MEXICO'S 'ELIOT NESS' SEEKS U.S. HELP

MEXICO CITY-Ten days after taking power following a hotly contested
election in 2006, Felipe Calderon sat in the gilded presidential
chair and signed a decree that would shape his presidency: an order
to deploy 6,000 army troops to his home state of Michoacan to take on
drug gangs. Like many, the president believed the army might have
trouble with the drug lords, but would at least force them out of
city plazas and back into the shadows.

It hasn't worked out that way. Some three years later, more than
23,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence across
Mexico, according to government figures. The bloodshed keeps rising
despite the presence of an estimated 45,000 to 60,000
soldiers-roughly a fourth of Mexico's army-in nine states.

The 47-year-old career politician begins his first official visit to
Washington on Wednesday as a leader who started a battle on the
doorstep of the U.S. that turned into a war-a conflict whose
consequences will shape Mexico for years to come.

Polls show that while most Mexicans support the president's war, most
think the drug lords are winning. In the past few weeks, cartel
gunmen burst into the Holiday Inn hotel in Monterrey and snatched
guests from their rooms. Drug gangs also blocked the highways leading
out of Monterrey, Mexico's business capital. Among the victims of the
war: a groom coming out of his wedding, a 12-year-old and his mother,
and scores of teens.

The war may be striking closer to Mr. Calderon, too. Diego Fernandez,
one of leading figures in Mr. Calderon's National Action Party (PAN)
and a former presidential candidate, disappeared last weekend, and is
believed to have been kidnapped. Some say the apparent abduction
could be a warning to Mr. Calderon to back off.

In an interview, Mr. Calderon acknowledges the drug gangs were much
stronger than he realized, largely because his predecessors let the
problem grow. He compared his position to that of a doctor who opens
up the body of a patient who supposedly has appendicitis, but who the
doctor discovers has cancer.

At that point, said Mr. Calderon, a responsible doctor begins
aggressive treatment. "Of course, there is always a patient that
says: "Listen, that doctor is terrible. Before I went to see him I
was feeling really well," Mr. Calderon said.

Critics say Mr. Calderon launched the drug war in part to gain
credibility following his narrow victory and focused too much on the
army's brute force rather than intelligence work and undermining
cartel finances.

They also say that he has surrounded himself with a loyal but
ineffective team that prevents him from changing his strategy quickly enough.

Manlio Fabio Beltrones, a Senator for the former ruling party,
compares Mr. Calderon to a new home owner who discovers a beehive in
his home. "He begins whacking the beehive with a broom without
thinking it through. And now his home is full of angry bees," says
Mr. Beltrones.

For supporters, which include the U.S. government, Mr. Calderon is a
hero. Every Mexican president since the 1980s vowed to take on drug
traffickers, but the bespectacled lawyer is the first to make it a
priority. President Barack Obama calls him Mexico's Eliot Ness.

For someone who has put his country and legacy on the line fighting
drug gangs, however, the Mexican leader says he could use more help
from the U.S., the world's largest illicit drug-consuming nation. Mr.
Calderon praised President Obama's recent initiative to curb drug
demand. But he also said there was a correlation between the increase
in drug-related violence in Mexico and the lapsing of the assault
weapons ban in the U.S. in 2004.

Mexico has seized some 45,000 assault weapons under Mr. Calderon's
watch, most of them smuggled from the U.S. "I respect the Second
Amendment to the United States Constitution," Mr. Calderon said. "But
the truth is that these weapons are not going into the hands of good
Americans, [they] are going directly into the hands of criminals."

For the U.S., Mr. Calderon's war has major implications. Ciudad
Juarez, across the river from El Paso, Texas, has become the murder
capital of the world, three times more violent than Baghdad. In
March, two Americans linked to the U.S. consulate in Juarez,
including a pregnant woman, were murdered by hit men.

Mexican cartels now control the bulk of the distribution of illegal
drugs in the U.S., according to U.S. officials. In many ways, Mr.
Calderon is waging a lonely war. He is fighting decades of entrenched
corruption. The country's army is poorly trained. Many officials and
most of Mexico's elites share little sense of urgency. Some say the
president himself didn't show enough leadership. During his first
three years in power, Mr. Calderon visited Ciudad Juarez, ground zero
in the drug war, only twice. That changed after an incident in
January when gunmen burst into a party there and murdered 15 teens.
The president mistakenly said the victims were cartel hit men,
causing an outcry. He has since visited Juarez three times.

"People in Colombia-and I include myself-believe that Mexicans are in
denial," says a former top-ranking Colombian defense official, who
says that although Mexico's drug violence is not yet at the level
faced by Colombia in the 1990s, Mexico's legacy of corruption will
make a solution more difficult.

The last of five children, Mr. Calderon grew up with a father who had
his own quixotic quest. His father Luis ran for office six times
against the Institutional Revolutionary Party and lost each time. He
finally won a congressional seat on his seventh try, in 1979.

Mr. Calderon's introduction to politics began at age six, helping
siblings paste his father's election propaganda on walls. After law
school and a masters' degree in economics, he became the PAN's
youngest leader at age 33. Friends describe the president as
nationalistic and patriotic, a true Mexican who loves strong tequila
and sentimental ballads. Recently, Spanish singer Joaquin Sabina told
the press that he thought Mr. Calderon had been "naive" to launch a
war on drugs. The president invited the singer to lunch. They traded
points of view over a few tequilas, and belted out songs with a mariachi band.

Mr. Calderon overcame a 15 percentage point deficit in the 2006
general election to squeak out a victory against the favored
candidate, leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

Afterwards, Mr. Lopez Obrador refused to concede, claiming fraud and
organizing protests. To take the oath of office, Mr. Calderon had to
sneak into Congress, past leftist lawmakers who vowed to disrupt the
ceremony. Some say Mr. Calderon was searching for a spectacular move
to start his presidency, much like former President Carlos Salinas,
who won a contested 1988 election, did in jailing a powerful
oil-workers' union boss. "I think he did this for reasons that had
nothing to do with violence or drugs, but the old Mexican tradition
of starting off the six-year term with a bang," says Jorge Castaneda,
a former foreign minister under Mr. Calderon's predecessor, Vicente Fox.

Like many Mexicans, Mr. Castaneda says the assault on drug gangs only
made matters worse by putting pressure on cartels that then attacked
rivals to make up for lost profits, resulting in more violence.

Enrique Krauze, Mexico's leading historian, endorses the war, despite
misgivings about strategy and timing. "Every war has its
pacifists-the 'better red than dead' types. Our version is 'better
narcos than dead' types. But they are wrong. Calderon was right to
confront this." Drug gang violence began rising in Mexico a few years
after Mr. Fox won the 2000 presidential election. With the end of the
PRI's system of a strong president, Mexico endured a power vacuum,
filled by state governors, union leaders, big business and drug gangs.

The notion that Mexico took too long to fight the drug gangs was
endorsed recently from an unusual source: a major drug lord. Ismael
Zambada told Proceso magazine that the government waited too long,
and "the narcos are a part of society now."

Mr. Calderon says the critical moment for him in assessing the
violence was a series of conversations before taking office with the
leftist governor of Michoacan state, Lazaro Cardenas.

Mr. Cardenas, grandson of the fabled Mexican president of the same
name, told Mr. Calderon that he and other state governors were
worried about the growing influence of drug gangs in local police
forces and politics.

In 2005, a Michoacan-based gang rolled five severed heads on to the
dance floor of a strip club. It was the first of many gruesome
beheadings. "The governor had asked for help from the federal
government...[but] was given none," says Mr. Calderon. "He asked for
help and I gave it to him."

Mr. Cardenas says he asked the president for more attention to
security matters but not specifically to send in troops. He says one
incident in particular seemed to affect Mr. Calderon. The
president-elect was in Morelia, the state capital, talking with the
governor when news broke of a local prison riot. Some of the inmates,
linked to drug gangs, had taken their own lawyers hostage. They later
executed four of them. Joint Operation Michoacan flooded the state
with soldiers. Within months, violence ebbed. But soon after, the
killings rose again not only in Michoacan, but across northern Mexico.

Mr. Beltrones, the opposition senator, says Mr. Calderon's plan
focused too much on army patrols. His summary of what needs changing:
"more intelligence, less army." And a stronger attack on cartel
finances. "It hurts more to get hit in the pocketbook than between
the legs," he said.

Mr. Calderon says Mexico is focusing more on intelligence work, and
points to the recent killing of top drug lord Arturo Beltran Leyva by
Mexican Navy forces as a successful example.

Edgardo Buscaglia, an Uruguayan-American academic, says countries
that have successfully attacked organized crime, like the U.S., Italy
and Colombia, had four elements in place: a judicial system that
worked, an assault on drug gangs' assets, an attack on high-level
political corruption and a program to attack the "soft-side" of the
drug trade through education and work opportunities.

Without those, Mr. Buscaglia says any attack on organized crime will
result in increased violence, as traffickers simply dedicate more
resources to corruption and beating rivals.

Consider Mexico's decrepit judicial system. Mr. Calderon's government
has trumpeted the arrests of more than 70,000 people linked to
organized crime in the past three years. But Mr. Buscaglia estimates
98% have since been freed because of faulty prosecution or
corruption. When asked, Mr. Calderon didn't dispute that figure.

Last year, soldiers swarmed into Michoacan's city halls to arrest 10
mayors for alleged ties to a local drug gang. Since then, all 10 have
been released because of a lack of evidence.

Under Mr. Calderon, Mexico passed a reform allowing states to
overhaul courts to include things like oral arguments and
cross-examination, which should improve the quality of police work
and judicial transparency. But only a handful of states have
implemented the changes.

Another area where Mexico lags is attacking cartel finances. Central
bank figures estimate that some $15 billion in U.S.
dollars-cash-comes into the Mexican economy every year. While money
spent by American tourists can account for some of that, experts say
much of it is drug money that makes its way to Mexico.

The Mexican leader doesn't have much time to show progress before the
bloodshed erodes public support. Already some Mexican politicians,
like Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard, have suggested they will dump
Mr. Calderon's security policies if they win the 2012 presidential
campaign. U.S. officials are also worried.

"We are at a critical stage...because we don't know who comes next
after Mr. Calderon," Anthony Placido, head of enforcement and the
Drug Enforcement Administration, told a recent senate hearing.