MEXICO WINNING CARTEL WAR

The Mexican government, finally, is gaining the upper hand in a drug
war that has turned much of the border region and parts of interior
Mexico into war zones. President Felipe Calderon's campaign against
the cartels is now three-and-a-half years old and the death toll is
nearing 40,000. After a series of visits to Ciudad Juarez, the war's
epicenter, and interviews with federal law enforcement and
intelligence officials in Mexico City, I see convincing evidence that
the government has dramatically weakened the drug cartels, an
essential step if the country is to restore peace.

The strategy of "disarticulating" the cartels has been largely
successful. The command-and-control structure of the cartels has been
decimated and the cartels are severely fractured. Twenty-one of the
37 individuals on Mexico's most wanted list have either been
apprehended or killed. Of the five original cartels, two of them, the
Juarez Cartel and the Tijuana Cartel, are mere shadows of their once
powerful selves. The Gulf Cartel has split into two warring
factions. Last week, Mexican federal police captured Jose de Jesus
Mendez Vargas (better known as El Chango, or The Monkey), the leader
of La Familia, one of the country's most powerful criminal gangs. La
Familia's brutality against its rivals led Calderon to launch his
crackdown on organized crime. The Sinaloa Cartel, under the
leadership of the mythic "El Chapo" Guzman Loera, has always operated
more as a federation of closely allied organizations with Guzman as
the figurehead. The Beltran Leyva organization broke off from "El
Chapo" in 2008 and has been at war with him ever since. Ignacio
"Nacho" Coronel, a powerful leader within the Sinaloa Cartel, was
killed last year and his successor, Martin Beltran Coronel, has been
arrested. And there is evidence of ruptures between groups in
Durango, the heart of Guzman's territory. The cartels have been
eviscerated by a combination of federal operations and internecine conflict.

A factor making it increasingly difficult for the cartels to operate
is that they are being hunted by a variety of Mexican military and
law enforcement agencies. The Mexican army and marines operate
independently. The Mexican federal police force has quintupled in
size to 33,000 officers (and U.S. sources describe their cooperation
with American law enforcement as unprecedented). Finally, there is
the smaller Agencia Federal de Investigacion. Each of these entities
is pursuing the cartels, sometimes collaboratively, sometimes
independently, and each has taken down important cartel capos.

Another important variable is that it has also become much more
difficult and costly for cartels to ensure control and protection.
Prior to 2000, in PRI-controlled, pre-democracy Mexico, what was
decreed at the top levels of government was enforced all the way down
to the poorest municipalities. That made corruption
efficient. Well-placed bribes at the top controlled everything up
and down the line.

Today's playing field is much more complex, given that there are so
many actors. For example, even though the Beltran Leyva cartel was
paying the head of the organized crime unit in the Mexican Attorney
General's Office $450,000 a month to provide information about
investigations and operations, Mexican army special forces arrested
Alfredo Beltran Leyva in January 2008. His brother, Arturo Beltran
Leyva was subsequently killed in December 2009 by the Mexican
marines. There are simply too many players tracking down the cartels
and the latter can't pay everyone off. Mexico's fledgling
democratization has also increased the cartels' cost of doing
business. Once a country where a single party controlled everything,
today Mexico's three most influential political parties control
governorships and municipalities, making it more cumbersome and
expensive for the cartels to control local and regional institutions.

Together, the decimation of the cartels, the strengthening of federal
law enforcement institutions, and Mexico's increasing democratization
bode well for Mexico's future. However, for the present, taking down
cartel operatives and unprecedented seizures of cash, weapons and
drugs have had no appreciable impact on the one metric that matters
most to the Mexican public: the level of violence. The vast majority
of deaths are due to gang-on-gang disputes related to the local
retail drug business. This violence is more akin to the Bloods and
the Crips killing one another off in the streets of South Central
than it is a cartel war per se. The fracturing of the cartels has
also resulted in a proliferation of criminal bands engaging in
ordinary street crime, including the lucrative kidnapping and
extortion business. This crime is taking an enormous toll on
citizens, which is why Calderon's popularity is sagging,
notwithstanding his government's success against the cartels.

Today, Mexico is actually fighting two different wars: the war
against the cartels, which is under the purview of federal
authorities, and an explosion of ordinary street crime, much of which
is under the purview of state and local police forces. The Mexican
government is clearly winning the cartel war; it is local crime that
has become the country's biggest challenge. Even as it succeeds in
dismantling national and transnational drug trafficking networks,
Mexico will continue to have a significant crime problem until state
and local law enforcement are strengthened, judicial reforms are
implemented and the social conditions that are breeding grounds for
criminality improve.