Mexican drug trafficking

Although Mexico has been a producer and transit route for illegal drugs for generations, the country now finds itself in a pitched battle with powerful and well-financed drug cartels.
The government says more than 34,600 have been killed in the four years since President Felipe Calderón took office and threw the federal police and military at the cartels, with the toll for 2010, 15,237, the heaviest yet.
Mexican and American officials, crediting American training of the military and what they consider to be an increasingly professional federal police force, point out that more than half of the 37 most wanted crime bosses announced last year have been captured or killed. The government also maintains that the last quarter of 2010 showed a decline in the pace of killings.
But the public does not seem to believe it. A poll released Jan. 11 by Mexico’s national statistics institute found that more than 70 percent of respondents believed the country’s security had worsened since 2009.
Both Mexican and American officials, who say the two countries have never worked closer in fighting crime, are facing growing pressure to prove that their strategy is working. With Republicans now in control of the House, the Obama administration will face renewed scrutiny to account for the $1.4 billion, multiyear Merida Initiative, the cornerstone of American aid in Mexico’s drug fight.
The violence has in some cases spilled over the border and become a source of mounting concern in states in the Southwest. And in June 2010 a Justice Department report described a "high and increasing" availability of methamphetamine mainly because of large-scale drug production in Mexico.
In October 2010, the government announced that it was preparing a plan to radically alter the nation’s police forces, hoping not only to instill a trust the public has never had in them but also to choke off a critical source of manpower for organized crime. It would all but do away with the nation’s 2,200 local police departments and place their duties under a “unified command.”
In February 2011, the Pentagon began flying high-altitude, unarmed drones over Mexican skies in hopes of collecting information to turn over to Mexican law enforcement agencies. A Homeland Security drone was said to have helped Mexican authorities find several suspects linked to the Feb. 15 killing of Jaime Zapata, a United States Immigration and Customs EnforcementImmigration agent.http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/mexico/drug_trafficking/index.html