In Mexico's Seething Drug Wars, New Alarm About Violence Moving North

Mexican police found the corpses of 13 men shot execution style near the resort town of Mazatlan in December.

The threat, meanwhile, keeps growing. The Mexican cartels are dramatically expanding their reach, setting up bridgeheads and joining forces with counterparts in Colombia, Bolivia, and even Peru, where the Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path is reinventing itself as a drug-trafficking outfit. "Whenever we look at the fighting in Mexico, we should all remember that they're fighting over who controls the distribution networks for heroin and cocaine in our cities," says Mark Schneider, a vice president of the nonprofit International Crisis Group. Mexican cartels now control most of the U.S. drug market, concludes the latest National Drug Threat Assessment by the Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center. The cartels distribute their drugs in some 230 cities north of the border.

Mexican officials have tried to remain optimistic, even as public opinion polls show that Mexicans feel their government is losing the war. "The capacities of the Mexican state are aligned to break the structures of each cartel," federal Police Chief Edgar Eusebio Millán Gómez said last year. A few months later, he was gunned down on the street in Mexico City. Meanwhile, a Mexican official in Paris confessed that if Calderón hadn't gone after the cartels, the next president of the country most likely would have been a drug trafficker.

Other troubling signs include the formation of citizen vigilante squads that take the law into their own hands. One that calls itself the Citizens Commando of Juárez has threatened to kill a criminal every 24 hours until the government gets the violence under control. Other groups of citizens, meanwhile, have mobilized—perhaps at the behest of the cartels—to protest the military's presence in their towns. Police in Monterrey have taken to using water cannons to break up their marches. "We're not there yet, but when the government can no longer exert authority and protect their citizens, that's becoming a failed state," warns one senior U.S. official, noting that in Colombia, similar groups formed, only to eventually turn into violent criminal factions themselves.

More violence and kidnappings are expected in the coming year, despite—and often as a result of—Mexico's stepped-up enforcement efforts. When a cartel is weakened because of arrests or deaths, other cartels prey on their wounded brethren. "It's not in the nature of these cartels to walk away from their business without a fight," says Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, a senior associate of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Besides, there is so much money to be made that as soon as one group goes away, another one steps in to take its place." And as long as Americans continue buying their wares, the cartels will have more than enough money to fund their side of the war.

With Anna Mulrine

• Read Mort Zuckerman on Mexico's drug wars.