That same report calculated that no less than 60% of Mexico’s cities are controlled by organized crime. That’s not "influenced by," nor "under the sway of" - flat-out controlled.

The drug cartels are slaughtering cops, soldiers, government officials, and unfortunate bystanders at a rate of 8 each and every day, on target to kill over 4,000 citizens by the end of the year. Since President Felipe Calderon took office December 2006, and started to apply pressure on the cartels, sending 20,000 troops into 11 Mexican states, the traffickers have responded by murdering at least 4,867 people. The police are so corrupt, so bought and paid for by the cartels, that even when someone is arrested for a homicide, the odds are the case will never be brought to trial as an astonishing 87% of the investigations inevitably contain fatal errors of one kind or another, causing them to be dismissed, according to the Mexican newspaper La Reforma.

And of all that’s not bad enough, the cartels might be forming into a "megacartel," that could pose an even greater challenge to the state.

A short summation of the Mexican drug business: The Arrellano-Felix Organization (AFO) owned the Tijuana border crossing market; The Sinaloa Federal, a cooperative venture between Carrillo-Fuentes in Juarez, and the Sinaloa Cartel, controlled from Tijuana to Nuevo Laredo; and The Gulf Cartel, supported by its partners and enforcers Los Zetas (about whom this site has previously written), ruled from Nueva Laredo to the Gulf of Mexico.

Thus, the drug (and human) smuggling business was divided up, though of course the cartels engaged each other with extreme violence on a constant basis. Then Calderon shook things up, focusing the first stage of his war on the traffickers on the Gulf Cartel. He extradited its boss, Cardenas, along with a number of his lieutenants, who were running their gangs from inside Mexican jails, to the U.S. This vacuum allowed Los Zetas to step up and take command of the cartel, or, to be more specific, the cartel’s businesses. At the same time, peace within the Sinaloa Federation broke down and, to cut to the chase, after a particularly vicious interlude, the Beltran-Leyva group emerged paramount, and soon they were working with Los Zetas, creating an organization that controls the border across the length of the U.S.-Mexico border, save for Tijuana, where the embattled AFO group is struggling to hold onto the city.

All these leads to a situation that threatens the stability of the government and the nation. As Guillermo Valdes, head of Mexico’s intelligence organization, CISEN, recently told the Financial Times: "Drug traffickers have become the principal threat because they are trying to take over the power of the state."

And once again from UN adviser and professor Buscaglia, who addresses not only the problems within Mexico, but touches on the American role as well, quoted in the ISN Security Watch: "Unless the Mexicans start dismantling the financial and economic networks supporting organized crime operations, through money laundering, high-level corruption, arms trafficking, human trafficking, etc, the expressions of violence and instability will keep growing and the paradox will impede an effective performance of the State.... (The US has) a policy that is contradictory within itself on migration, guns, drugs and trade and investment, and Mexico just has to live with it because they are junior partners..."

The U.S. cannot be expected to solve Mexico’s problems, brought about by generations of corruption, greed, and fundamentally undemocratic institutions. Nonetheless, the sooner Americans take responsibility for what happens on our own soil, and how that affects what occurs on both sides of the border, the better off both countries will be.