Pubdate: Fri, 4 Jul 2008
Source: Province, The (CN BC)
Copyright: 2008 Reuters
Contact: http://www.canada.com/theprovince/letters.html
Website: http://www.canada.com/theprovince/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/476
Author: Catherine Bremer, Reuters
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Mexico (Mexico)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Felipe+Calderon

DRUG CARTELS WINNING THE EVIL WAR

Analysts Estimate That As Many As Half of Police Officers Paid by Cartels

MEXICO CITY - President Felipe Calderon has staked his reputation on 
wiping out Mexico's drug violence but his campaign is in trouble as 
trafficking gangs murder ever more people, target police and openly 
recruit hitmen.

Calderon's first move on taking power 18 months ago was to launch a 
bold $7-billion army-led assault on powerful drug cartels, vowing to 
wrest back control of violence-scarred northern border states.

His army busts have put a string of senior smugglers behind bars and 
captured truckloads of cocaine and cash.

But the top drug lords are still free, and disrupting years-old 
trafficking alliances and protection networks has sparked an 
explosion in killings between rival gangs who dump hacked-off heads 
and tortured bodies in public.

The bloodshed has dented Calderon's popularity and left him bogged 
down in a vicious war with the odds of winning it stacked against him.

Calderon, 45, has defined success as reducing the violence, but drug 
murders have instead soared to more than 4,000 since his offensive 
began, and the turf wars intensified this year.

In brazen defiance of Calderon's pledge to gain the upper hand, 
cartel hitmen are picking off police from grim hit lists and hanging 
banner advertisements on highways offering fat wages for soldiers to 
defect and join them.

"They're not scared of him," said Eduardo Valle, a veteran drug 
expert who was a top advisor to Mexico's attorney-general in the 
mid-1990s and now lives on the Mexico-U.S. border.

Although the army has failed to stop the violence, Calderon cannot 
withdraw the troops without conceding defeat for a policy that the 
quiet but tough leader himself set as a top priority.

"It's much easier to send the army out on the streets than bring them 
back to barracks. He can go neither forward nor backward," Valle said.

Cartels typically surrender turf temporarily when the army moves in, 
but experts say it doesn't hurt their underlying business because 
they just switch to other smuggling channels.

Calderon is the latest in a string of presidents to try to tackle the 
gangs that took root in the 1970s and eventually took over from 
Colombian cartels as Latin America's dominant trafficking groups.

But he is the first to use the army on a massive scale, with some 
25,000 soldiers and federal police deployed across the country. 
Dramatic car chases, daylight gun battles and raids of safe houses 
are all part of the military offensive.

Some Mexicans in smuggling hot spots protect drug barons who bolster 
local economies and reward loyalty with lavish street parties, but as 
police murders have leapt Calderon has urged Mexicans to stand 
together to "confront this evil."

Yet the cartels run their multibillion-dollar businesses shrewdly 
with intricate underground networks of contacts and huge arsenals of weapons.

The army raids have made some prominent captures, hurting the east 
coast Gulf cartel and accelerating a split inside the Pacific coast 
Sinaloa cartel, but the cartels seem able to quickly replace those 
arrested or killed.

Border training camps provide a stream of new recruits from youths 
who associate trafficking with glamour and wealth, and robust U.S. 
and European demand for cocaine and other drugs keeps the illicit 
rewards worth the risks for many.

While the army grapples to keep control, escalating violence has 
killed more than 1,400 people this year alone, including some children.

Severed heads and trussed-up bodies have been dumped in public, often 
with warning notes, as far from the border as Mexico City and the 
Pacific beach resort of Acapulco.

Most victims are gang members and the violence has yet to scare off 
foreign investors or tourists, although they are more careful about 
where they go in Mexico. But 500 police have been slain over the 18 
months and panic sown by hoax e-mails warning of public gun battles 
shows Mexicans are frightened.

"They are accelerating the violence. We've never had this kind of 
conflict in the country," said Samuel Gonzalez, the head of Mexico's 
anti-organized crime unit in the late 1990s and now a professor at 
Mexico's ITAM university.

"The cartels have an infinite capacity to recruit hitmen. The 
violence will keep rising with one extra factor -- the state is 
losing force all the time as it spends money on the army, while the 
others are getting income from drugs," he said.

Attorney-General Eduardo Medina Mora and U.S. officials say the surge 
in violence proves Calderon is squeezing the cartels, but critics say 
they would regain any secured turf within days of troops leaving.

"They're basing this on territory, not structure. It's a kind of game 
that encourages competition between cartels," said Valle. "When the 
army leaves the bad guys will come back."

Insiders say the only way to weaken cartels is to attack the 
organized crime and money-laundering cells that support them, cut off 
their supply of smuggled U.S. weapons and weed out their protectors, 
from traffic cops to judges.

As many as half of Mexico's police are estimated to be in the pay of 
cartels. Drug lords also fund municipal and state political 
campaigns, analysts say.

"Military solutions alone never work," said Gonzalez. "The government 
needs to start fighting corruption, which is something we're not 
seeing at all." 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake