Mexico Under Siege

MISTRUST BEDEVILS WAR ON CARTELS

The U.S. has begun pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into
Mexico to help stanch the expansion of drug-fueled violence and
corruption that has claimed more than 5,000 lives south of the border
this year.

The bloodshed has spread to American cities, even to the heartland,
and U.S. officials are realizing that their fight against powerful
drug cartels responsible for the carnage has come down to this:
Either walk away or support Mexican President Felipe Calderon's
strategy, even with the risk that counter-narcotics intelligence,
equipment and training could end up in the hands of cartel bosses.

Both nations agree that the cartels have morphed into transnational
crime syndicates that pose an urgent threat to their security and
that of the region. Law enforcement agencies from the border to Maine
acknowledge that the traffickers have brought a war once dismissed as
a foreign affair to the doorstep of local communities. The trail of
slayings, kidnappings and other crimes stretches through at least 195
U.S. cities.

The rapidly escalating problem will probably present the Obama
administration with hard choices on how to work with Mexico to combat
the cartels and the gun-running, money-laundering and other illicit
businesses that nourish them.

So far, the fight has largely been waged by the Calderon
administration, which deployed thousands of federal troops and police
to 18 states to take on the cartels, some of which have paramilitary
forces protecting them and many police officers and politicians in
their pockets.

"They know they have a monumental undertaking, but you have to start
somewhere," Michael A. Braun, former assistant director and chief of
operations at the Drug Enforcement Administration, said of the
Mexican government. "If you don't, in another five years the cartels
will be running Mexico."

The U.S. answer for fighting the cartels is contained in a package
known as the Merida Initiative, named for the Mexican city where it
was unveiled by Presidents Calderon and Bush in October 2007. When
Congress passed the first installment of the three-year aid package
in June, it contained at least 33 programs, giving about $400 million
to Mexico for this fiscal year and $65 million for drug-fighting
efforts in various Central American and Caribbean countries.

The first tranche of money was delayed until this month, and
squabbling and other problems have held up delivery of most direct
assistance. A senior State Department official confirmed that Mexico
would have to wait more than a year for at least two U.S. transport
helicopters and a reconnaissance plane that it says it desperately needs.

Starting From Scratch

Some senior U.S. counter-narcotics officials and lawmakers say the
U.S.-Mexico relationship has been so polluted for decades by
mistrust, neglect and failure to collaborate that the countries must
build much of their anti-drug strategy from scratch, even at a time
when beheadings and other brutal slayings have become commonplace in Mexico.

They fear the cartels are so strong and well-funded that Mexican
government forces will continue to be undertrained, under-equipped
and outgunned for years, even with U.S. aid. And they say it could
take decades and billions of dollars more to establish the
corruption-resistant criminal justice institutions needed to
eliminate the cartels and their government benefactors.

"You need a robust internal capacity to identify the cancer, cut it
out and move on while checking the margins to make sure it hasn't
spread," said Braun, who is now managing partner at Spectre Group
International, a security consulting firm. "And they have never done
that. They never institutionalized law enforcement at any level."

U.S. authorities remain deeply troubled that corruption in the top
echelons of Calderon's administration could undermine the Merida
effort. Some said the recent arrest of Mexico's former drug czar, Noe
Ramirez Mandujano, on suspicion of taking a $450,000 bribe from the
cartels showed that Calderon's effort to root out corruption was working.

Some U.S. officials say they share more information than ever with
Mexico. Others are conducting damage assessments after Ramirez's
arrest, and after Mexico revealed that cartel operatives had
infiltrated Interpol, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and even DEA operations.

Calderon will probably discover more corruption within his government
and his administration, but he deserves credit for requesting
assistance and battling the cartels since his election two years ago,
Braun and other current and former U.S. officials said.

Since it was first unveiled in Merida, the drug plan has been
criticized as a confusing patchwork of questionable programs,
including military and law enforcement training, high-tech
drug-detection scanners and gang-prevention programs.

Then Congress set about making it even more complicated.

Some lawmakers got more money for U.S. counter-narcotics efforts, and
others focused on more funding for Central American regional security
programs. Many have complained that no one is coordinating the
initiative, and that turf battles and confusion reign among the many
agencies that have a piece of it.

"You've got so many different agencies involved -- who would you even
put in charge of it?" said an official with the State Department's
Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, who
spoke on condition of anonymity.

Hard Feelings

Privately, Mexican officials are furious with Bush for not doing more
to investigate and stop the flood of assault weapons coming in from
U.S. gun shops and gun shows. One senior Mexican official said the
weapons made up about 90% of the cartels' arsenals.

And Mexico continues to accuse Washington of doing far too little to
diminish the southbound flow of billions of dollars in laundered drug
proceeds and drug precursor chemicals, even though both are addressed
in the initiative.

Washington, particularly the DEA, is so distrustful of Mexican
authorities that they share sensitive counter-narcotics intelligence
and evidence with only a small group of Mexican officials.

These include a handful of recently installed top aides to Calderon
and about 225 Mexican law enforcement officials who have been
thoroughly investigated and trained, and who can be continually
monitored by the U.S.

They say they have no choice.

"It is very troubling from the standpoint that in order for us to
help the government of Mexico help themselves, we've got to have the
confidence to share very sensitive information without the fear that
that information is going to be leaked to the traffickers or to
others in a way that could compromise operations and ultimately get
people killed," said Anthony Placido, the DEA's director of intelligence.

"It would be easy to take the path of least resistance and say
they're all corrupt and we can't work with them," Placido said. "But
the reality is it is simply much too important not to. They have
taken on these traffickers, and now they have to win. And they
deserve and need our support."

The contentiousness surrounding the Merida plan is no surprise to
veteran counter-narcotics officials and policymakers. They say it is
emblematic of a turbulent relationship between the two countries that
has often been defined by bickering, public finger-pointing and an
overall atmosphere of mistrust.

For more than two decades, U.S. officials have accused Mexico of
ignoring hard evidence that violent homegrown crime syndicates were
gaining power and corrupting its police, army and government in a
lucrative campaign to flood American streets with cocaine, heroin and
other drugs.

Mexican officials said Washington had done little to diminish
Americans' voracious demand for illicit drugs, and had made Mexico
vulnerable by cracking down on the Colombian cartels, which then
turned to Mexican organizations to move their drugs to the U.S.

And after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. turned away from
the drug fight, some Mexican officials say.

As the two countries watched and often feuded, the drug groups grew
into sophisticated and deadly organized-crime cartels with a global
reach, a strong U.S. presence and a stranglehold over many of the
Mexican governmental institutions responsible for stopping them.

DEA intelligence now estimates that the cartels are paying hundreds
of millions in bribes a year and that they have expanded their
operations to Africa, Europe and elsewhere.

Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's ambassador to the U.S. and a former
counter-narcotics official, cautioned that Merida was only a first step.

He said it wouldn't be easy to improve cross-border interdiction,
intelligence-sharing and an integration of both countries'
counter-narcotics efforts after so much neglect.

"Obviously, the longer you take to address a challenge or disease,
the harder it is to root out," Sarukhan said. "And whoever thinks
that the Merida Initiative or the type of cooperation that we have
implemented since President Calderon arrived is a silver bullet that
will eliminate a decades-old challenge in Mexico is wrong."