TOURISTS INSULATED FROM FIERCE DRUG TRADE

Cuauhtemoc Agustin Reyes was nobody's idea of an angel.

Wanted in the United States for murder, robbery, kidnapping, and
narcotics trafficking, this ill-tempered thug was holed up in a luxury
hotel on Mexico's Mayan Riviera, along with his 20-year-old girlfriend.

Then, one night last June, Reyes flew into a rage and started to trash
his holiday villa, thereby upsetting the hotel staff, who alerted police.

Before long, an agent of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation
showed up at the Cancun airport and accompanied Reyes on a flight
bound for California and the cold embrace of American justice.

It was a rare instance of two worlds colliding.

Each year, tens of thousands of foreign holidayers journey to the long
white beaches and variegated waters of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula,
mainly to escape the bleak weather back home.

For a week or two, they surround themselves with what seems to be a
Spanish-speaking version of paradise -- cerulean skies, caressing
sunshine, whispering waves, and glorious food, not to mention
friendly, law-abiding locals who always seem happy.

It seems too good to be true -- and that's exactly what it
is.

Just a seashell's toss from the beaches of Cancun or Acapulco, resides
a wholly different land, one that few Canadian holidayers ever encounter.

Once upon a time, that other, starker Mexico could be summed up by a
single word -- poverty -- but nowadays this impoverished republic is
also prey to another demon -- drugs.

"Now the drug problem just pervades Mexican society," says Daniel
Wilkinson of Human Rights Watch in New York. Late last month, a
Canadian couple from Woodbridge was killed in a hotel room while
holidaying south of Cancun. There is no evidence the murders were in
any way related to drugs.

But, each year, a huge number of deaths in Mexico are.

"Crime in Mexico may have been bad before," says Judith Teichman, a
Mexico expert at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the
University of Toronto, "but the expansion of the drug trade has put
this country in a very dangerous position."

Crime statistics in Mexico are notoriously unreliable, but it's safe
to say the rate of violent crime is alarmingly high and it is somehow
related to drugs.

"The five biggest drug cartels are in Mexico now," says Teichman.
"They're bigger than the Colombians now."

Combine this country's mounting narcotic woes with a long tradition of
incompetent and corrupt policing, plus a chronically dysfunctional
judicial system, and the result is not merely a mess, but a deadly
one.

In recent years, the South American drug trade has increasingly routed
itself through Mexico, as cocaine produced in Colombia makes its
clandestine way toward its hugely lucrative market in the United States.

"We're talking about powerful mafias," says Wilkinson of the drug
cartels in Mexico. "They're powerful, they're rich and they're ruthless."

The big Mexican drug cartels follow the same business strategy enunciated
by the late Colombian cocaine kingpin, Pablo Escobar: Plata o plomo.

Silver or lead.

First, they bribe you. If that fails, they kill you.

Largely dishonest to begin with, Mexican police have proven to be a
poor bulwark against the drug trade. They mostly respond the only way
they know how, by collecting payola or by picking people up off the
street and bludgeoning them till they say they're guilty.

"The most notorious problem is the use of torture," says Wilkinson.
"It's basically beating confessions out of people."

Meanwhile, drug traders now tend to pay off their minions in kind,
which has resulted in a burgeoning of so-called narco-menudeo -- or
retail drug trading -- as drug carriers hustle to turn their pay-off
into cash.

Mexico now has an alarming drug consumption problem, which has fuelled
an explosion in petty and not-so-petty crime. The country is widely
reckoned to be the world capital for kidnappings, many of them
so-called "express kidnappings" -- brief seizures carried out by
delinquents seeking modest ransoms, earmarked for drugs.

Nearly two years ago, a quarter of a million Mexico City residents hit
the streets in angry protest against the federal government's failure
to make inroads against crime, but there is no sign that anything has
improved since then.

Each year in the northern city of Tijuana, for example, one in five
households is broken into by burglars, most likely intent on
subsidizing their drug habits.