Mexico's War Against Drug Cartels Deadly Toll

The death toll from Mexico's ongoing war against drug cartels and corruption continues rising, and the deaths are becoming higher profile figures, including police chiefs and other leading officials.

So, how does the New York Times cover this? They think that the war shouldn't be fought. The title gives it away: Mexico’s War Against Drugs Kills Its Police.

Top security officials who were once thought untouchable have been gunned down in Mexico City, four in the last month alone. Drug dealers killed another seven federal agents this year in retaliation for drug busts in border towns. Others have died in shootouts.

Drug traffickers have killed at least 170 local police officers as well, among them at least a score of municipal police commanders, since Mr. Calderón took office. Some were believed to have been corrupt officers who had sold out to drug gangs and were killed by rival gangsters, investigators say. Others were killed for doing their jobs.

The president has vowed to stay the course, portraying the violence among gangs and attacks on the police as a sign of success rather than failure. The government has smashed the cartels, he says, forcing a war among the splinter groups. The killing of Commissioner Millán, he has said, was “a desperate act to weaken the federal police.”

“What it signifies is a strategy of some criminal organizations who seek to terrorize society and paralyze the government,” he said last week. “The question is, should we persevere and go forward or simply hide in our offices and duck our heads. No way is the Mexican government going to back down in such a fight.”

The violence between drug cartels that Mr. Calderón has sought to end has only worsened over the past year and a half. The death toll has jumped 47 percent to 1,378 this year, prosecutors say. All told, 4,125 people have been killed in drug violence since Mr. Calderón took office.

But the steady drumbeat of police killings has caused more shock here. On Wednesday, for instance, the second in command of the police in Morelos State and his driver were found dead in the trunk of a car. A placard on the bodies warned against joining the Sinaloa Cartel.

Several terrified local police chiefs have resigned, the most recent being Guillermo Prieto, the chief in Ciudad Juárez, who stepped down last week after his second in command was killed a few days earlier.

“It is not just happening in Ciudad Juárez,” Mayor José Reyes Ferriz, said at the funeral for the deputy commander, Juan Antonio Roman García. “It’s happening in Nuevo Laredo, in Tijuana, in this entire region. They are attacking top commanders to destabilize the police.”

One reason for the surge in violence is that Mr. Calderón and his public security minister, Genaro García Luna, have upset longstanding arrangements between the police and drug traffickers at every level of government, several experts on crime in Mexico said.

The official government of Mexico is trying to take down the drug cartels, and the Times instead thinks that the Mexican government is killing its police? The Calderon government wants accountability and wants to eliminate graft and corruption, which have been holding back development in Mexico for generations, and yet the idea of going after the drug cartels is an anathema to the Times, despite the carnage wrought on society worldwide as a result of drug trafficking.

This is yet another symptom of the warped worldview pervasive at the Times.