"Mexico is not a failed state"

It is obvious that President Felipe Calderón is uncomfortable discussing the ongoing violence that is devouring Mexico and which has claimed more than 30,000 lives since he took office in 2006.

Soon after his inauguration, Calderón declared an all-out war against the powerful drug cartels- making it a top government priority. But today, as he approaches the end of his mandate, these efforts have shown little results. Mexicans are fed up with the daily shootouts, the headless bodies of victims that show up in public places, the senseless killings, the lack of safety on the streets in some major cities and a sense of growing frustration that this is a war that cannot be won.

"The fact is that when I became president I realized the enormous power these criminals had acquired, and I also understand that a good part of that power was acquired through neglect [by authorities]. Or we can also assume that there may be some kind of an agreement between them," the president said in an interview earlier this month in his Los Pinos official residence.

"If you examine the figures of the highest homicide and crime rates in Mexico, you can see they take place in Chihuahua, Tamaulipas and Sinaloa, at least in 2010. I am convinced that if the government had concentrated on these fronts - not just fighting the criminals, but by rebuilding institutions, reviewing officers, applying tests of trust and creating special units for specific crimes such as kidnappings - we could have resolved this problem some time ago or at least it wouldn't have escalated to what it is today."

In a 2008 Pentagon report, Washington analysts concluded that Mexico is at the risk of becoming "a failed state." The conclusion was "a brutal blow" to the Calderón administration, the conservative leader says. "I now see the world today and wonder where are those who said that Mexico was a failed state. I see what is happening in Egypt; I see what is happening throughout North Africa [...] The truth is that Mexico is really very, very far from that."

Compounding the Pentagon's assessment was Calderón's stormy relationship with US Ambassador Carlos Pascual, who resigned on March 19. Pascual had been critical in his reports to his superiors in Washington about the efforts taken by the Mexican army and law enforcers in the drug war. The cables were made public last December when EL PAÍS published them as part of the WikiLeaks release. They reportedly infuriated Calderón, who called the ambassador "ignorant." At the time of the EL PAÍS interview with Calderón, Pascual had yet to resign. "I have said all that I have had to say about this issue, and to me the most important thing is our relationship with the United States, which is a very complex one and much broader than an incident involving one person."

In another issue, Calderón spoke about the need to go beyond what his government has tried to accomplish in introducing tax reform. Most of the country's revenue is collected from the state-owned oil industry, Pemex. Calderón said that his government introduced two tax-reform bills but there had been much resistance from the opposition Revolutionary Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD).

"The fact is that there have been governments without a majority and with an opposition that is bent on blocking any type of tax reform [...] What is fundamental here, I think, is the parties questioning whether this policy is beneficial to their supporters. No doubt the failure of a tax reform has come from that side- not because of a lack of will by the government but by an unwillingness by the opposition."