Mexico's War on Drugs is a Sham

MEXICO CITY The familiar complaint that Mexican presidents are reluctant to be full-fledged partners in the war on drugs is no longer heard in Washington these days: Mexican President Felipe Caldern has taken the lead, launching the most ambitious war on the drug cartels operating in Mexico.

Since taking over from Vicente Fox in December 2006, Caldern has sent more than 27,000 soldiers to eight Mexican states; ordered federal officers to take over police departments in border towns and arrest hundreds of corrupt police; mobilized the Mexican army to destroy thousands of acres of marijuana and opium poppy plants; arrested and extradited scores of drug kingpins indicted in the United States; and set up military roadblocks along Mexican highways leading from the border to the interior of the country.

The Mexican people are demanding that their parks, their streets, their schools, their neighborhoods are safe places for their families, where their children can live and grow up in peace, Felipe Caldern told the nations governors a month after taking office, before launching a campaign against the drug cartels.

Mexico is sending a clear message to the U.S., saying, Were doing everything we can, even more than you, Lorenzo Meyer, a historian and social commentator based in Mexico City, told New America Media. The U.S. ambassador wont be able to moan about Mexico not fighting crime.

The Sierra Madre Occidental, the Mother Mountain range of the Mexican West, begins just south of the Arizona border and extends for nearly 900 miles. It contains no cities or large towns, only two paved roads and almost nothing in the way of law and order. This rugged cordillera has always defied the efforts of governments – Aztec, Spanish and Mexican – to enforce control, and it is now one of the biggest production areas in the world for marijuana, opium and heroin, and a staging point for Colombian cocaine.

It is not the sort of place where you can just turn up without an introduction, and I spent years trying to make contacts who could take me in under their protection. Time and again, I was told that it was too dangerous to take a gringo into the mountains, because the drug lords were feuding, or battling the army. Finally, I found a way to get into the Sierra Madre, spent four months travelling down the range and was extremely lucky to escape from the mountains without getting killed.

Along the way, I glimpsed Mexico's future. In the past 18 months, and particularly in the last two weeks, the murderous narco-anarchy I saw in the Sierra Madre has gone nationwide. President Felipe Calderon has gone to war against Mexico's drug cartels, all of which were started by Sierra Madre clanfolk who came downhill – and he is now discovering that the Mexican state isn't strong enough to defeat them.

In Mexico City, cartel gunmen assassinated the nation's police commander in the grounds of his home. In the state of Chihuahua, drug gangs have, in the past fortnight, put up hit lists and wanted posters with names and photographs of police commanders, and offers of reward money for their deaths. In the border city of Juarez, the list was posted on a police memorial statue. No one dared take it down, and so far 17 names have been crossed off it – dead.