug
trafficker from Tamaulipas. Equipped with an alarming array of
smuggled weapons and financed by illegal drug sales, it is now a
nationwide organization. Its local franchises trade in drugs, but also
in prostitution, pirated CDs and DVDs, gangland movies, child
pornography and people-smuggling. As a result, migrants' passage
through Mexico has become an odyssey of horror. The lucky ones are
robbed of their last penny. Others are kidnapped and held for ransom
from their impoverished families. Mutilations are not uncommon. Rape
is routine.

It was Richard Nixon who coined the term "war on drugs" 40 years ago,
creating difficulties for policy makers ever since. As opposed to
complex social problems, which must be understood and solved, wars
must be fought and, if financing is to be renewed, battles must be
won. But four decades later, we are still without a victory.

Even worse: where once only a handful of countries were involved in
the cultivation and processing of cocaine, marijuana and heroin, now
old and new drugs are manufactured on an industrial scale on almost
every continent. Where once outlaws used their weapons sparingly and
tried not to attract attention, now ferocious mafias are willing to
defy the state and buy off the law-enforcement apparatus of an entire
country. And where once traffickers mostly killed each other, we in
Mexico now have to mourn the death of 72 migrants - and who knows how
many thousands of similar victims - who were merely looking for hard
work and a better life.