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October 26, 2005
Letter From the Americas
In the Border Brutality, Discerning a Bright Side
By GINGER THOMPSON
MEXICO CITY - Up in the clouds on the presidential airplane, Vicente Fox summoned the deep, defiant tone of voice that helped bring down seven decades of autocracy to talk about his government's fight against a wave of drug-related violence that has badly shaken the nation's faith in its young democracy.

"We are going to win the battle against insecurity," he said, pounding his fist on a table. "It is a frontal war. It is a permanent fight. It is going to take time, but we are going to win."

On the streets below, where the battle the president talked about has set new benchmarks for brutality, signs of imminent victory are hard to see. At 30,000 feet, though, he discovered a silver lining in the clouds of violence. The fight against drugs has become so ugly, he said, because for the first time the fight is for real.

To the president and high-level law enforcement officials interviewed in recent weeks, the violence is a tough but logical side effect of the progress made in recent years with the arrests of at least a dozen powerful kingpins. And the growing transparency within the government, Mr. Fox added, has weakened the old corrupt networks that allowed the cartels to move through society, and prosper.

"We have detained 12 major leaders of organized crime," Mr. Fox went on. "Now there are the 'tigrillos,' the minor, young members of these cartels who are trying to take over the spaces of their bosses, and they are killing each other."

Independent analysts and human rights investigators do not disagree with Mr. Fox. Yet while it was his crackdown that set off the wildfire of violence, they say, the government lacks the resources to put it out.

"It's as if Fox clubbed a beehive, but didn't think about how he would protect himself from the angry swarms of bees," said Jorge Chabat of the prominent Mexican research organization CIDE. "The state has the capacity to capture drug traffickers, but it does not have the resources to deal with the violence that followed because the police are the same, the prison systems are the same and the rest of the institutions are as weak as ever."

The violence has grown most intense in Nuevo Laredo, across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Tex. The bustling commercial center - more than 60 percent of the trade between the United States and Mexico passes through it - has in the last year become the murder capital of Mexico's northern frontier, and ground zero in the government's efforts to smash drug cartels.

More than 130 people have been killed there so far this year, including a city councilman and a police chief gunned down less than seven hours after being sworn in, as drug traffickers fight for control of the lucrative transportation routes that run through Nuevo Laredo onto Texas Interstate 35. That is more than twice the number of people slain in Nuevo Laredo last year. But the number of killings is not what has alarmed people across the country as much as the style and duration of the violence.

At the end of a recent interview, Deputy Attorney General José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos showed a videotape of a shooting in Nuevo Laredo last summer. Automatic machine-gun fire lasted for seven full minutes on a main avenue of the city. The camera captured exploding cars and images of bodies turned to ashes and bone.

"It could be Baghdad," Mr. Vasconcelos said. "This is truly a war."

When pressed for evidence that Mexico is winning this war, law enforcement authorities talked about the tens of thousands of drug dealers they have put behind bars, the hundreds of suspicious police officers and prison guards dismissed from duty and the thousands of federal police officers and soldiers sent to patrol cities all along the border.

But the killings not only continue, they have spread from Nuevo Laredo to the Pacific Coast, which federal authorities consider the main landing area for drug shipments from Central America. Investigators like Omar Muñiz, of the Center for Border Studies and the Promotion of Human Rights, said that with only a handful of the investigations into the drug killings leading to arrests, impunity remains the rule. And when local police officers in Nuevo Laredo continue to earn less than $700 a month, he said, they remain easily corruptible.

"Our task is very difficult," the attorney general, Daniel Cabeza de Vaca, acknowledged in an interview. "Neither us nor anyone else in the world is going to be able to compete with the drug traffickers' power to corrupt. It is their greatest weapon."

Scholars like Mr. Chabat suggested there might be one greater. It is impossible to understand the power of drug trafficking in Mexico, he wrote recently, without understanding the "unholy alliance" between the state and organized crime.

It is an alliance, Mr. Chabat wrote in the magazine Letras Libres, that is based partly on corruption and partly on the incapacity of this country's weak institutions to fight organized crime. But it is also driven by the vast economic benefits that come with drug trafficking. The illegal industry, he said, creates jobs, supports political campaigns, builds highways and industrial parks and brings badly needed services to some of the poorest communities.

"That does not mean that there exists a policy to foment drug trafficking to attract the capital it produces," Mr. Chabat added, "but there are real incentives that go beyond corruption, that stop authorities from fighting it."

On the president's plane, Mr. Fox vowed his government would not back down from the fight. But he also conceded that there were forces beyond his government's control that made it hard to defeat the cartels completely. Perhaps the most powerful, he said, was the demand for drugs from this country's wealthy neighbor to the north.

"What happens to all the drugs that enter the United States?" he said. "What happens to all the criminals in the United States who distribute and sell drugs? What happens to those who launder money, and then that money comes back to Mexico to bribe and corrupt our police?"