Mexico's drug problem: a deadly battle against Mexico's drug cartels has overtaken illegal immigration and trade as the top issue between Mexico and the United States.

• Author: Archibold, Randal C.
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

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The small Mexican border town of Praxedis--long terrorized by drug cartels battling for control of smuggling routes--made headlines in October when it appointed a 20-year-old female criminology student as its police chief.

But after just five months on the job, Marisol Valles, now 21, fled with her family to the United States seeking asylum after receiving death threats. She had good reason to take them seriously: Her predecessor's head was found on the doorstep of the police station.

In a neighboring town, 28-year-old Erika Gandara became the police chief after no one else would take the job and every other officer on the force had quit or been killed. In December, armed men kidnapped her from her home, and she hasn't been seen since.

That kind of brutality has been the hallmark of a war in which the Mexican government has been battling drug cartels that are at the same time fighting each other for control of routes to the lucrative drug markets in the U.S.

When Mexico's President, Felipe Calderon, took office in late 2006, he made defeating the country's drug cartels a priority, committing the forces of both the federal police and the military to the fight. The result has been four years of escalating violence and more than 34,000 people killed, including 15,000 in the last year alone. (Many of those killed have been members of drug gangs, killed by rival gangs.)

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"The country is under a security crisis, a crisis without precedent in the history of the country," says Mexican Senator Ricardo Monreal Avila.

U.S. Market for Drugs

The U.S. is not a bystander in Mexico's drug wars: The drugs, mainly marijuana and cocaine, are largely purchased and used by Americans, and many of the guns the drag cartels use are bought, either legally or illegally, in the U.S. and smuggled across the border.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has acknowledged that the problem isn't Mexico's alone.

"Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade," Clinton said on a trip to Mexico. "Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers, and civilians."

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Illegal Immigration & Trade

Until a couple of years ago, the biggest issues between Mexico and the U.S. were economic development and illegal immigration (see "Other Key Issues," p. 11). But now, the drug war--and the threat of violence spilling over the 2,000-mile-long border with the U.S.--is eclipsing other concerns.

"The fate of Mexico is intertwined with the fate of the U.S.," says Kevin Casas-Zamora, a Mexico expert at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, D.C. "To the extent that violence careens out of control in Mexico, it will end up affecting the U.S. sooner or later."

That has already begun to happen. In February, two American teenagers were shot and killed while they shopped for a car in Juarez, Mexico. Carlos Mario Gonzalez Bermudez, 16, and Juan Carlos Echeverri, 15, were both students at Cathedral High School in El Paso, Texas. A week...