Mexican Drug Gangs Target Military

This is what failed immigration and drug policies have wrought. The Mexican gangs are fighting over the lucrative drug trade coming into the United States:

Mexican drug cartels armed with powerful weapons and angered by a nationwide military crackdown are striking back, killing soldiers in bold, daily attacks that threaten the one force strong enough to take on the gangs.

The daily bloodshed includes an ambush that killed five soldiers this month, a severed head left with a defiant note outside a military barracks on Saturday and the slaying Monday of a top federal intelligence official who was shot in the face in his car outside his office in Mexico City.

Guess where they get the guns:

The drug trade is all-powerful in Mexico. Analysts estimate that cartels here make between $10 billion and $30 billion selling cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine to the U.S. market, rivaling Mexico's revenues from oil exports and tourism. The gangs also make billions through robbery, kidnapping and extortion of businesses and would-be migrants.

The crackdown will fail. There is too much money to be made. The Mexican government is too weak to fight ruthless, well financed drug gangs:

U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officials say it's too early to judge the crackdown's success. Seizures at the U.S. border indicate the flow of drugs north may actually be increasing — 20 percent more cocaine and 28 percent more marijuana has been seized in the past six months, compared with the same period a year earlier.

Violence nationwide in Mexico seems to be increasing. The country's three leading newspapers estimate shootouts, decapitations and execution-style killings have claimed the lives of about 1,000 people this year, on track to soar past last year's count of 2,000. The government doesn't count drug-related killings, and a top federal police official, Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna, has referred to the newspaper figures as the best numbers available.