DRUG WAR: CAN MEXICO SUCCEED WHERE COLOMBIA FAILED?

MEXICO CITY - The familiar complaint that Mexican presidents are
reluctant to be full-fledged partners in the war on drugs is no longer
heard in Washington these days: Mexican President Felipe Calderon has
taken the lead, launching the most ambitious war on the drug cartels
operating in Mexico.

Since taking over from Vicente Fox in December 2006, President
Calderon has sent more than 27,000 soldiers to eight Mexican states;
ordered federal officers to take over police departments in border
towns and arrest hundreds of corrupt police; mobilized the Mexican
army to destroy thousands of acres of marijuana and opium poppy
plants; arrested and extradited scores of drug kingpins indicted in
the United States; and set up military roadblocks along Mexican
highways leading from the border to the interior of the country.

"The Mexican people are demanding that their parks, their streets,
their schools, their neighborhoods are safe places for their families,
where their children can live and grow up in peace," President
Calderon told the nation'sgovernors a month after taking office,
before launching a campaign against the drug cartels.

"Mexico is sending a clear message to the U.S., saying, 'We're doing
everything we can, even more than you,' " Lorenzo Meyer, a historian
and social commentator based in Mexico City, told the Los Angeles
Times. "The U.S. ambassador won't be able to moan about Mexico not
fighting crime."

But the question remains whether Mexico will succeed where Colombia
has failed: Will Mr. Calderon win, or will the nation be plunged into
a state of civil violence?

Mr. Calderon's actions have provoked an unprecedented response from
the drug cartels. Mexico is suffering more casualties in the war on
drugs than the U.S. military is in Iraq. More than 2,000 Mexicans have
been slain in the previous 18 months, with a gruesome escalation since
February of this year. Drug-related violence has exploded in the
border states of Baja California Norte, Tamaulipas, Sinaloa and Chihuahua.

In 2007 decapitations signaled power struggles among rival drug
cartels as Mexico's drug cartels have resorted to beheadings to
intimidate enemies. But in recent months, drug cartels have attacked
police stations and Mexican soldiers. Hundreds of police officers and
federal agents have resigned from their posts, fearing for their lives
and the safety of their families as they have seen their colleagues
kidnapped, gunned down or decapitated.

Late in May Federal Police Chief Commander Edgar Millan Gomez was
assassinated.

At his funeral, Mr. Calderon vowed to press forward. "Today I
reiterate my promise not to retreat in the quest for a Mexico where
order prevails," the president said, in memorial services that were
broadcast live across the country. "We must say, all Mexican men and
women, together, enough is enough."

Although Mexicans uniformly have stood behind Mr. Calderon's quest for
reestablishing civilian control throughout the nation, the escalation
of violence is making people fearful.

Luis Astorga, a Mexico City-based sociologist and authority on
Mexico's drug trade, argues in the Washington Post that the
assassination could have a "snowball effect, even leading to the risk
of ungovernability." The targeted killings of high-ranking members of
the Mexican law enforcement community are an indication, he says, of
"terrible things, a level of weakness in our (law enforcement)
institutions-they can't even protect themselves."

A recent email hoax reporting that Mr. Calderon had been wounded in an
assassination attempt sent shivers throughout the country.

The challenge for Mr. Calderon-and Mexico-is to avoid the failure of
Colombia, where civil society has come undone during a decades-long
war on drugs. Until now, Mexico had been more circumspect: the drug
cartels tended to operate along the border, thousands of miles from
Mexico City, where a quarter of the Mexican people live.

During the PRI era, "in order to coexist, the government looked the
other way as long as the cartels didn't wreak havoc in the country,"
Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, director of the Mexico Project at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies, told Rolling Stone. "It
became somewhat of a safety valve in terms of dealing with organized
crime, as a way of mitigating the political instability."

Mr. Calderon knows the risk of taking on the cartels but he also knows the
lesson of Colombia's monumental failure: accommodation leads to a breakdown
of civil society. In "Inside Colombia: Drugs, Democracy, and War," a study
of the failure of the war on drugs in Colombia, journalist Grace Livingstone
noted that "more trade unionists, journalists and mayors are killed here (in
Colombia) than anywhere else ... Most notoriously, it has the highest
kidnapping rate in the world. ... More than 50,000 people have died in
political violence since 1980 and the death rate is rising."

Mr. Calderon's optimism comes from what he has learned from Colombia's
failure:

When Washington throws money at a problem it gets worse. Washington's
pouring of half a trillion dollars into "Plan Colombia" over a quarter
century has destabilized that nation and fueled public corruption. Mr.
Calderon has made it clear that Mexico will not receive U.S. military
personnel, and the only assistance authorized, just this spring when
the U.S. Congress approved the Merida Initiative, would be limited to
$350 million in hardware-helicopters, communications equipment, and
related law enforcement supplies.

Colombia lacked a firm, consistent campaign. Where Colombia's efforts
have been hampered by a succession of presidents from opposing parties
since 1980 (Turba, Bentacur, Barco, Gaviria, Samper, Pastrana, Uribe),
Mexico's campaign has been led by Mr. Fox and now Mr. Calderon, both
from the same political party, and neither burdened by a "perpetual"
election since Mexico has one six-year presidential term. Mr. Calderon
is betting that a firm program can break the cartels between now and
when he leaves office in 2012.

Mexico remains a transit, and not a production, country. Colombian
peasants grow coca primarily in small family plots and are beholden to
drug kingpins who redistribute money in lavish "social" programs for
rural communities neglected by Bogota. In Mexico, however, the drug
cartels enjoy almost no support from the public. Mr. Calderon is
confident that, with the whole of Mexican society on his side in this
battle, he can press forward with a single voice and a united nation
behind him in ways Colombia has never been able to do. Whether or not
he succeeds will shape how Mexicans and Americans live their lives for
decades to come.