CALDERON'S WAR

MEXICO CITY -- Every Monday morning, President Felipe Calderon
settles in at the head of the table in the presidential library at
Los Pinos, Mexico's fortresslike chief executive's compound.

Calderon presides over strategy sessions with the leaders of Mexico's
army and navy, key players in the centerpiece initiative of his
7-month-old presidency: a military assault against drug cartels. No
Mexican president in recent history has convened his security council
with such regularity, but few of his modern-day predecessors have
faced such a daunting security crisis.

Calderon is betting his presidency on a surge of Mexican troops --
one of the country's largest deployments of the military in a
crime-fighting role -- to wage street-by-street battles with drug
cartels that are blamed for more than 3,000 execution-style killings
in the past year and a half. Sending more than 20,000 federal troops
and police officers to nine Mexican states has made Calderon
extremely popular; his latest approval ratings hit 65 percent.

Military Use Opposed

But as the campaign drags into its eighth month and the death toll
mounts, Calderon is facing a growing cadre of critics, including the
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights representative in Mexico, who
opposes the use of the military in policing. Calderon is also
contending with enemies in Mexico's Congress who want to strip him of
the authority to dispatch troops without congressional approval. The
Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization, has
faulted him as quick to use the military but slow to change Mexico's
corrupt police.

All this is familiar territory for Calderon, a former congressman and
energy secretary who appears comfortable in the role of political scrapper.

Pundits predicted he would struggle in office after collecting barely
more than a third of the vote in last July's election and being
forced into a three-month legal battle -- three times as long as the
Bush-Gore electoral crisis in 2000 -- before being declared president
by Mexico's Supreme Electoral Tribunal.

Calderon inherited Mexico's drug problem, which was beginning to
rival in scope and savagery the 1980s drug wars in Colombia. Drug
lords, who make their riches trafficking in cocaine but also
methamphetamine and marijuana, were beheading rivals and killing
police officers, municipal officials and journalists who got in their
way. Some municipal governments and police forces were so infiltrated
by organized crime that they essentially ceased to function as public
service entities and became virtual arms of the cartels.

As far back as mid-July 2006, with the election outcome still in
doubt, Calderon began laying the groundwork for the military
campaign, said Mexico's attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora.

'Police Not Enough'

With corruption raging throughout local governments and only 27,000
federal police officers available, Medina Mora said, the military
seemed to be the only viable option.

"The size of the problem was large enough to understand that using
the full federal deployment of police was not enough," Medina Mora said.

By the time Calderon took office in December, Mexico's two most
powerful drug organizations -- the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels -- were
deep into a war over "plaza," as Mexicans call drug territory.
Carnage led the news almost every night. It was then that Calderon, a
careful, wonkish public speaker not known for soaring rhetoric,
started hitting verbal home runs.

"My hand won't tremble" in acting firmly to stop the crime that is
holding Mexicans hostage, Calderon said repeatedly.

On Dec. 11, 10 days after taking office, Calderon launched the first
of six military operations, sending more than 6,000 federal troops
and police officers to his home state of Michoacan. The next day, a
cousin of first lady Margarita Zavala was found murdered in the trunk
of a car outside Mexico City -- a killing that some suspect was
retribution by drug gangs. Undaunted, Calderon sent a force of 3,000
to Tijuana three weeks later.

The day after the Tijuana raid became a signal moment in Calderon's
drug war. He donned a khaki hat and military uniform to review his
troops in the city of Apatzingan, purportedly the first time in a
century that a Mexican president had dressed in military attire.

Columnists fretted that he would turn Mexico into a military state.

Others mocked the hang of a baggy uniform on the diminutive,
unathletic Calderon.

"He looked pathetic," Sen. Graco Ramirez -- a Calderon nemesis who is
the son, grandson and brother of Mexican army generals -- sniffed
during a recent interview at Mexico's legislative palace.

Ramirez is more than a fashion critic; he and other members of the
Democratic Revolutionary Party are among the leaders of a push to
declare the use of the military in drug raids unconstitutional.
Medina Mora counters that under the Mexican constitution, the armed
forces "have not only the power but the duty to preserve internal order."

Calderon dismissed the criticisms. In February, he announced a 45
percent pay increase for the Mexican army, a move that contrasted
neatly with a decision to lower his own salary by 10 percent and
abolish pensions for Mexican presidents.

Searches, gunbattles

In the months since he first appeared in a military uniform, Calderon
has sent thousands of troops to the infamous drug zones of Sinaloa,
Durango and Chihuahua, known as the Golden Triangle, and to Acapulco,
Veracruz and the states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon, home to
Mexico's industrial capital, Monterrey. The soldiers operate
roadblocks, cordon off urban areas for house-to-house searches and
frequently engage heavily armed drug dealers in gunbattles.

The troops have arrested more than 580 people, according to the
government, though only one would qualify as a major figure. Since
the military campaign began, 19 troops and 168 police officers have
been killed; more than 1,080 civilian deaths have been recorded,
though most of those were the result of infighting among cartels.

Analysts say it is too soon to tell whether the military operations
will have a long-term effect. Execution-style killings have decreased
somewhat in recent weeks, but some news reports attribute that to
what they call a truce between warring cartels; Medina Mora credits
the military and said there was no evidence of such a truce.

The approach has won admirers in the United States, where law
enforcement agencies have long pushed for Mexico to confront drug
cartels more aggressively.

Mexican authorities are hoping the United States will reciprocate by
paying for additional training and equipment. Calderon, in
particular, is suggesting that the United States has an obligation to
help with Mexico's law enforcement costs because of the extent of
Americans' illegal drug use. The talks have been complicated by
sensitivities in the United States related to Mexico at a time when
Capitol Hill lawmakers were debating immigration proposals.

"When there was a school shooting over in Russia, I got e-mails
saying, 'That's why we need a wall on the Mexican border,' " Reyes
said. "Regardless of what we do, there are going to be those who try
to politicize it."

Mexican authorities are well aware that political tensions could
delay or scuttle proposals for more U.S. aid. For now, they are
preparing for months, maybe years, of military battles with drug
leaders without more help from the United States and for long Monday
mornings in the presidential library.