Tough Habit to Break

While the government battles the cartels, an even more difficult war is being fought for the hearts and minds of many Mexican people. "There was a lack of enforcement in some areas in the past that now are seeing a lot of Mexican government law enforcement action with successful results," says one senior U.S. counter-drug official in Mexico, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Calderón is trying to change the country."

Recent polls show that for the first time a majority of Mexicans think the cartels are winning the war. When top cartel members are arrested or killed, homages in the form of narcocorridos—drug ballads—are posted on YouTube almost immediately. But no one wrote a song for Edgar Millán Gómez, the federal policeman killed on May 8 in his Mexico City apartment who, after being shot eight times, still mustered the strength to ask his attacker, "Who sent you to kill me?" No one wrote a song about Alberto Capella, the current Tijuana police chief, who mere days before taking up his new post, was attacked by 20 gunmen in his own home. Tijuana's "Rambo," as he's now known around town, managed to fend them off with his own weapon before the police arrived some 30 minutes later from the station—which is just over a mile away.
 
Defeating an ingrained system of corruption and lawlessness where the bad guys are often admired will be difficult, many Mexicans say. "There's a culture of corruption which we face in this country, which hurts our country, but is part of its soul," laments Jaime Alberto Torres Valadez, a spokesman for the Ciudad Juárez police department.

Some don't necessarily want to change the status quo—after all, it's a system they've known nearly forever. In the state of Sinaloa—the heart of Mexican drug country—drug trafficking and lawlessness are an entrenched part of the culture. The earliest documented poppy production in the state was in 1886. Mexico's most wanted man, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, and the Sinaloa cartel were born there. And admiration for the bandidos of yesteryear is so strong that the unofficial patron saint of drug trafficking—the mythical mustachioed Jesús Malverde, who is said to have robbed from the rich and given to the poor before he was hanged at the beginning of the 19th century—has his own small but well attended chapel in the state capital, Culiacán.

In Badiraguato, a small town high up in the dry hills just north of Culiacán, a group of teens and 20-somethings talked candidly about their culture one day last week. If Sinaloa is the heart of drug country, then Badiraguato is its primary valve—the surrounding hills are home to poppy and marijuana fields, and residents there know who puts food on the table. "The drug traffickers do good things here. They employ people. There's no corn, no beans here—the people here are all about drugs," said 22-year-old José de Jesús Landell García, who co-owns a shoe shop with his father. He added that most of his friends took up employment with the drug cartels "because it was the only thing they could do."

Badiraguato is the epitome of a drug-funded town. Unlike most mountainside pueblos, this town of roughly 5,000 people is clean, its roads newly paved. Brand new SUVs, BMWs and Mercedeses cruise the streets, and most residents live in Mediterranean-style homes, with red tiles, gates and lush, green lawns. The mayor earns $63,000 a year—a high salary in this area—and lives in a two-story house high on a hill overlooking the town, which looks more like Santa Barbara, Calif., than what one might expect to find in the sierras of Mexico.

"The drug traffickers have money, create jobs and help people," said Landell García. His friend, 17-year-old Gladys Elizabeth López Villareal, agreed. "The people, like Chapo, are good people. We're their admirers. They help us and they respond how they have to," she said, referring to the drug traffickers' not so pleasant ways of dealing with their business competitors and, sometimes, the law. Such sentiments are found throughout the state. "[Often] the government doesn't give to the people, so they turn to the narcos," said 28-year-old law student Jesús Manuel González Sánchez, who runs the Malverde shrine in Culiacán.