Mexico in The Times

A lot of the news coverage of Mexico in the American papers is formulaic and not too enlightening: Official X was killed, drug wars are uncontrollable, people in Washington are worried, experts have suggestions but are basically stumped, yada yada yada.

That was emphatically not so with James McKinley's piece in The New York Times today. Really, a terrific piece of analysis and reporting. Two portions stand out:

Drug traffickers have killed at least 170 local police officers as well, among them at least a score of municipal police commanders, since Mr. Calderón took office. Some were believed to have been corrupt officers who had sold out to drug gangs and were killed by rival gangsters, investigators say. Others were killed for doing their jobs.

The last sentence is key; increasingly, it seems that high-level officers are being targeted despite the lack of any connection to one cartel or the other. That marks a shift away from the standard practice among cartels that had endured for years. I'm not sure if it is a sign that the cartels are getting desperate, as Calderón says; that sounds like a willful optimism. I'm not really sure what it means, but it is unsettling.

McKinley's paragraphs on Calderón's efforts to reform the federal police are also worth reading, probably the most detailed description of it that I've read in the American media.