Tough Habit to Break

In the yard under the midday sun at Santa Marta Acatitla, a women's penitentiary on the outskirts of Mexico City, a prisoner dressed in a stylish beige pantsuit, Jackie O-style sunglasses and heels, heads over to the pay phone in the shaded corner. "Look," says one inmate, her eyes lighting up and her jaw dropping slightly. "La Reina."

La Reina del Pacifico, the Queen of the Pacific, otherwise known as Sandra Avila Beltrán, was taken into custody late last year. The alleged drug queenpin who rose to the top of a male-dominated industry now spends her days here, awaiting trial for charges relating to alleged connections to organized crime. Her cellmates spend much of their days gossiping about her. "She's so cool," says one. She's a "hero" who worked around the system. At this another inmate frowns. "She's just one more here in the prison," she says cynically. "If she's really La Reina, then why is she still here? Why haven't her people come and rescued her yet?"

Such talk is increasingly common throughout Mexico today, from prisons to mountainside towns, as the country wages a ferocious military campaign against powerful drug cartels that make an estimated $13 billion a year and control swaths of national territory. On one side is the president, the military, the law; on the other, the drugs, the violence, but also the stuff of legends—the supposed Robin Hoods who steal from the rich and give to the poor, the bad boys for whom rules don't apply.

President Felipe Calderón is trying to do more than just eradicate drug production and smuggling into the United States, he's attempting to transform a culture that was built on cartel money, force and patronage. It won't be easy. More than 4,000 lives have been lost since Calderón started his initiative in December 2006.

In many parts of the country, drug bosses run everything from local politics to the police to business. They've established themselves as the grandstanding members of the community that local politicians never have been. Sometimes their influence is subtle, sometimes not. At a party earlier this year commemorating Children's Day in the northern town of Ciudad Acuña, a banner hung proudly behind the swarms of kids being entertained by clowns. HAPPY CHILDREN'S DAY, it read, FROM YOUR FRIEND, OSIEL CARDENAS GUILLEN. YOU ARE THE FUTURE OF OUR MEXICO.

The godfather of the Gulf cartel had sent a message home to the future of "our" Mexico from his cell in Houston, to which he was extradited last year after being arrested in 2003. He currently faces charges of drug trafficking and attempting to kidnap two U.S. federal agents. (He pleaded not guilty before a magistrate in Texas.)