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neighborhood is watching me. I suck in the dusty air, feel the warmth of the sun. Across the street, a large German shepherd barks through the iron fence. He stares me down and does his work of guarding a world where only large, angry dogs go about unarmed.
     
    There are a few basic rules about the Mexican army. If you see them, flee, because they famously disappear people. If you are part of them, desert, because they famously pay little. In the 1990s, President Ernesto Zedillo formed a new, pure force to fight drugs and had them trained by the United States. They were paid a pittance—a friend of mine in the DEA grew close to them because his agency instantly put them on the payroll and he was their pay-master. By 2000, the special antidrug force had joined the Gulf cartel and became known as the Zetas, U.S.-trained military killers with discipline and skill with weapons. The original Zetas are mainly dead, but their style—decapitations, military precision in attacks—spread and now they are the model for killers in many cartels. They are also an inspiration and a constant lure for Mexican soldiers who desert for the cartels—over a hundred thousand troops fled the army and joined criminal organizations in the first decade of the new century. The pay is better and so is the sense of power.
    In 2000, the election of Vicente Fox ended the seventy-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. The drug industry ceased to be controlled by the central government, many independents entered the business, domestic drug use skyrocketed, and federal control of the nation grew ever more feeble. The razor-thin election of Felipe Calderón in 2006 brought the very legitimacy of the president into question. He responded by unleashing the army against the drug industry ten days after his election as a show of force. And that is when the killing began to spiral to previously unimagined levels. First, he sent twenty thousand troops to his home state of Michoacan. Then, the military mission grew to thirty thousand nationally, and eventually forty-five to fifty thousand. With each escalation, the number of murdered Mexicans exploded. At about the same time, the United States began mumbling about Plan Mexico, a billion and a half dollars to help our neighbors to the south fight the good fight, with the lion’s share going to the army. Put simply, the United States took a Mexican institution with long ties to the drug industry—the army was a partner in the huge marijuana plantation in Chihuahua, Rancho Bufalo, of the mid-1980s, and it was a Mexican general who became the drug czar in 1997 until it was discovered he worked for the Juárez cartel—and bankrolled it to fight the drug industry.
    And so in Juárez tonight, the army does the killing, the United States gloats over a battle against the cartels, the president of Mexico beams as Plan Mexico comes close to his grasp. And the street soldiers of the drug industry either duck down or die—the kills in Juárez are largely of nobodies or of their local cop allies. And the Zetas, the thousands they have trained, and their imitators get friskier. They have training camps in northern Mexico—they killed four cops from Nuevo Laredo in such a camp and then burned them in barrels. They have heavy arms, grenades, rockets, good morale, and high pay. Desertion is not an option.
    By the late 1990s, the cartel in Juárez was said to have rockets. And was hiring former Green Berets to make sure its communications systems were up to snuff. But as the bodies mount in Juárez, the capos are not the ones with bullet holes. In fact, there is no evidence they are even concerned by this military exercise. It is a mystery.
    During this season of gore, Francisco Rafael Arellano Felix, the former head of the Tijuana cartel, was released in El Paso in early March after doing about ten years in Mexican and U.S. prisons. He crossed the bridge into what the DEA claims is enemy territory, the