IN DRUG WAR, MEXICO FIGHTS CARTEL AND ITSELF

REYNOSA, Mexico - An army convoy on the hunt for traffickers rolled
out of its base recently in this border town under the control of the
Gulf Cartel - and an ominous voice crackled over a two-way radio
frequency to announce just that. The voice, belonging to a cartel
spy, then broadcast the soldiers' route through the city, turn by
turn, using the same military language as the soldiers.

"They're following us," Col. Juan Jose Gomez, who was monitoring the
transmission from the front seat of an olive-green pickup truck, said
with a shrug.

The presence of the informers, some of them former soldiers,
highlights a central paradox in Mexico's ambitious and bloody assault
on the drug cartels that have ravaged the country. The nation has
begun a war, but it cannot fully rely on the very institutions - the
police, customs, the courts, the prisons, even the relatively clean
army - most needed to carry it out.

The cartels bring in billions of dollars more than the Mexican
government spends to defeat them, and they spend their wealth to
bolster their ranks with an untold number of politicians, judges,
prison guards and police officers - so many police officers, in fact,
that entire forces in cities across Mexico have been disbanded and
rebuilt from scratch.

Over the past year, the country's top organized crime prosecutor has
been arrested for receiving cartel cash, as was the director of
Interpol in Mexico. The cartels even managed to slip a mole inside
the United States Embassy. Those in important positions who have
resisted taking cartel money are often shot to death, a powerful
incentive to others who might be wavering.

This was a war started by Mexico, but supported - and in some ways
undermined - by the United States. The template was made in the
United States, a counternarcotics strategy originally designed for
Colombia. Mexico is using American intelligence to track the
traffickers and is awaiting a fleet of American helicopters and
aircraft to pursue them, part of hundreds of millions of dollars in
aid initiated by President George W. Bush and expanded in recent days
by President Obama.

At the same time, American drug users are fueling demand for the
drugs, and American guns are supplying the firepower wielded with
such ferocity by Mexico's cartels - a reality acknowledged by
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on her trip to Mexico last week.

With the prospect of a quick victory increasingly elusive, a rising
chorus of voices on both sides of the border is questioning the cost
and the fallout of the assault on the cartels.

Mexicans, aghast at the rising body count, the mutilated corpses on
their streets and the swagger of the drug chieftains, wonder if they
are paying too high a price in pursuing organized crime groups that
have operated for generations on their soil. "Sometimes, I think this
is a war you can't really win," a Mexican soldier whispered to a
reporter, out of earshot of his commander, during a recent drug
patrol in Reynosa. "You do what you can, but there's so many more of
them than us."

Americans, including border state governors and military analysts in
Washington, have begun to question whether the spillover violence
presents a threat to their own national security, and, to the outrage
of many Mexicans, whether the country itself will crumble under the
strain of the war.

A War's Origins

The impetus for the drug war began during President Felipe Calderon's
2006 campaign.

Although the economy was the No. 1 issue, Mr. Calderon, a
law-and-order technocrat, was paying attention to a steady rise in
criminality early on. Mr. Calderon received threats on his life from
drug cartels during the campaign, fueling his outrage, according to
officials close to him. And he began to suspect that drug money was
finding its way into political parties.

After a nail-biter of a victory, by about half of a percent of the 41
million ballots cast, so close that his main opponent still does not
recognize it, Mr. Calderon opted to send the army into the streets to
fight the drug cartels. He aimed for the bold step to win the support
of the crime-weary population and to bolster his legitimacy as the
president for all Mexicans.

While his contested election seemed to fade quickly from public
discussion, the drug war proved a e bigger headache. About 28 months
down the line, the government trumpets record seizures of drugs,
money and guns to show that it is striking serious blows against the
traffickers.

As further evidence of success, the government cites the tens of
thousands of arrests it has made of rank-and-file members of the four
main Mexican cartels and of some of the kingpins leading them.
Recently, three top traffickers have been arrested, including one
accused of organizing an assault on the United States Consulate in Monterrey.

The United States Drug Enforcement Administration says Mexico's
battle against drugs is clamping down on supplies, citing the
doubling of cocaine prices in the United States over the past two years.

But violence has gone up, not down. Although Mexicans have largely
backed Mr. Calderon's efforts, the figure they seem most fixated on
these days is the more than 6,200 drug-related killings in 2008, up
more than 100 percent from 2007, and the more than 1,100 so far in 2009.

The deaths, many of them gruesome mutilations intended by the cartels
to attract notice, come from dealers enforcing discipline within
their ranks, from bitter turf battles among rival cartels and from
clashes between criminals and the authorities. Prompting the most
outrage, but representing the smallest number, are innocents struck
down by stray bullets, enveloped by the ever-present drug war.

While Mr. Calderon dismisses critiques suggesting that Mexico is a
failed state, he and his aides have spoken bluntly of the cartels'
attempts to set up a state within a state, levying taxes, throwing up
roadblocks and enforcing their own codes of behavior. The Mexican
government says there are now 233 "zones of impunity," areas where
crime runs rampant, down from 2,204 zones a year ago.

Mr. Calderon and his security team argue that the violence shows the
desperation of the cartels as the government dismantles them. The
D.E.A. agrees that the cartels are in their death throes, but it says
it expects the violence to get worse in the near future.

Any projection that tougher times are on the horizon alarms an
already jittery public. Tougher than the head of the federal police
killed by hitmen last year? Tougher than the heads of nine soldiers
found in plastic bags? Tougher than the cartels flaunting their power
by hanging banners on bridges listing their demands?

National Weaknesses

It has long been considered a Mexican cultural eccentricity that the
country's police officers are poorly paid and encouraged by
supervisors to make ends meet through bribes. These days, however,
those offering the biggest mordidas, as the illicit changing of money
is known, are the traffickers, who Mr. Calderon's administration
acknowledges have thousands of police officers, small-town mayors and
even high-level government officials across the country on their
payroll, something now regarded as a full-fledged national crisis.

"Anybody could be a narco," said a Mexican government official, using
the Spanish slang for someone with links to the drug traffickers.

In fact, before the Mexican government names someone to a high-level
antidrug post, it often runs the leading candidates by the D.E.A.,
which conducts background checks and lie-detector tests to ensure
that the people about to be hired to fight criminals are not
criminals themselves.

Even in normal times, when morgues are not overflowing, the bulk of
Mexico's crimes are never solved. One investigation found that only
24 of every 1,000 crimes reported to authorities resulted in suspects
being sentenced. Of every 100 people taken into custody on suspicion
of committing a crime, fewer than 4 were ever found guilty, the same
study found. Evidence is mishandled, witnesses refuse to speak and
the judiciary is manipulated.

The authorities often spotlight arrests, hauling the suspects before
the cameras, and then quietly release them after the 80 days of
investigation that Mexico's system allows.

Mexicans long ago lost faith in their judicial authorities. One
recent study found that about 90 percent of those who have been
victims of a crime never reported the episode to the authorities,
convinced it would do no good.

"I didn't see anything," is the national refrain, one that Mr.
Calderon is chipping away at with anonymous tip lines and beefed-up rewards.

The United States government, which has set aside a portion of its
aid money for so-called institution building and judicial reform in
Mexico, recently estimated that 450,000 Mexicans were making their
living in the drug industry, about one-third of them involved
directly in the business of trafficking drugs and two-thirds
cultivating drugs in the countryside. But nobody really knows how
many people are linked to what is a sprawling drug economy.

Some are inside Mexican customs, where someone recently dabbed Vicks
VapoRub on the nose of a drug-sniffing dog. Airports, land borders
and seaports have been a clearinghouse for the cartels' central
ingredients - illegal drugs, illicit cash and smuggled guns - as some
customs employees charged with searching for the goods have turned a
blind eye for a fee. In fact, American authorities are discussing a
plan to inspect vehicles leaving the United States for Mexico to make
sure they are not carrying contraband.

Mexico's prison system presents another vulnerability. Joaquin Guzman
Loera, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel and the most-wanted man in
Mexico, presides over a huge drug production and trafficking
operation with the help of an extensive network of turncoat
politicians and police officers. Although he was sent to prison, he
managed to bribe prison officials to help him escape in 2001. Aware
that Mexican prisons are often run by the prisoners, Mexico has been
extraditing record numbers of drug suspects to the United States,
something it resisted doing for years.

On Thursday, a man who was in the process of being extradited to the
United States for drug trafficking received help in escaping from a
hospital in Chihuahua State, where he was undergoing medical
treatment under police guard. The men who facilitated his escape were
apparently his fellow traffickers, and the authorities are also
investigating whether some of the police guards were part of the breakout plan.

Although Mexico's military is regarded as significantly less corrupt
than the country's police forces, defense officials estimate that
100,000 soldiers have quit to join the cartels over the past seven years.

In Reynosa, the Gulf Cartel, which controls a vast swath of territory
along Mexico's eastern coastline, has hired a paramilitary force,
known as the Zetas, to protect its turf. Founded by army deserters,
their arsenal is so extensive that even their system of informants
cannot keep it hidden.

On night patrol in Reynosa in November, soldiers came upon some
suspicious men, who led them to a house that was packed with
armaments for the drug cartels - 540 rifles, 165 grenades, 500,000
rounds of ammunition and 14 sticks of dynamite. It was Mexico's
biggest arms seizure to date - but the owners of the cache
themselves, as they so often do, escaped to fight again.

The reach of the drug kingpins has even the army fearful. Many
soldiers cover their faces while on patrol to avoid being identified
and singled out by the drug cartels. The army also recently began
allowing soldiers to grow their hair longer, because military-style
crew cuts were believed to be putting off-duty soldiers at risk.

To address the problem of corruption in the military, the Defense
Ministry has proposed a 60-year prison term for any soldier linked to
organized crime. Commanders admit that they must carefully guard
information on their missions from potential cartel members in
uniform. And the roadblocks they set up, like one that stopped cars
recently near the bridge connecting Reynosa and McAllen, Tex., only
work for a few minutes before cartel spies discover them and route
traffic elsewhere.

"Imagine Bush sending a military infiltrated with Taliban to
Afghanistan," said Samuel Gonzalez, a security analyst who was the
top drug prosecutor in the presidential administration of Ernesto
Zedillo in the 1990s. He likens the fighting in Mexico to the trench
warfare of World War I.

"It's block by block," he said.

Quest for Alternatives

The war analogy is not a stretch for parts of Mexico. Soldiers, more
than 40,000 of them, are confronting heavily armed paramilitary
groups on city streets. The military-grade weapons being used,
antitank rockets and armor-piercing munitions, for example, are the
same ones found on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The country's challenge, though, may be tougher than that of a
conventional war. The enemy is more nebulous and the battlefield is
everywhere - in border towns like Tijuana, regional capitals like
Culiacan and in the metropolis of Mexico City, where Mr. Calderon
gathers with his national security staff every morning in his wooded
compound ringed by soldiers to strategize and count the previous
day's dead. The presidential protective detail got a thorough review
after one of its members was found to have received money from a cartel.

The brutality and brazenness - the fact that drug assassins are
chopping off heads, dissolving bodies in acid and posting notes on
mutilated corpses taunting the authorities - has prompted more and
more second guessing of Mr. Calderon's approach.

"Calderon took a stick and whacked the beehive," Javier Valdez, a
Sinaloa journalist who covers the drug trade, said in an oft-heard
critique of Mexico's drug war

The Mexican president is faulted for starting a head-on assault on
the heavily armed cartels without first gathering intelligence on
them, without first preparing a trustworthy police force to take them
on, without preparing the country for how rough it would turn out to be.

He is taken to task for not aggressively pursuing the politicians
collaborating with the cartels. He is criticized for failing to put a
significant dent in the drug profits that fuel the cartels' operations.

An effort is under way to change laws to make it easier to seize
businesses that are linked to traffickers, but it has been bogged
down by fierce political infighting. "We keep hearing we're going to
win," Victor Hugo Cirigo Vasquez, the speaker of the Mexico City
Assembly, said to a reporter recently. "That's what the U.S.
president said in Vietnam."

There are calls for a completely new approach. One of Mr. Calderon's
predecessors, Mr. Zedillo, recently joined two other former heads of
state from Latin America in pushing for a complete rethinking of the
drug war, including the legalization of marijuana, which is
considered the top revenue generator for Mexican drug cartels.

Mexico is nowhere near such a transformative step as legalizing
drugs, which would cut drug profits but also might cause use to soar.
Still, there are initiatives on the horizon.

Three years ago, the Mexican Congress passed a plan to decriminalize
the possession of small quantities of cocaine and other drugs, but
Vicente Fox, then the president, killed the bill after American
officials raised an alarm. Mr. Calderon made a similar proposal last
fall, albeit lowering the amounts still further, and this time
American officials did not utter a peep.