MEXICO CITY — Army Capt. Claudio Montane wants one thing clear from the start: This place is not a narco-museum. The point is not to glorify drug traffickers.
"Its purpose is to show Mexico and the world the efforts and the good results that we have achieved," Montane said, opening a tour of a military collection officially called the Museum of Drugs.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, May 12, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 National Desk 1 inches; 34 words Type of Material: Correction
Museum of Drugs: An article in Monday's Section A about Mexico's Museum of Drugs referred to the museum as telling a tale of a cat-and-mouse battle with prehistoric roots. It should have said pre-Hispanic.
But spend a couple of hours examining the exhibits with Montane, in his crisp dress uniform and spit-shined shoes, and you wonder if a better name would be the Museum of Mexico's Long and Unwon War Against Drug Traffickers Who Keep Finding Clever New Ways to Feed the U.S. Habit.
Just as the museum outlines the army's 33-year-old role in this war, it offers powerful testimony to the inventiveness and enormous resources that traffickers continue bringing to the fight.
From their use of semi-submersibles to sneak Colombian cocaine in by sea to powerful rifles capable of punching through armor, the smuggling gangs present a foe that can seem more formidable with every passing day.
A section full of captured cross-border smuggling artifacts -- including an innocent-looking doughnut and empanada that proved to be filled with drugs -- is a credit to on-the-ball soldiers in the field. But it prompts a nagging question: How much got through?
"Drug dealers are ingenious," said Montane, who before running the museum was on the front line of the drug war, in the northern state of Sonora. "But the genius of the military people is more."
This is no ordinary museum. For one, it's closed to the public. Housed on the seventh floor of the Mexican Defense Ministry building here, it is instead used to teach military personnel about the drug trade they have been called upon to fight.
The collection was created in 1985, back when troops were mainly used to eradicate crops of marijuana and poppies by uprooting and burning them.
But the exhibits have never been more relevant than today, with the military playing a larger role in the drug war than at any time in its history. Mexican President Felipe Calderon has dispatched 45,000 troops across the country since declaring war on the drug cartels in December 2006.
It has been a bloody chapter. Clashes between troops and drug traffickers, and among rival gangs, have claimed more than 10,000 lives. A plaque at the museum's entrance tallies the military's losses since December 2006: 99 officers and soldiers have died.
