The Americas

INNOCENT MEXICANS BEAR THE BRUNT OF DRUG VIOLENCE

On June 2, Nuevo Laredo police commander Enrique Cardenas was shot
dead in front of his nine-year-old daughter. Two weeks later
Alejandro Dominguez took the job as the city's top cop. "I'm not
afraid of anyone, and I don't owe anybody anything," Dominguez said
as he was sworn in. Six hours later the new police chief was also
dead, riddled with bullets.

Nuevo Laredo used to be a sleepy Mexican city popular with U.S.
day-trippers from Laredo, Texas, who liked to pop over the border for
a ride in a horse-drawn carriage, a stroll around the city square and
a chicken mole dinner. Today, U.S. demand for illicit drugs and a
battle for turf between drug cartels that want to serve those
consumers have turned the town into a virtual war zone.

The violence is destabilizing the border, disrupting North American
economic integration and threatening the lives and livelihoods of
innocents caught in the crossfire. But those are only the most
obvious casualties. For the U.S. there is something even bigger to
worry about: the alliances that narco-trafficking gangsters seem to
enjoy with political extremists in places like Colombia and Bolivia.
It is worth asking where all this leads if political terrorists begin
operating along the Rio Grande as they have for years in the Andes.

Nuevo Laredo is far from the only Mexican city under siege by drug
cartel capos. Last week, the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported that
President Vicente Fox had sent 1,000 troops to restore order in eight
border towns: "Army humvees equipped with machine guns roam through
the streets of towns such as Matamoros, Nuevo Laredo, Tijuana and
Mexicali, while federal police forces have set up check points on
several roads in the states of Tamaulipas, Baja California and
Sinaloa," El Pais reported.

In the narcotics trafficking business, the "last mile," when illegal
substances cross the U.S. border, is where they gain much of their
value. That's because the costs and risks involved raise the "street"
price. For years Tijuana has suffered gangster violence
disproportionate to the rest of Mexico because of its strategic
position for drug traffickers. But now the shoot-outs and murders are
flaring all along the U.S.-Mexican border.

When Mr. Fox reportedly sent some 400 federal agents to Nuevo Laredo
in response to the assassination of the police chief, it was only his
latest effort to crack down on drug trafficking and violence at the
border. Reportedly since 2000 the Fox government has taken out more
than a dozen cartel heads and scores of "deputy" chiefs. Yet
paradoxically, things have gotten worse. When the bosses are
sidelined, the criminal elements metastasize. Police point to the
2003 arrest of the head of the Gulf cartel as the provocation for the
attempt by the Sinoloa cartel to take over Gulf's trafficking routes
in Nuevo Laredo.

One Mexican official put it this way: "Federal agents have hit them
hard. The heads have been chopped off. Now there is gang war and
anarchy. They are splitting into groups and fighting each other."
According to a report by Intelligence Research Ltd., "The CIA and DEA
claim that there are now 100 different Mexican gangs involved in the
U.S. cocaine trade."

The social damage from gang warfare is abetted by two other classic
manifestations of the drug trade. The first is the corruption of
local law enforcement. Mexican news reports say that when federal
agents arrived in Nuevo Laredo in the second week of June, some 40
Nuevo Laredo police fired on them, badly injuring one agent. The
federal government promptly detained hundreds of local
law-enforcement officers. A spokesman for Mr. Fox said, "There is
clear evidence of the relationship between drug gangs and the Nuevo
Laredo police force.

The second facet is the rise of mercenary armies, some with members
recruited from the regular army. One well-trained group of assassins,
known as the "Zetas," has been hired by one of the cartels to carry
out execution-style murders. The Zetas are also known for their
intimidation of police and city officials and extortion practices
against local businesses. Their success depends heavily on
terrorizing the population, which explains why slayings have now
become very public events. Such brutality demonstrates that
compliance with the drug traffickers is not always a matter of greed.
It can also be a matter of survival for public officials and their families.

In a 1993 column, late Journal Editor Robert Bartley noted that while
some in Congress wanted to resist closer relations with Mexico
because of drug trafficking, "the Mexicans see themselves as
deserving partners, spending blood and money to hold the front line
in a drug war waged primarily for the benefit of the gringos."

That sentiment is no less true today. Mexican officials, judges,
journalists and civic leaders face slim odds of survival if they
decide to challenge the drug-trafficking business. The cartels have
become highly sophisticated in their tactics. They also employ
high-tech weaponry, which Mexico asserts comes from the U.S. It has
asked the U.S. government to do more to cut off arms trafficking into
Mexico so that Mexican law enforcement has at least a fighting
chance. "We don't stand much of a chance against organized crime and
their high-powered weapons from the black market," one police trainer
told the Dallas Morning News.

It is likely that many more Mexicans will give their lives in what
increasingly appears to be an impossible task: stopping Americans
from getting their hands on mind-altering substances. Even U.S.
officials seem to hint at that reality from time to time. Last week,
OsterDowJones Commodity Wire quoted a U.S. official saying, "The key
to interdiction is to get it before it hits the ground. Once it hits
the ground in Mexico, you might as well say it's in the United States."

So all Mexico has to do is seal off every possible sea, land and air
route into the country -- including, by the way, the rumored
air-drops made into its southern jungles -- and we will have won the
war on drugs.

But until that glorious day arrives, innocent Mexicans on the border
are caught in this policy nightmare. Referring to the vacant
police-chief post in Nuevo Laredo, a Texas sheriff, Rick Flores, told
the Dallas Morning News, "Whoever takes that job will be signing a
death certificate." Asked if he would want it, he said, "Hell, no.
It's bad for your health."