EDITORIAL: WAVE OF KILLINGS THREATENS TO SWAMP CALDERON

The last thing Mexican President Felipe Calderon needs is an object
lesson in the power and reach of the Mexican drug cartels. But he got
one last week when a dozen people - including a television reporter
and a police chief - were gunned down in a wave of execution-style
killings, presumably the work of narcotics traffickers.

Amado Ramirez, a Televisa correspondent, was shot in the back three
times by an unknown gunman as he left a radio interview on Friday.
Also dead in the lastest wave of execution-style killings is Chief
Ernesto Gutierrez Moreno. Gutierrez was killed in Chilpancingo, the
state capital of Guerrero, which includes Acapulco. The chief was
killed while eating dinner in a Chilpancingo restaurant with his wife
and son.

Intenational journalist groups are calling on Calderon to launch a
federal investigation into the death of Ramirez. The same should hold
true in all homicides believed to be drug-related.

As in the United States, homicides are considered local matters, but
this wave of killings calls for a much firmer, federal hand.

Since taking office on Dec. 1, Calderon has deployed more than 24,000
federal police and soldiers to drug strong points throughout Mexico,
including Acapulco. The effort may pay off eventually, but the
narcotics traffickers - as if to mock the president's efforts -
continue to stack up bodies throughout the republic.

It is a test of wills played out on the nightly news. Though his
predecessors have wrestled with the drug cartels, none have done it
with as high a profile as Calderon has.

So, it is a test of strength and will that the world - and the United
States in particular - is watching. Calderon's effectiveness will be
judged inside and outside the country by how he handles the drug
crisis that is wracking his nation.

In this effort he will be able to deploy Mexican police and military,
but given the reach of drug cartels, the president might find it
lonely going. The expressions of outrage over the killings are largely
confined to human rights groups and the Mexican press. Politicians are
a little more timid in their condemnations of the evils of drugs and
those who purvey them.

For the United States, the stakes couldn't be higher. This country is
the prime market for the drugs that flow from and through Mexico - and
for the accompanying crime and misery the narcotics traffickers export.

It is not a war that will be won easily, as the rising death toll
attests. Nor will it be as simple as compiling arrest statistics. To
win, Calderon is going to have to show the drug traffickers a much
more united political establishment than he has been able to put
together in the short time he's been president.

His brief tenure notwithstanding, Calderon - known as master
negotiator - is going to have to move decisively and quickly, because
the narcotics lords appear to get stronger by the day and relish
public displays of violence to demonstrate not only their power, but
their contempt for Mexican authority.