Mexican Drug Trafficking

Although Mexico has been a producer and transit route for illegal drugs for generations, the country now finds itself in a pitched battle with powerful and well-financed drug cartels. In 2008, there were more than 6,200 drug-related murders, more than double the figure from the year before. Top police commanders have been assassinated and grenades thrown, in one case into the crowd at an Independence Day celebration.

The authorities say most of the deaths have resulted from drug cartels fighting rivals. But soldiers and police have also been killed, as well as some innocents.

The upsurge in violence is traced to the end of 2006 when President Felipe Calderon launched a frontal assault on the cartels by deploying tens of thousands of soldiers and federal police to take them on. Mr. Calderon has successfully pushed the United States to acknowledge its own responsibility for the violence in Mexico since it is American drug consumers who fuel demand and American guns smuggled into Mexico that are used by the drug gangs.

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 and the swagger of the drug chieftains, wonder if they are paying too high a price and some have begun openly speaking of decriminalizing drugs to reduce the sizeable profits the gangs receive. Americans, from border state governors to 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 state itself will crumble under the strain of the war.

While Mr. Calderon dismisses suggestions that Mexico is a failed state, he and his aides have spoken frankly of the cartels' attempts to set up a state within a state, levying taxes, throwing up roadblocks and enforcing their own perverse codes of behavior. The Mexican government has identified 233 "zones of impunity'' across the country, where crime is largely uncontrolled, a figure that is down from 2,204 zones a year ago.

The authorities have made a string of high-profile arrests of drug chieftains recently and have had success seizing large amounts of illegal drugs, guns and money. But the violence remains high and authorities acknowledge that they will never wipe out this multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry. The goal now is to turn what is a national security problem into one that can be handled by law enforcement. That alone is a tall order since the cartels have infiltrated governments and police forces throughout Mexico, paying officials to protect their illicit business.