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"I would think the ONLY way it could succeed is with the cooperation of the drug cartels."

I seem to recall you've raised the issue of the drug cartels and the current level of political unrest in Mexico before and my usual response has been that they're more interested in local than national politics. I want to amend my earlier comments now to say that it is becoming clear to me that there is a major drug cartel influence at work within the Mexican left. Allow me to explain, and I'll just be working off the top of my head. Normally, I would be providing a lot of links here, but I'm just going to ask you to trust me on what I relate.

As the Mexican post-election controversy has wound down a bit, I have begun visiting a few other Latin American news web sites I visited only on rare occasions in the past. Included among these are El Universal (Caracas), El Heraldo (Caracas), El Espectador (Bogota), El Mercurio (Santiago, Chile), El Mundo (Santa Cruz, Bolivia), La Patria (Manizales, Colombia), El Comercio (Lima) and a couple of others (I've got a bookmark folder for all of these as you might guess). And what I've been picking up in their discussion of drugs is that the Mexican drug cartels are driving the narcotics trafficking industry in South America outright. They've commented on the FARC in Colombia making contacts with the Mexican drug cartels (something I have pointed out), they see Mexican Mafiosos (their exact word) active in Peru and Bolivia organizing armed resistance to coca eradication campaigns, they describe the distribution system as primarily running directly to Guatemala to provide overland access into Mexico across an almost completely unguarded frontier, and they are discussing the drug violence now occurring within Mexico almost as much as the Mexican news media itself is doing, but curiously enough, with much more analysis of what's going on behind the news of Mexican drug violence than I find in the news in Mexico. Make no mistake about it, from the South American perspective -- and I should say I don't see this in Venezuelan newspaper articles -- the fight that is going on in Mexico is for control of the coca and opium traffic coming out of South America. They can name specific gangs -- the Colombian, Peruvian, and Chilean media are very good at this -- and just where they operate; they can relate these gangs to current activity in Latin America by city and region; they quote the U.S. DEA and CIA reports on drug trafficking organizations more so than American news media outlets do, and they relate their associations within Mexico as well.

From the South American perspective, part of the dissolution of order in the far south of Mexico is both created by the Mexican drug cartels in their own interests and it is also helping to create a new power alignment within the drug cartels, specifically that the import routes are becoming less and less reliant upon boats moving up the Pacific Coast and more and more across the Guatemalan highlands. This is presenting Mexico with an internal realignment in which the Sinaloan and Baja California cartels are either getting pushed aside by new operations controlling the import into southern Mexico, or they're being forced to negotiate new arrangements cutting these new operations in for a piece of the pie. And the result is exactly what you'd expect -- chaos. The incredibly high murder rates in the drug trade we've been seeing in the news from Mexico recently are practically being predicted by the South American press. It's all perfectly understandable to them.

I've only learned a lot of this information over the past month and a half or so -- to be honest I'm still learning more every week -- so I cannot present myself as having complete expert knowledge on the matter. But I know how to recognize a sensible argument and I must say that the South American news media is making very good sense of the recent violence in Mexico to a far greater degree than anyone in Mexico -- I wonder if the Mexican news media fears for their lives if they name names? -- or in the U.S. for that matter. And the political element? That's easy. With the FARC in the mix having direct contacts with Lopez Obrador's PRD (thanks to former Venezuelan Ambassador Vladimir Villegas) and the Guatemalan border providing access into PRD-controlled Chiapas and Tabasco, it's not hard to do the extrapolation.

The Mexican drug cartels are no longer able to count upon the PRI as they used to do. The PRD is fast becoming the only game in town. The PAN has allied itself with the U.S. drug enforcement efforts, so they're out of the picture. And it's going to take a while for these alignments to fall into place, so expect more violence.

This pretty much represents a summary of what I've been reading CA Guy. It's a little different take than I've given you in the past, but that is a reflection of my utilization of new, and I would argue very relevant, source material.