Thirty-seven dismembered bodies dumped on Mexico highway

[Comrade Grumpy]

15. The Mexican government has deployed tens of thousands of troops...

...to fight the cartels. Calderon called them out in December 2006, and it has only gotten worse since then.

The local police forces are corrupted, the federal police are corrupted, and its probably a safe bet that elements of the army are corrupted, too. You have state police commanders running death squads for the cartels.

At this point, even if we completely legalized the drug trade, the cartels wouldn't go away. They are so wealty and powerful and have expanded into other realms of criminality that they are going to be an enduring problem.

Many Mexicans are looking wistfully back at the days of the PRI dictatorship, when the government didn't so much try to repress the traffic as manage it. Deals were made and adhered to, and the level of violence was magnitudes lower. The PRI candidate looks likely to win the presidency in July.