DISPATCHES FROM THE WAR ON DRUGS

U.S. Ambassador To Mexico Carlos Pascual Loses His Job For Telling The Truth.

It took Mexican President Felipe Calderon more than three months, but
on March 19 he finally got his man. That's when Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton announced that she had accepted the resignation of the
U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual.

Mr. Pascual had earned the ire of Mr. Calderon for his critical
accounts of Mexico's prosecution of the war on drugs, sent to
Washington in 2009 and 2010. Those dispatches were supposed to be
confidential. When they were made public by Wikileaks in December,
they infuriated the Mexican president, who reportedly requested that
Mr. Pascual be removed.

Mr. Calderon is now rid of a diplomat whose "ignorance," the president
had told the Mexican daily Universal in a February interview,
"translates into a distortion of what is happening in Mexico."

There is no doubt a feeling in the presidential residence of Los Pinos
that Mexican honor, especially of the army, has been upheld. Yet the
assertion that Mr. Pascual was not up to speed on Mexico cannot be
sustained. The ambassador's analyses-and those of his colleagues in
the embassy who also wrote a number of the leaked cables-may have been
too frank for public viewing, but they were hardly controversial.
Indeed, it seems more likely that the cables hit a nerve because they
were all too accurate.

The bigger problem for both Mr. Calderon and the U.S. is that the
cables reveal how ineffective the lumbering government bureaucracies
on both sides of the border are against ruthless drug-trafficking
entrepreneurs. The gangsters run circles around the drug warriors
while bureaucrats record the carnage.

Take the March 2009 cable marked "Ciudad Juarez at the tipping point,"
which is signed by Charge Daffaires Leslie Bassett. It describes
Mexico's 2008 "response to a then unprecedented spasm of violence" in
the northern state of Chihuahua with "the deployment of some 2,000
military and 500 federal police officers." It goes on to say that
while the operation "succeeded to an extent in disrupting the cartels
. . . as a public security effort [it] proved to be a significant
failure." That's why, "as bloodshed in Juarez continued to escalate in
the first months of 2009," the government decided it would "deploy an
additional 5,000 troops and 2,000 federal police officers to the area
to retake control of what was a quickly deteriorating situation."

That produced a "dramatic-if possibly temporary-drop in violence since
the arrival of federal forces." But the cable also noted that no one
knew why. None of the theories involved the possibility that the good
guys were winning. The Juarez city government "suggests the operation
is causing the 'cockroach effect,' forcing cartel operatives to
scatter and relocate to other border states." Meanwhile, U.S. law
enforcement officials and the Mexican army believed that the mobsters
were "simply lying low to observe and collect intelligence" and that
they would likely "renew the fight."

An October 2009 cable, signed by Mr. Pascual, reported that Mexican
Undersecretary for Governance Geronimo Gutierrez Fernandez lamented
that the early phase of the Merida Initiative ($400 million for the
drug war approved by Congress in June 2008) did not contain "enough
strategic thought." There was too much focus "on equipment, which they
now know is slow to arrive and even slower to be of direct utility,"
and not enough focus on institution building.

The cable continues: "[Mr. Gutierrez Fernandez] went on to say,
however, that he now realizes there is not even time for the
institution building to take hold in the remaining years of the
Calderon administration. 'We have 18 months,' he said, 'and if we do
not produce a tangible success that is recognizable to the Mexican
people, it will be difficult to sustain the confrontation into the
next administration.'" And: "He expressed a real concern with
'losing' certain regions."

Mr. Pascual reported that soon after 15 Juarez high school and
university students, with no links to the cartels, were massacred in
January 2010, Mr. Calderon "created an unprecedented level of
engagement by every level of government to address the violence in
Juarez." He also wrote that the U.S. was "well-placed to support
efforts to implement new and creative strategies." The 2010 drug-war
death toll in Juarez reached more than 3,000.

In November 2009, Mr. Pascual wrote that Mexico's security strategy
"lacks an effective intelligence apparatus to produce high quality
information and targeted operations," and also that there was
resistance to information sharing because some units viewed "local
military commands as often penetrated by organized crime." In another
cable Mr. Pascual charged that the Mexican army sat on intelligence
that the U.S. gave it in the hunt for drug kingpin Arturo Beltran
Leyva, who was later killed by the Mexican navy.

It is not surprising that Mr. Pascual's observations were considered
unfair given the price Mexico has paid battling America's drug habit.
But it is the truth of the embassy's account of events, which
demonstrate the futility of the effort, that does the most harm to Mr.
Calderon's noble cause. Getting Mr. Pascual fired changes none of that.