AS MEXICO BATTLES CARTELS, THE ARMY BECOMES THE LAW

PETATLAN, Mexico -- President Felipe Calderon is rapidly escalating
the Mexican army's role in the war against drug traffickers,
deploying nearly 50 percent of its combat-ready troops along the
U.S.-Mexico border and throughout the country, while retired army
officers take command of local police forces and the military
supplies civilian authorities with automatic weapons and grenades.

U.S. and Mexican officials describe the drug cartels as a widening
narco-insurgency. The four major drug states average a total of 12
murders a day, characterized by ambushes, gun battles, executions and
decapitated bodies left by the side of the road. In the villages and
cities where the traffickers hold sway, daily life now takes place
against a martial backdrop of round-the-clock patrols, pre-dawn raids
and roadblocks manned by masked young soldiers.

Calderon's deployment of about 45,000 troops to fight the cartels
represents a historic change. Previous administrations relied on
Mexico's traditionally weak police agencies to combat the
traffickers, who funnel 90 percent of the cocaine that enters the
United States. The cartels corrupted local authorities and reached
tacit agreements with the national government, limiting the violence
while the drugs continued to flow.

After Calderon became president in December 2006, he told Mexicans
that the use of the military against the cartels would be limited and
brief. But it is now the centerpiece of his anti-narcotics strategy,
according to interviews with senior U.S. and Mexican officials and
dozens of people on the front lines of the war.

"It can be traumatic to have the army in control of public security,
but I am convinced that we don't have a better alternative, even with
all the risks that it implies," said Monte Alejandro Rubido, a senior
public security official who is overseeing the overhaul of Mexico's
police forces.

The military's withdrawal is dependent on the success of the police
reforms, according to the government. U.S. and Mexican officials
predict that troops will be patrolling the streets for years. In many
regions, the army has become the law. But rather than quelling the
violence, it increasingly appears to have been drawn into a deepening
morass of cartel rivalries, local political disputes and blood feuds.

In the southern state of Guerrero, the army ratcheted up security
last year, killing several alleged drug traffickers and making dozens
of arrests. That was followed by a two-month stretch in which nine
soldiers were abducted and decapitated in the state capital, four
policemen were incinerated in a daylight grenade attack near a beach
resort and a former mayor was shot 24 times before 1,000 people
packed into a plaza for the coronation of a town beauty queen.

Mexicans have greeted the unprecedented deployment of federal troops
in their communities with a mix of gratitude and dismay.

"There are a lot of opinions. I personally feel more secure to see
the army out in the streets," said Denis Gonzalez Sanchez, a
29-year-old city administrator in Petatlan, a Guerrero beach town of
30,000 where the army began patrols last year after three dozen
gunmen massacred the family of a former mayor accused of links to
traffickers. "A lot of people feel exactly the opposite: They say
that the army is making us less secure. But I always think it's
better knowing that they are out there protecting us, that they are
watching over us, when there is nobody else to do it."

Mexican officials say the cartels operate on a $10 billion annual
budget earned from drug sales in the United States; according to U.S.
government estimates, they employ 150,000 people. This year, the
Mexican government will spend $9.3 billion on national security, a 99
percent increase since Calderon took office.

Since December 2006, more than 10,100 people have been killed in the
strife, including 917 police officers, soldiers, prosecutors and
political leaders, according to Milenio, a Mexican media
organization. At the same time, human rights complaints against the
army have surged 576 percent, according to Mexico's National Human
Rights Commission, including allegations of unlawful detentions,
forced disappearances, rape and torture.

A 'Courageous Step'

Calderon and his advisers have described the military's deployment as
an emergency measure while he seeks to reform Mexico's local, state
and federal police forces. He has promised that when the new police
forces are ready, the troops will return to their barracks. That
process may take until the end of his six-year term in 2012, he said recently.

The government is attempting to vet and retrain 450,000 officers,
most at the state and municipal levels, employing lie detectors, drug
tests, psychological profiling and financial reviews to weed out
corruption and incompetence. Nearly half of the 56,000 officers
vetted so far have failed.

The government is also forging agreements with each of Mexico's 31
states and its federal district, Mexico City, for the military to
deliver automatic rifles, high-caliber ammunition, grenade launchers
and fragmentation grenades to state and municipal officers who obtain
federally mandated security clearances. "I can't hand over modern
weapons systems to a police officer who has not fulfilled all the
requirements," said Heriberto Salinas, a 70-year-old retired army
general who commands the Guerrero state police force. "It has to be
someone who is vetted and evaluated."

Mexican authorities are increasingly turning to retired army officers
to run the police, counting on their discipline and training to
resist the corrupting influence of the cartels and their ties to the
military to help coordinate joint operations. In addition to Salinas,
who came out of retirement at the request of Guerrero's governor, six
of the state's eight operations coordinators are former military. At
least a dozen governors have tapped retired generals as state police
commanders, and hundreds of former military officers are serving at
the municipal level. The assistant secretary for strategy and
intelligence for Mexico's federal police, Javier del Real Magallanes,
is an active-duty general.

Last month, Calderon dispatched an additional 5,000 troops to the
border city of Ciudad Juarez, and the army took control of the police
department after traffickers forced the resignation of the police
chief by threatening to kill one of his officers every 48 hours.

Anthony P. Placido, chief of intelligence for the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration, called Calderon's decision to use the
military an "extraordinarily courageous step."

"This was not a traditional law enforcement problem that could be
solved using traditional tools," Placido said in an interview in
Washington. "It had gotten away from them. If the D.C. police were to
engage in an operation against these criminal adversaries, and they
faced bands of 30 to 50 of these criminals, and they were all
carrying AK-47s and grenades and the bodies were dropping at the rate
they're dropping, I suspect you might have to call in the National
Guard. I don't think it is drastically different from what we would
do if faced with a similar situation."

Pushed to Act

U.S. and Mexican officials familiar with Calderon's thinking said a
confluence of events pushed him to declare war on the traffickers.
During the presidential campaign, U.S. and Mexican officials
independently received a tip that the powerful Gulf cartel had taken
out a contract on Calderon's life, according to a source with direct
knowledge. Although the tip was never verified, it was taken
seriously because of the cartel's links to the Zetas -- feared
Mexican Special Forces veterans who served as assassins for the
organization. U.S. authorities believe that the Zetas have broken off
to form their own cartel in recent months.

The U.S. and Mexican governments also received information that drug
money -- one American official estimated $5 million to $10 million --
made its way into the 2006 mayoral and parliamentary races. Calderon
and his advisers viewed the influence of such money as a serious
threat to democracy in the country, which had been governed for
decades by a single political party -- the Institutional
Revolutionary Party, or PRI -- until Calderon's predecessor, Vicente
Fox, was elected in 2000.

"It was a factor that was considered, especially the municipal
elections, because from there they could gain control of the local
police forces," Eduardo Medina Mora, Mexico's attorney general, said
in an interview. "This was why we couldn't wait. The threat was
assessed from many different factors, this one being a relevant one,
but not the only one."

A Savage Response

Between Calderon's election in July and his inauguration in December,
a surge in drug violence signaled the savagery to come. In September,
a heavily armed gang apparently affiliated with the drug militia La
Familia burst into the Sun and Shade disco in Uruapan, a favorite
haunt of dealers in Michoacan, Calderon's home state. The men tossed
five severed heads onto the dance floor, leaving a note that read,
"Everyone should know, this is divine justice."

"One of the most critical elements in the decision to use the
military was the amount of violence between the election and when we
took over," a senior Calderon adviser said. "The executions, the
decapitations, the confrontations between the drug gangs. There was a
perception in society of lawlessness, that there was no state."

Calderon had campaigned on a law-and-order platform, but he never
explicitly told Mexicans he intended to use the military.
Traditionally, law enforcement has sought to contain, rather than to
directly assault, the drug cartels in Mexico. Fox had targeted cartel
leaders, a strategy that did nothing to eradicate the organizations.

People who have followed Calderon's career say the challenge played
to his black-and-white view of the world and his deep-seated
patriotism. The president, a Catholic with three young children, is
known to have a sense of moral anger against the corrupting influence
of drugs in Mexico, where consumption is a growing problem.

"He liked the mano duro," or iron fist, said Raul Benitez, a national
security analyst in Mexico City. "And in Mexico that means the military."

The army was responsible for one of the most painful episodes in
recent Mexican history: the massacre of hundreds of student
protesters days before the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. The military
has gradually improved its public image since then by providing
support during natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes.
It also fought small-scale guerrilla uprisings in the 1990s in the
southern states of Chiapas and Guerrero. U.S. and Mexican officials
said Calderon did not anticipate the violence his strategy appears to
have unleashed. Jose Luis Pineyro, a military analyst in Mexico City,
said the president and his advisers had "launched a war for which
they were unprepared."

But Calderon has given no sign of backing down. He said recently that
drug trafficking is "a cancer that has invaded everything. So what
you have to do is eradicate this disease, expose it to radiation and
attack it. And of course this is expensive and painful, but it must be done."

Placido, the DEA intelligence chief, said he believes Calderon "is
way past the point of no return. . . . This is my personal opinion,
but I think he's all in. He has to fight to save himself, his party
and his country."

Convulsed by Violence

Guerrero, on Mexico's Pacific coast, is a crossroads for drug
traffickers and a laboratory for Calderon's policies.

The state is Mexico's largest producer of opium poppies, which
flourish in its rugged highlands, and the second-largest producer of
marijuana. Its 200-mile shoreline is a main transshipment point for
Colombian cocaine entering Mexico en route to the United States. The
coastal highway is a two-lane road between the resorts of Acapulco
and Zihuatanejo that runs through fishing villages and past lush
mangroves and breathtaking beaches. It is also one of the country's
busiest drug-trafficking corridors.

Guerrero is convulsed by violence. The Mexican army's 9th Military
Region has deployed about 5,000 troops to fight traffickers from
Acapulco to the smallest mountain villages. At least four separate
drug cartels are warring over territory, a mix made even more
volatile by the presence of corrupt police forces, local political
bosses and a largely indigenous population that often sympathizes
with the traffickers when not working directly for them.

Zeferino Torreblanca Galindo, Guerrero's governor, said in an
interview that he backed Calderon's strategy of sending the army into
the streets against the traffickers, albeit reluctantly. The
municipal and state police were too corrupt and ill-equipped for the
task, he said. "If the army doesn't do it, we are left out here on our own."

By the fall of last year, however, the violent consequences of the
militarization policy were reverberating through the state. In
October, threatening placards known as narco-mantas began to appear
along highways. On Dec. 9, the severed head of a Mexican army
sergeant was found in a bucket in Chilpancingo, the state capital.

Logical Consequences

On the morning of Dec. 21, Juan Humberto Tapia, a 38-year-old
sergeant, left his house atop a hill in Chilpancingo to walk to work
at the headquarters of the 35th Military Zone. The 18-year veteran
rarely carried a weapon; he worked as an information technology
specialist, repairing the brigade's computers. He planned to retire
in two years and open an Internet cafe.

Tapia never made it home that day. The following morning,
Chilpancingo awoke to celebrate its Christmas festival. Hours before
the parade, Tapia's body, wrapped in green plastic, was discovered by
the side of a road entering the city. Next to his headless corpse
were the bodies of six other soldiers from the 35th Military Zone, a
former police commander and an army recruit. The severed heads were
found a mile away, in the parking lot of a Sam's Club.

A profanity-laced message found next to the bodies warned that 10
soldiers would be killed for every drug trafficker killed by the army.

"I don't know exactly what happened to my husband, nor do I want to
know," said Tapia's wife, Rebecca Ramirez. "If I start to ask
questions -- how they kidnapped him, what they did to him -- it's
just going to hurt more. I'd prefer to remember him for how he was --
a person who was good, dedicated, honest."

"This is a consequence of the involvement of the army in the fight
against drug trafficking," said Hector Astudillo Flores,
Chilpancingo's mayor. "It's only logical: If you come after me, I'm
going to come after you. The army has its specific functions; the
constitution spells them out. The constitution doesn't talk about the
army involving itself in this type of activity. But the circumstances
have aligned themselves in such a way that it has become necessary,
and this is one of the consequences."

War of Nerves

On a sparkling half-moon bay on Guerrero's coast lies the resort city
of Zihuatanejo. Just before dawn Feb. 20, the army swept into the
gritty neighborhoods that surround the city's white-sand beaches and
luxury hotels and arrested nine men it identified as members of the
Beltran Leyva cartel.

The next day, a few minutes before the 9 a.m. shift change, a gray
Jeep Cherokee pulled up in front of the Zihuatanejo police station,
and someone fired a grenade into the car park. The explosion injured
five bystanders and sent a storm of metal fragments into the building's facade.

Four days later, in broad daylight, gunmen attacked four Zihuatanejo
policemen with grenades as they patrolled the city's outskirts in a
Ford pickup. The officers burned to death in the vehicle. A week
later, another Zihuatanejo policeman was shot to death in front of
his home; the assailants left a sign that read in part, "I am going
to kill every single cop, an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth." The
message also contained a threat to kill the chief of police, "who
nobody can get rid of."

"Of course I'm afraid. I'm filled with fear," the 34-year-old police
chief, Pablo Rodriguez Roman, said at the shrapnel-pocked police
station, now protected by sandbags piled five feet high. "But I can't
show it to my men. If I do, the entire force will collapse."