CALDERON'S UNWINNABLE WAR

Using Troops to Fight Mexico's Drug Lords Has Pushed the Death Toll
to New Highs, Testing Public Patience and Support.

The government official had just turned his SUV in to a narrow alley
near his office on May 14 when a red Pontiac cut him off. Next,
according to eyewitnesses, three gunmen on motorcycles pulled up
alongside and opened fire. The flawless assassination bore all the
hallmarks of the murders once carried out in Bogota and Medellin by
the henchmen of Colombia's notorious drug lords. But the mayhem this
time was in the upscale Mexico City district of Coyoacan. The victim
was Jose Nemesio Lugo, a 55-year-old Justice Department official who,
only a month earlier, had been put in charge of the attorney
general's national crime-intelligence center.

The Mexican news media were quick to blame domestic traffickers for
the hit. If they're right, it was only the latest bloody reprisal
sparked by President Felipe Calderon's massive military crackdown on
the country's growing drug trade. Rather than tamp down violence,
Calderon's decision to increase the military's role in the conflict
has had the opposite effect: Mexico today is at war, and it's not
clear who's winning. Since January, more than 1,000 people have died
in drug-related violence-on pace to eclipse last year's
record-breaking total of 2,000.

Last month alone, five Mexican soldiers, including a colonel, died in
an ambush in Calderon's home state of Michoacan; the body of an Army
captain was found near the highway from Mexico City to Acapulco, and
an admiral narrowly escaped assassination in Ixtapa. In an
unprecedented admission by a sitting Mexican president, Calderon
disclosed earlier this year that he has received death threats,
probably from drug lords.

Using the military to fight drugs isn't new in Mexico. The country's
armed forces were first used to eradicate marijuana and opium-poppy
crops in the late 1970s, and Calderon's predecessor, Vicente Fox,
sent hundreds of troops into six northern states in the late spring
and summer of 2005 to help restore a semblance of law and order. But
the current president has vastly increased the military's role. Faced
with a wave of drug-fueled violence that rose sharply in Fox's final
months, Calderon sent thousands of troops into Michoacan and the
neighboring state of Guerrero within weeks of taking office last
December. Since then, he has expanded their number to 24,000 and
widened the theater of operations to six other states. Calderon has
escalated the drug war in two other critical respects: the action now
includes much of central Mexico, not just the north; and instead of
limiting their efforts to crop eradication and intelligence
gathering, troops are now performing functions normally assigned to
police, such as raids, interrogations and the seizure of contraband.

Mexican officials say the surge is working: more than 1,000 gunmen
and traffickers have been arrested, and raids and roadblocks are
leading to almost daily drug captures. The president now seems bent
on expanding the war: his government recently announced plans to
create an elite military force capable of surgical strikes against traffickers.

One reason for the rising body count is that some cartels use highly
trained ex-members of the Army's Special Forces, known as Zetas, as
hired guns. "Calderon's war on drugs has firmly pinned Mexican Zetas
against their former comrades," noted a report issued by the
Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs in late May, "taking
the conflict to a new level." The cartels have also become more
brazen. A month ago dozens of gunmen invaded Cananea, near the U.S.
border, abducting seven cops and four civilians and sparking a
five-hour fire fight that left more than 20 dead. Senior government
officials have also become targets. The director of the Coahuila
state police's kidnapping and organized-crime unit was himself
kidnapped in May. A corpse was later found in Monterrey bearing a
note threatening the life of Nuevo Leon state's attorney general.
That same month, four bodyguards of Mexico state's governor were also
gunned down. A note attached to a severed head found a few hours
later seemed to link their deaths to vengeful drug lords.

Some experts are questioning the wisdom of using the military to
fight the cartels. The Mexican armed forces are not properly trained
for law enforcement, and using them for that purpose will expose
soldiers and officers to the same corruption that has undermined the
anti-drug efforts of the police. "We're talking about [cartels that
are] overwhelmingly powerful, that count on a huge network of
informants," says Adam Isacson of the Center for International Policy
in Washington. "It's too much to expect soldiers with a few years of
infantry training to tackle [them]."

Polls show the public still endorses the president's aggressive
strategy. But pundits wonder aloud if it is turning Mexico into the
Colombia of North America: a chaotic narco-state where politicians,
judges and senior cops either do the bidding of the country's crime
bosses or risk assassination. In a recent editorial, the influential
daily Reforma mused that Calderon "perhaps never imagined that the
resemblance between Colombia and Mexico would become so great so
quickly." Even some government officials have begun to acknowledge
the parallel. "They are different contexts," said Calderon's top
police official, Public Security Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna, in
mid-May. "[But] in the logic of a criminal, there are things that are
very similar."

This does not mean that Mexico is guaranteed to suffer the kind of
ongoing violence Colombia has weathered. Colombia's drug war was
greatly complicated by the involvement of left-wing guerrillas and
paramilitaries, two problems Mexico doesn't have. In relative terms,
the Mexican drug trade is also smaller: at an estimated $10 billion
to $30 billion a year, it represents a lesser slice of the national
economy than did Colombia's during the cartels' heyday.

The real danger is that, as happened in Colombia two decades ago, the
Mexican public could turn against the government's drug war unless it
achieves a dramatic reduction in the levels of violence. In the late
1980s, millions of Colombians initially welcomed a major offensive
launched by President Virgilio Barco against the late Pablo Escobar.
But when the boss of the Medellin cartel retaliated with a ruthless
terror campaign featuring Beirut-style car bombs and the
assassination of cabinet ministers, ordinary Colombians soon
experienced a change of heart, leading Barco's successor to adopt a
much more conciliatory approach.

A similar dynamic could easily play out in Mexico now. A recent cover
story in the left-wing newsmagazine Proceso characterized the current
campaign as "the Iraq of Calderon," and many question whether the
Mexican president has the political capital to sustain the crackdown
for the five and a half years remaining in his term. Various
"governments in both Colombia and Mexico promised a more vigorous
fight against drug traffickers than their predecessors," notes
Gustavo de Greiff, a former Colombian attorney general who moved to
Mexico in 1994 after receiving death threats. "They mobilized forces,
they put some people in jail and seized some drug shipments. But the
problem goes on and on and on, and it's never solved." Should Mexico
indeed follow that track, local officials-and those north of the
border-would be dealt yet another setback in the seemingly unwinnable
war on drugs.