Mexico at war with itself in pursuit of traffickers

REYNOSA, Mexico — An army convoy on the hunt for traffickers rolled out of its base in this border town under the control of the Gulf Cartel — and an ominous voice crackled over a two-way radio frequency to announce just that. The voice, belonging to a cartel spy, broadcast the soldiers' route through the city, turn by turn, using the same military language as the soldiers.

"They're following us," Col. Juan Jose Gomez, who was monitoring the transmission, said with a shrug.

The informers, some of them former soldiers, highlight a central paradox in Mexico's ambitious and bloody assault on the drug cartels that have ravaged the country. The nation has begun a war, but it cannot rely on the very institutions — the police, customs, the courts, the prisons, even the relatively clean army — most needed to carry it out.

The cartels bring in billions of dollars more than the Mexican government spends to defeat them, and they spend their wealth to bolster their ranks with an untold number of politicians, judges, prison guards and police officers — so many police officers, in fact, that entire forces in cities across Mexico have been disbanded and rebuilt from scratch.

Over the past year, the country's top organized crime prosecutor has been arrested for receiving cartel cash, as was the director of Interpol in Mexico. The cartels even managed to slip a spy inside the U.S. Embassy. Those in important positions who have resisted taking cartel money are often killed.

This was a war begun by Mexico, but supported — and in some ways undermined — by the United States: American users fuel demand for the drugs, and American guns supply the firepower wielded by Mexico's cartels.

Mexicans, aghast at the rising body count, wonder if they are paying too high a price in pursuing organized crime that has operated for generations on their soil.

Americans, including border state governors and analysts in Washington, ask whether the spillover violence presents a threat to national security.

"Sometimes, I think this is a war you can't really win," a Mexican soldier whispered to a reporter, out of earshot of his commander, during a recent drug patrol in Reynosa. "You do what you can, but there's so many more of them than us."

The government trumpets record seizures of drugs, money and guns to show that it is striking serious blows against the traffickers.