Countering the cartels

The decomposing bodies of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent and his pilot are discovered wrapped in plastic bags at a ranch about 60 miles from the Guadalajara streets where they were kidnapped by the cartel controlling drug trafficking in central Mexico. The agent’s corpse bears traces of the drugs a doctor administered to keep him alive during some 30 hours of interrogation, as his torturers crushed his jaw, ribs and windpipe, and drilled a hole into his skull. “We are in a war and cannot accept that Enrique Camarena died in vain,” the U.S. ambassador says.

That was 25 years ago. Last weekend, a U.S. consular official, her husband and the husband of another consulate employee were fatally shot after attending a children’s birthday party in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano called the killings “brutal, unconscionable and unforgivable.” This was another crime in a different city controlled by a different cartel. But it is all part of the same war of attrition that has been underway for more than a quarter of a century. What progress do the United States and Mexico have to show for it? Drug consumption in the U.S. has continued unabated, and the violence has only increased.

In the first 2 1/2 months of this year, nearly 500 people have been killed in Ciudad Juarez’s drug violence, many of them bystanders to the battles among competing drug gangs and between cartels and government troops. That’s in addition to the more than 2,600 killings there last year -- not across the globe in Baghdad or Kabul, but in a city on our border. The violence has driven out a quarter of Juarez’s residents in the last two years.

We don’t yet know whether consulate official Lesley Enriquez or her companions were personally targeted or if perhaps traffickers wanted to send a generic message to U.S. and Mexican officials. The Aztecs gang, lowly foot soldiers for the Juarez cartel, is suspected in the slayings.

President Felipe Calderon has deployed thousands of troops to Juarez in recent years, but since the killing of 15 youths at a teenager’s birthday party in January set off a wave of protests by parents, he has visited the city three times and promised an infusion of money for social programs -- a kind of counterinsurgency program designed to draw unemployed toughs and gunmen away from the cartels. We hope this broader approach will have more success. The U.S. government must continue to work with Calderon not only to fight the traffickers, but to create jobs, strengthen government institutions and professionalize a legal system sadly overburdened by the need to bring the killers of Enriquez and so many others to justice.