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Losing The Battle
A sharp spike in drug-related violence has some analysts worrying about the 'Colombianization' of Mexico.

By Joseph Contreras
Newsweek International


July 11 issue - The hostages were found just before dusk in three houses on the southeastern outskirts of the Mexican border town of Nuevo Laredo. Most had their hands bound, some had been blindfolded with tape over their eyes, and at least one had been tortured and had to be rushed to a local hospital. But not all and probably not even most of the 44 captives discovered by federal agents and Army troops early last week were innocent victims of a kidnapping ring. As the police investigation unfolded, Mexican authorities suspected the kidnappers and many of their hostages belonged to the drug-trafficking underworld that has terrorized Nuevo Laredo for the past two years. Some of the captives may have failed to settle debts with neighborhood drug dealers. Others were likely foot soldiers in the employ of rival trafficking syndicates, rounded up to provide valuable information. Perhaps most disturbing of all, some of the detainees said they had been initially snatched by municipal police officers who were paid $300 for each hostage.

The discovery of the kidnap victims was only the latest twist in the escalating drug wars plaguing Mexico today. Nearly 700 people have been killed in drug-related violence thus far this year. Last month, after the newly named police chief of Nuevo Laredo was murdered within hours of accepting the job, the government of President Vicente Fox launched a crackdown in three northern states regarded as strongholds of the country's leading drug-trafficking cartels. The rising tide of lawlessness has stoked fears that a narcostate, where organized crime holds sway over Mexico's political elites, might one day emerge on the southern border of the United States. "There are growing signs that the Colombianization of Mexico is now becoming a reality," says Ted Galen Carpenter, a defense and foreign-policy expert at the right-wing Cato Institute in Washington. "If a similar process takes place in Mexico, it's going to be 10 times worse than in Colombia because Mexico is locked into the U.S. economically to a much greater degree."

Officials on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border dismiss such warnings as overblown. Mexico's Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca told the newspaper El Universal last month that the country's drug cartels represented no immediate threat to national security, and in its latest annual report on the international narcotics trade the U.S. State Department gave the Fox government high marks for "its intensive counternarcotics and law enforcement effort." If anything, say some U.S. officials, the current turf wars between dueling cartels in a number of Mexican border states erupted in response to the vacuum created by the Fox government's arrest of two major kingpins in 2002 and 2003. Parallels with Colombia, where both leftist guerrillas and right-wing militias are also engaged in drug trafficking, do not bear close scrutiny in their judgment. "In Mexico you don't have insurgent groups or terrorist organizations that are involved in virtually every aspect of drug trafficking," says Mike Braun, chief of operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. "We're getting greater cooperation from the Fox administration than from any previous Mexican government I know of."

At the same time, Braun and other U.S. officials don't try to downplay the magnitude of the challenge facing them in Mexico. Up to 90 percent of all the cocaine consumed in the United States is smuggled through Mexico. The country ranks as the largest foreign supplier of marijuana and the second largest source of heroin for the American market. More than half the methamphetamines sold in the United States are made in Mexico, and Mexican-run labs that operate north of the border account for much of the remainder. Inside the United States, Mexican traffickers control 11 of the 13 largest urban markets and have acquired a fearsome reputation. "The Mexican cartels are the most dangerous trafficking organizations in the world," says one U.S. official in Mexico City who asked not to be identified for security reasons. "They'll kill you for a dime, and they have everyone paid off and scared to death."

And that goes to the heart of Mexico's drug problem. The menace haunting the country's present and future stability starts with the letter C, but it's spelled "corruption," not "Colombia." Law enforcement is a notoriously low-paying career in Mexico, and an entry-level cop in a midsize city's police department makes as little as $135 a month. Confronted with a druglord's stark choice of plomo o plata (lead or money), many if not most Mexican policemen on the lower rungs of their agencies will opt for the bribe. "We're fine with respect to law enforcement at the central-government level," says the DEA's Braun, "but the farther you get from the seat of power, the more problematic things can become in a place like Mexico."

Nowhere is that more evident than on the mean streets of Nuevo Laredo. The city of 300,000 is the busiest port of entry along the 3,100km-long U.S.-Mexico border, with an average of 6,000 trucks crossing into Texas each day. That makes the town a highly coveted entrepot for drug traffickers, and in the late 1990s the Gulf cartel led by Osiel Cardenas began recruiting troops from a military-intelligence battalion who had been posted to the area to combat the drug gangs. The city became a full-blown war zone in 2003 when Cardenas was arrested and a cartel based in the Pacific-coast state of Sinaloa sent a large contingent of hit men to do battle with his private army of ex-soldiers. In more recent times the city's entire 724-member police force was confined to its stations last month after some local cops opened fire on a convoy of federal agents dispatched from Mexico City to restore order in Nuevo Laredo.

The city's economic fortunes took a nose dive when the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City issued a travel advisory in January voicing alarm over the recent deaths and disappearances of more than two dozen American citizens in Nuevo Laredo. The ensuing collapse of the city's cross-border tourist trade has driven retail sales down by 50 percent, and real-estate prices have also tumbled. Convoys of soldiers in black berets and armed with assault rifles began patrolling the streets of the city three weeks ago, but the casualty toll in Nuevo â€â€