YUMA Az ( YES drive your car or DRUGS over the fence ) Drugs wars -see photo

Welcome to the inherent looniness of the drug war. It has actually been a good year for Mexico, in at least one respect: the murder rate dropped precipitously along some stretches of the border. (Though whether this can be attributed to the kill-or-capture campaign of outgoing President Felipe Calderón is not at all clear. The largest cartel, the Sinaloa, vanquished a number of challengers during this period, and black-market monopolies are often more peaceful than the alternative.) But it was a colorful year as well, due to the systematic, try-anything-once eclecticism of the smugglers, and the antic game of Tom-and-Jerry escalation that they tend to play with law enforcement on both sides of the border.

1. On the Fence

“Show me a fifty-foot fence and I’ll show you a fifty-one-foot ladder,” a drug warrior once told me, and the cartels have long excelled at so-rudimentary-they’re-obvious methods of pushing product across the border. In this instance, a group of smugglers near Yuma, Arizona, tried to drive a Jeep right over the fence. “Ramps!” you can almost hear them saying beforehand. “We could use ramps!” If you could inscribe the Quixotic essence of the drug war in a single image, the photograph above might very well be it.