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The second in command of Mexico's version of the FBI was accused of taking $10,000 a month from the cartels, and two weeks later, the head of Interpol for Mexico was also arrested.
In the most startling accusation, an informer reported that the payoffs reached all the way to Vasconcelos -- a top Calderon adviser and the Bush administration's man in Mexico.
In January, after Calderon had unveiled Operacion Limpieza, I returned to Mexico to report on the struggle to purge the government of corruption and re establish the rule of law. I met with a high ranking federal official in the lobby of a stylish hotel in an upscale district of the capital.
The official, a heavyset and well dressed man, had served in Los Pinos, the Mexican equivalent of the White House. Speaking in perfect English, he was prone to making formal pronouncements reiterating the government's official policy, only to veer into bursts of candor and knowing laughs.
He agreed to speak to me but would only talk "on background" -- a demand I encountered at every turn in a nation where having your name appear in a drug related story can endanger your life, or career, or both.
Like many Mexican officials, Backgrounder blames much of his country's drug war on the United States -- and not without justification. It is America's insatiable demand, after all, that has created the market for narcotics in Mexico. Likewise, it is Washington's fixation with the War on Drugs that has pressured Mexico to wage a shooting war within its borders to stem the flow of illegal substances north of the border.
As Calderon pointed out during his summit with President Obama in January, there are thousands of gun stores just across the border in the United States; it is these stores that arm the cartels with AK 47s that are easily smuggled into Mexico. If Mexico or Canada were arming American criminals in such a fashion, Mexican officials like to point out, it would almost certainly be taken as an act of war.
Operacion Limpieza, Backgrounder adds, was really an American initiative undertaken by the Mexican authorities to placate Washington -- and to deflect attention from the fact that the U.S. government's own security operations had been breached by Felipe. "The Americans exaggerate the problem," he says. "There are institutional reasons for the American government to say that Mexico is a big disaster. Agencies like the FBI and DEA are competing for resources. There is a problem here, of course. Cities like Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez and Culiacan are violent, but the threats have been there for years. It's bad, but it's no worse than the crack epidemic in New York in the Eighties. To question the viability of the state of Mexico is preposterous."