Mexico's Calderon gains points for drug war grit
Source: Reuters
By Greg Brosnan MEXICO CITY, Jan 29 (Reuters) - Mexican President Felipe Calderon's military offensive against ruthless drug cartels has calmed a surge in violence and won him support from many who until now saw him as a bookish, even nerdy technocrat. In the two months since he took office, Calderon has sent thousands of troops into trafficking strongholds where police had feared to go in order to bring down escalating drug violence. He struck a major blow on Jan 19 by extraditing four major traffickers to face trial in U.S. courts. Calderon got a boost from widely published photographs of Gulf cartel chief Osiel 'Friend-killer' Cardenas, who had run his narcotics empire from a Mexican prison. In the pictures, a handcuffed Cardenas, in gray prison garb, is staring at the ground as masked police bundled him aboard a U.S.-bound plane. "In the short time he's been president, he's done what no president had dared to do," said Natividad Flores, 59, as he hawked lottery tickets outside a posh mall in Mexico City. "It's a good start." The sentiment is widely shared in Mexico, where a vicious war over the past two years between rival drug lords has left parts of the country littered with corpses and severed heads. The year 2006 was especially violent, with about 2,000 people murdered. The deployment of troops to several states has already reduced the carnage. The clampdown has won extravagant praise from Washington and given Calderon a desperately needed boost after he narrowly won last year's presidential election. His leftist rival led months of protests against alleged vote-rigging. POLICE ON THE PAYROLL But Calderon's success may be limited. Experts say powerful drug lords have bought the loyalty of so many police and even judges that Calderon's efforts will do little to stem the flow of cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana to the United States, but they still give him credit for forcing cartel hit men to take cover. "The government has given a very clear signal. It's saying "listen guys, you can't kill people in the middle of the street and behead each other,'" said Mexican analyst Jorge Chabat. "It's not going to end drug trafficking. But it will have an effect in terms of diminishing the level of violence we have seen in the last two years." Drug violence surged and spread as regional allies of the rival Gulf and Sinaloa cartels took a furious turf war beyond traditional gangland hot spots near the U.S. border to as far south as the Pacific resort of Acapulco. The mountainous western state of Michoacan, a transshipment point for cocaine from South America and locally made methamphetamine, descended into chaos and brutality last year. In one incident, gunmen rolled five severed heads onto a small-town dance floor. Under Calderon, soldiers and police in armored cars have rolled into Michoacan's perilous badlands, laying roadblocks and making arrests in former no-go narco strongholds. They have taken similar action in the cities of Acapulco and Tijuana. "It gives some sense that people are more secure, that they don't have to worry about drug shootouts in the middle of a city or heads being sliced off and rolled into bars," said Peter Hakim of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue. "People care about this a great deal." Calderon's critics warn the crackdown could lead to even more violence, and even U.S. officials say there is a risk of new turf battles as cartel leaders try to seize business from rivals who have been extradited or forced to lie low.
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