There's actually some truth to this comment from the DEA but it reminds me so much of Dick Cheney's many "light at the end of the tunnel" comments about Iraq I couldn't resist. Besides I never believe anything anyone involved in narcotics says no matter what end of the transaction they're on.

"Our view is that the violence we have been seeing is a signpost of the success our very courageous Mexican counterparts are having," said Michele Leonhart, acting DEA administrator. "The cartels are acting out like caged animals, because they are caged animals."

In fact, things are going so great that Calderon is making the occupation of Juarez "permanent":

(Calderon's) government says drug murders in the city have since dropped by 80 percent. But police corruption and complaints of rights abuses threaten to undermine early gains and the federal attorney general's office is sending more agents, recruiting more police and appointing a general as an aide to the city's mayor, the army said on Thursday.

"People are asking what will happen if the army leaves Ciudad Juarez. Well, the army's presence here is permanent, but we are also strengthening all areas of security," army spokesman Enrique Torres said.

The DEA has more advice from Mexico:

"Two things that really turned things around in Colombia were extradition and the use of wiretaps," says the DEA official, who worked Colombia and Mexico and asked not to be named. "There are lessons to be learned for Mexico" from Colombia's experience.

On a related note, a law requiring fingerprints from anyone wishing to use a cell phone in Mexico is now in effect. Suspicion breeds confidence. Wonder if that was a DEA suggestion too.

Here's an interesting policy prescription from Professor and author George Grayson via the Washington Post web site:

I don't believe either country can stop the violence and corruption. What Mexicans could do is to uplift their downtrodden who live a rag-pickers in fetid slums and barren communal farms, even as the elite enjoy princely lifestyles.

What to do: (1) recover the public education system from the hugely corrupt SNTE teachers union led by Elba Esther Gordillo; (2) open PEMEX, the national oil company, to private investment before Mexico becomes an oil importer; (3) undertake trust-busting against food-processing, cement, and telecommunications giants; (4) reform the fiscal system so that the government collects more than 11.8% of GDP in taxes; (5) hire Canadian or Scandinavian firms to assume control of Customs operations, etc. etc.

Mexico is an extremely wealthy country whose future lies in its OWN hands!

Of course, even as Calderon and Obama parade before the cameras, the tide that will sweep Calderon and his PAN out of power continues to rise:

The peso slumped 0.5 percent to 13.1600 per U.S. dollar at 12:31 p.m. New York time, from 13.0891 yesterday. The currency earlier rose to 12.9813, the strongest since Dec. 17. The drop pared the peso’s advance over the past month to 6.8 percent, the biggest gain among Latin America’s six most-traded currencies.

“With such a negative outlook on the economy from the central bank statement, and after the rally in the peso over the past month, some traders will reassess their short-term strategy and are looking to lock in some profits,” said Gerardo Margolis, a vice president for emerging markets at TD Securities Inc. in Toronto.

Banco de Mexico slashed its target rate to 6 percent from 6.75 percent today, a bigger cut than the half-percentage point reduction expected by the median forecast of 27 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. Policy makers have lowered the rate four times since the start of the year from 8.25 percent.

Economic statistics suggest a “strong contraction” in economic growth and employment in the past two quarters, meaning gross domestic product will shrink in 2009 more than the bank had forecast, Banco de Mexico said in a statement. The bank said in January that Latin America’s second-biggest economy would contract as much as 1.8 percent this year.

I'll wrap up with a long quote from this insightful piece from Andres Martinez of the New America Foundation about how the U.S. is seen by many on the other side of the border:

On the Mexican side, of course, there is plenty of misunderstanding as well, but one borne not from neglect but from excessive rumination about the northern colossus. Mexican elites think they know the United States inside and out, but they invariably hold onto irreconcilable, overreaching stereotypes: As individuals, Americans are innocent, humorless, and bumbling, but in the aggregate, Americans somehow manage to form a ruthless, omnipotent hegemon.

Partly because half of what used to be Mexico now lies north of the border, Mexicans underestimate the ability of the United States to bumble. Seeing the United States as a nearly infallible superpower suits Mexico's cultural fatalism and provides Mexicans with an all-convenient scapegoat for their daily travails. But Mexico's exaggerated sense of awe about its northern neighbor is as corrosive and distortive to the bilateral relationship as is the utter contempt with which Americans regard Mexico.

On immigration, for instance, Mexicans can't entertain the possibility that perhaps the United States is incapable of policing its border with microscopic precision. Hence, in the Mexican narrative, millions of Mexicans have crossed "illegally" because Washington wanted them to do so since they needed their labor, a view reinforced by the ease with which they get hired. The fact that prospective employees are made to cross a desert as part of the application process, and forced to live in the shadows subject to arbitrary deportation, is just a sign of anti-Mexican prejudice, which preceding waves of immigrants from places like Ireland and Germany would never have been subjected to.

The headline-grabbing violence surrounding the drug trade, which has claimed more than 10,000 lives in the last three years, also exacerbates a sense among Mexicans that their fate is determined north of the border. American demand for illicit drugs is the root cause of the problem, and the trafficking cartels are becoming an ever larger cancer thanks to the billions in profits and the thousands of weapons that flow back into Mexico.

If you're a Mexican invested in the narrative of an all-powerful American empire, it's hard not to take the current situation as a personal affront. The Obama administration and members of Congress might pat themselves on the back for offering Mexico a helicopter or two to help out, but south of the border there is a perception that if it wanted to, the United States could easily put an end to the northward flow of drugs and the southward flow of cash and guns. Beyond effective policing, how about repealing the Second Amendment and legalizing drugs to solve the problem? The fact that Mexicans can raise such questions in earnest shows what distant neighbors they really are.

The current financial crisis also feeds all sorts of misunderstandings and even conspiracy theories south of the border. How to square this financial crisis, a global contagion that for once was triggered by the United States and is wafting across the border from north to south, with the image of an all-powerful America? In Mexico, the thesis of American decline is not obvious. Surely there must be something else going on, and indeed the fact that it is the Mexican peso, not the American dollar, that has been devaluing--eating away at recent gains in Mexican living standards--seems an indication that when it comes to the coin toss of sharing a border with the United States, it's always going to be "heads they win, tails we lose."