“narcotunnels,” elaborately engineered smuggling passages that run as deep as 100 feet below the fence that separates Tijuana from the United States. Stash after stash of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana was seized in town or intercepted at the border.
Since the end of 2006, the Calderón government has sent more than 25,000 soldiers and federal police on high-powered anti-drug “operations” to combat drug cartels. It has initiated sweeping plans for judicial and police reform. It has extradited several top cartel figures to the United States, earning praise and a package of anti-drug aid from the U.S. government. Yet this year is on pace to be the bloodiest on record for Mexico’s drug war, surpassing by almost 50 percent last year’s toll of more than 2,500 deaths.
militarization carries risks. The military worries about increasing corruption and a growing number of soldiers deserting their units to join the traffickers; others have warned that militarization will lead to major human rights violations.
Local police forces — which make up the vast majority of police in Mexico — are the “Achilles’ heel of Mexican security
Mexican security experts were talking about “Colombianization” or “the Pablo Escobar effect” — the idea being that, as with Escobar in Colombia in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the cartels were responding to the crackdown with a no-holds-barred assault on the state.
Until quite recently, however, pacts between the government and the cartels, spoken or unspoken, were the norm. For most of the 20th century, Mexico was ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The P.R.I. was authoritarian and corrupt, but these traits offered certain advantages when dealing with the drug trade.
In the latter half of the ’90s, Mexico’s one-party political system started to open up, and in the 2000 presidential election, the P.R.I. lost power to Vicente Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive running under the banner of the National Action Party. The transition to democracy was a moment of great hope for Mexico. But it also undermined the system of de facto regulation of the drug trade.
Rather than destroying the cartels, the government’s high-level strikes transformed the cartels from hierarchical organizations with commanding figures at the top to unruly mobs of men vying for power.
the vast majority of weapons in the cartel’s arsenals (80 to 90 percent, according to the Mexican government’s figures) are purchased in the United States, often at loosely regulated gun shows, and smuggled into Mexico by the same networks that smuggle drugs the opposite direction
“the most important thing is co-responsibility” — an acknowledgment that the United States owes Mexico its support in a long and difficult war.
The cartels seem to understand this way of thinking, and they try to send the opposite message: the bad guys will never back down, either. In 2005, they started posting videos of gangland executions on YouTube.
In a single day, thousands of cars and trucks enter the United States from Tamaulipas alone. Enough cocaine to supply American demand for a year, a market worth some $35 billion, might fill a dozen or so tractor-trailers.
I asked García Luna if this was an acceptable definition of success in the war on drugs: violence down, the police seemingly in charge, the cartels operating less conspicuously and less violently. He ducked the question but did not dispute the implication. “Given the temptation,” he said, “there are people who are always going to play the game, whether by airplane or helicopter, by land, by sea, because there is a real market. ... There is no product like it in the world.” (When I asked David Johnson, the assistant secretary of state for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, about the reason for mounting drug violence in Mexico, he said, without prompting, “In significant measure, it grows out of violent people taking advantage of the continuing strong demand in the United States.”)

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