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