Who's Winning the War for Mexico?

A Mexican soldier guarded packages of marijuana outside a tunnel discovered in Tijuana on Nov. 26. The 2,200-foot tunnel was used to transport drugs to the U.S.

The cartels are powerful, but they can be defeated. Ending the flow of drugs is another matter.

By DAVID RIEFF
WSJ

Last week, U.S. drug enforcement agents uncovered a 2,200-foot tunnel for smuggling marijuana that ran between a private house hard by the border in Tijuana, Mexico, and a warehouse across the border in Otay Mesa, Calif. The tunnel was no crude construction; it had electricity, a ventilation system and a rail track for transporting drugs. Several tons of cannabis, bundled and ready for transport, were found inside.

Each week seems to bring new reminders of the severity of Mexico's drug problem, and Washington is starting to worry. The Mexican drug cartels, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said this fall, "are showing more and more indices of insurgencies. It's looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago, when the narcotraffickers controlled certain parts of the country." The statement caused an uproar in Mexico, and President Barack Obama took the unusual step of repudiating it publicly. But the similarities cannot be escaped so easily, even if Ms. Clinton doesn't have the parallel exactly right.

Though we are certainly not winning the drug war, it has changed in important respects in recent years. Two decades ago, when the Medellin and Cali cartels were at their height in Colombia, Mexico was largely a trans-shipment point for narcotics. According to the Justice Department, in 2009, the last year for which reliable statistics are available, most of the drugs coming into the U.S.—heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, and marijuana—were either produced or refined in Mexico, although Colombian cocaine continued to be trans-shipped as well. Demand for particular drugs fluctuates, as in any market, according to supply and demand. At present, cocaine is down, but heroin and, above all, Mexican-produced marijuana and methamphetamines are up sharply.

This continued and still largely unstanched flow of narcotics into the U.S. is only part of the problem. Over the course of the past four years, fighting over turf and control of smuggling routes among the various Mexican drug cartels has made many Mexican cities and towns along the border virtual combat zones. "Amexica: War Along the Borderline," a recently released book by the British journalist Ed Vulliamy, paints a terrifying and authoritative portrait of this violence, in which at least 28,000 people have now died.

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