Mexican police found the corpses of 13 men shot execution style near the resort town of Mazatlan in December.

In Mexico Seething Drug War, Violence Moving to United States

EL PASO (By Alex Kingsbury, US News) March 12, 2009  —  A stone's throw from El Paso, Texas, a war is raging. There are almost daily running gun battles, kidnappings, robberies, and a frightening death toll. The northern Mexican town of Ciudad Juárez has gotten so overrun by drug-related violence that Mexico deployed an additional 5,000 soldiers this month, joining thousands of others already on patrol. Normally, fighting crime would be the purview of the local police, but in Juárez, drug traffickers threatened to execute cops last month — one every two days — until the chief of police resigned. After five executions in a week, he quit and hasn't been replaced.

The surge in carnage between the drug-trafficking cartels and the government has become a national malignancy. Last year, Mexico's drug wars claimed more than 6,200 lives, from policemen to traffickers to innocent civilians. In just the first two months of this year, the toll has already topped 1,000. The ferocity and duration have shocked senior U.S. government officials, who are watching some of the violence spill over the border into cities like San Diego, El Paso, and Phoenix. In fact, things have gotten so dire that warnings about the continued viability of the Mexican government itself are popping up all over Washington, from spooks at the CIA to federal agents tracking drugs and guns to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. Suddenly, the Obama administration is finding one of its most pressing foreign policy challenges is coming not from a far-off foreign fight but from a neighboring nation sinking deeper into chaos. Even worse, the narcotics insurgency is fueled by guns smuggled in from the United States and funded by U.S. consumers who spend $25 billion to $35 billion a year on methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, and marijuana brought in from Mexico.

The current crisis was triggered, in part, by perhaps the most concerted offensive ever by the Mexican government against the drug cartels, spearheaded by a deployment of 45,000 soldiers. Where past campaigns focused more on policing and tended to target individual drug cartels, Mexico is now trying a more comprehensive approach to go after the full range of traffickers. The new tactics are pitting the cartels against one another and the government simultaneously. "For years, we told the Mexicans to stop the drugs, so President Felipe Calderón finally sent in the military, and the violence skyrocketed. We didn't expect that, and we probably should have," says Billy Hoover, an assistant director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives who oversees efforts against weapons trafficking.

For-profit kidnappings are at record levels, journalists are being killed, and foreign investment capital and tourism dollars are evaporating. "It has shifted from a law enforcement problem to a national security imperative for them," says Tony Placido, the chief of intelligence at the Drug Enforcement Administration. The escalation of violence against the government, a recent military study from the U.S. Joint Forces Command dryly noted, "reminds one an unstable Mexico could represent a homeland security problem of immense proportions to the United States."

Indeed, it's difficult to overstate the level of turmoil. Schools like the University of Arizona and Vanderbilt University in Tennessee are strongly urging their students not to head south for spring break. The usually reserved State Department recently issued a series of blunt warnings to travelers, saying northern Mexico's gun battles are "the equivalent of military small-unit combat." The weapons being used by the cartels aren't much different from those used in war, either. The traffickers, who intercept cellphone and radio traffic, arm their soldiers with grenade launchers, night-vision goggles, sniper rifles, body armor, and machine guns.

In Tijuana — which has gotten so bad that it has been declared off limits to U.S. marines on leave — drug gangs hijack police radio frequencies to threaten local cops before following through in deadly fashion. Last year, the cartels killed more than 500 police officers. Decapitation has become a frequent terrorist tactic. In one well-publicized incident, the heads of two officers were gruesomely skewered on a fence outside a station as a statement from the cartels. Three Mexican police chiefs asked Washington for asylum last year and now are believed to be in the United States.

Mexico has worked hard, with some success, to reform its embattled justice system with anticorruption measures and higher judicial pay, but the cartels still pack a withering psychological punch, even in the dock. Last month, after a wanted enforcer known as the "Stew Maker" was arrested, Mexicans were horrified to learn he had confessed to disposing of some 300 bodies by dissolving them in acid.

All this has official Washington wringing its hands. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has expressed increasing concern about Mexico's trajectory, according to a senior Pentagon official, and he's particularly worried about instability moving north.

But the violence has already crossed the border. Major cities from Atlanta to Los Angeles have reported cartel-linked killings. Phoenix has quickly become the kidnapping capital of the United States, with an average of one person disappearing each day of the year, according to police. Most of the incidents are affiliated in some way with the drug trade. Late last month, the DEA pushed back against violence related to the Sinaloa cartel, one of Mexico's largest, arresting around 750 people in a sting operation netted $59 million in illicit cash.

While few expect Mexico to become a truly failed state, there is a very real risk it will become a de facto narco-state, ceding governmental authority in wide areas of the country to the drug cartels. That's the conclusion of retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a former U.S. "drug czar," who published a bleak assessment after a fact-finding mission in December. Barely two months later, a high-profile incident underscored just how serious that threat has become. Retired Brig. Gen. Mauro Enrique Tello, one of Mexico's most highly decorated military officers, became the drug czar for the mayor of Cancún. His was a brief tenure. A week later, he was abducted and tortured before a former soldier working for the cartels put a bullet in his brain.

The crisis is ushering in a new willingness in both Washington and Mexico City to work together against the cartels. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, citing Mexico as one of his top concerns for President Obama, predicted last month the violence may induce both governments to look for an even closer relationship in the coming year, despite historical animosities. Current CIA chief Leon Panetta, meanwhile, isn't revealing the spy agency's actions, but he has suggested the CIA is trying replicate its Colombian strategy in Mexico.

The existing cooperation between the two countries focuses heavily on security. A year ago, Congress reluctantly approved the $400 million-per-year Mérida Initiative, sought by President Calderón, which consists largely of aid for law enforcement and military equipment. Critics quickly dubbed it "Plan Mexico," a reference to the expensive and controversial Plan Colombia, which they claim has had little effect on the flow of cocaine into the United States.

As Mexico is quick to point out, the cartels get their heavy weaponry there north of the border. More than 90 percent of the guns used in Mexico's drug violence come from the United States, according to ATF officials. Recently, more powerful guns, including .50-caliber sniper rifles, have been showing up in the hands of the cartels, a trend that accelerated after the expiration of the U.S. assault weapons ban in 2004. Eastern European variants of the AK-47 have been streaming into Mexico from gun shows and stores around the country. "No trucker wants to waste a trip by traveling with an empty load, and, likewise, the people who bring narcotics north simply put weapons into their cars for the trip south," says the ATF's Hoover.

This vast trickle of guns moving in ones and twos — the feds call it "ant trafficking" — is nearly impossible to stop. In an operation called Project Gunrunner, the ATF has assigned more than 100 agents and staff to crack down on weapons flowing south and to assist Mexican officials in tracing weapons to their site of purchase through electronic databases. Gunrunner has seized thousands of guns headed for Mexico, but officials admit it's only a drop in the bucket.

Working too closely with the Mexican authorities carries its own risks. Intelligence officials confess privately they have little faith in some of the Mexican security apparatus and avoid sharing information because the military and police there are so deeply penetrated by the cartels. Indeed, Mexican police recently announced Cancún's former police chief is being questioned about allegations he helped protect General Tello's killers. Of course, U.S. officials aren't immune from taking bribes either, according to the DEA.

The threat, meanwhile, keeps growing. The Mexican cartels are dramatically expanding their reach, setting up bridgeheads and joining forces with counterparts in Colombia, Bolivia, and even Peru, where the Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path is reinventing itself as a drug-trafficking outfit. "Whenever we look at the fighting in Mexico, we should all remember they're fighting over who controls the distribution networks for heroin and cocaine in our cities," says Mark Schneider, a vice president of the nonprofit International Crisis Group. Mexican cartels now control most of the U.S. drug market, concludes the latest National Drug Threat Assessment by the Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center. The cartels distribute their drugs in some 230 cities north of the border.

Mexican officials have tried to remain optimistic, even as public opinion polls show Mexicans feel their government is losing the war. "The capacities of the Mexican state are aligned to break the structures of each cartel," federal Police Chief Edgar Eusebio Millán Gómez said last year. A few months later, he was gunned down on the street in Mexico City. Meanwhile, a Mexican official in Paris confessed if Calderón hadn't gone after the cartels, the next president of the country most likely would have been a drug trafficker.

Other troubling signs include the formation of citizen vigilante squads that take the law into their own hands. One that calls itself the Citizens Commando of Juárez has threatened to kill a criminal every 24 hours until the government gets the violence under control. Other groups of citizens, meanwhile, have mobilized — perhaps at the behest of the cartels — to protest the military's presence in their towns. Police in Monterrey have taken to using water cannons to break up their marches. "We're not there yet, but when the government can no longer exert authority and protect their citizens, that's becoming a failed state," warns one senior U.S. official, noting in Colombia, similar groups formed, only to eventually turn into violent criminal factions themselves.

More violence and kidnappings are expected in the coming year, despite — and often as a result of — Mexico's stepped-up enforcement efforts. When a cartel is weakened because of arrests or deaths, other cartels prey on their wounded brethren. "It's not in the nature of these cartels to walk away from their business without a fight," says Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, a senior associate of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Besides, there is so much money to be made as soon as one group goes away, another one steps in to take its place." And as long as Americans continue buying their wares, the cartels will have more than enough money to fund their side of the war.