MEXICO:STRETCHED THIN in an uphill battle against drug gangs, the government of Mexican president Felipe Calderón faces increasingly stark options at a pivotal moment.
The fatal September 15th grenade attack on civilians in western Mexico, coming on top of a steadily rising death toll nationwide, drastically altered the stakes in the long-running crackdown.
Calderón now has little room to pull back without appearing beaten. But the attack, which killed eight people during an Independence Day ceremony in Calderón's home state of Michoacán, is testing the public's stomach for the increasingly savage conflict.
"The violence is not going to stop soon. There will be more actions," political analyst Alfonso Zarate warned last week in the daily El Universal. "However, neither the government nor the public can turn back."
The crisis has reopened debate over alternatives, including legalising drugs. A growing number of residents wonder aloud whether Calderón's administration should revert to the practices of earlier governments led by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which tolerated traffickers as long as they kept the killings of noncombatants down and bribes up.
Calderón's aides have publicly ruled out any peace deals with the drug underworld.
"There are two options: to fight it or not fight it," security analyst Jorge Chabat wrote in El Universal last week. Walking away from the battle would worsen corruption and could leave the Mexican government critically weakened, he warned. But staying with the crackdown will almost surely mean more bloodshed. "We face two very, very bad options," Chabat wrote. "What is not clear is which one is the least bad."
Turf wars among drugtrafficking groups have killed more than 3,000 people this year, according to media reports, aggravating public anxieties over a rising rate of kidnappings and other crimes.
Calderón is digging in. The administration had already deployed 40,000 army troops and 5,000 federal police as part of a nationwide campaign that began shortly after Calderón's inauguration in December 2006. The offensive has yielded several high-profile arrests and some big seizures of drugs and money, including a recent $26.2 million (€18.7 million) haul in northern Sinaloa state.
But it has yet to deliver anything like a knockout blow.
"From the start of his administration, when he proposed this as a priority, president Calderón indicated clearly that this was going to be a long-term battle," attorney general Eduardo Medina-Mora said in a television interview last week. "The complexity, the penetration, the strength of [organised crime] was much greater than anyone wanted to assume."
During a recent visit to New York, Calderón again called on the US to help by staunching the cross-border flow of arms into his country. He also said Mexico was "paying a very high price" for US drug consumption.
But in raising the spectre of a possible terrorism campaign, the grenade attack has left Mexicans feeling more at risk than at any time since Calderón launched his offensive.
Last Friday, authorities announced the arrests of three men suspected of carrying out the grenade attack. They were said to be members of the Zetas, the armed wing of the so-called Gulf Cartel that has decapitated rivals and carried out scores of other killings.
Although polls show most Mexicans support the government's crackdown, they also indicate that citizens increasingly question whether this type of campaign can succeed. The Calderón administration conceded during a recent congressional hearing that the intelligence service lacks agents and information-gathering capacity for a nationwide campaign against organised crime.
Interior secretary Juan Camilo Mourino confirmed what everybody already suspected: that drug gangs have infiltrated police forces so thoroughly that authorities cannot guarantee public safety. And he expressed concern that drug money could make its way into midterm congressional elections next July.
Security is certain to be a key issue in the elections amid widespread perceptions that the drug war is deadlocked, at best. When Mourino, Medina-Mora and Genaro García Luna, the nation's public safety chief, appeared before congress last week, opposition lawmakers jeered and held up signs spelling out "Resign".
Public opinion remains a wild card. In a poll in the Milenio newspaper last week, two-thirds of respondents said they feared going to public places after the grenade attacks.
Still, public shock over the assault may boost support for Calderón's argument that pressure on drug traffickers is working. - (LA Times-Washington Post service)