Mexico’s armed forces were busy over the holiday season. On December 16th, in what must have seemed to bystanders like the longest barrage of machine-gun fire ever directed at a single target, members of the Mexican Navy’s Special Forces killed Arturo Beltrán Leyva, a major trafficker. This past weekend, with much less fanfare, the police arrested one of Arturo’s brothers, Carlos. In his mug shot one notices his shirt, which is made of an exquisite, nearly gossamer fabric, and the frightening rage in his dark eyes.

The Beltrán Leyvas got their start as hired guns for the most notorious of the Mexican drug traffickers, Joaquín Guzmán, better known as el Chapo, or “Shorty,” and eventually became Guzmán’s business associates. Arturo Beltrán Leyva—who, according to press reports, was known variously as the Beard, White Boots, or Death—was the head of the family. When one of his brothers, Alfredo, was arrested in early 2008, Arturo accused Shorty Guzmán of having turned him in. Soon after, Guzmán’s eldest son, Edgar, known as el Chapito, was shot dead with an AK-47 in the parking lot of a shopping mall, and it was widely assumed that his execution was ordered by Arturo Beltrán Leyva. The resulting split between the Guzmáns and the Beltráns set off several deadly turf wars and earned Arturo in particular a reputation for grotesque bloodthirstiness. Arturo’s own death and the imprisonment of two of his brothers was a major coup, and President Felipe Calderón, who has been pressed for good news, can legitimately claim a victory in the war against the drug trade he inaugurated on coming to office three years ago.

Whether that victory will have any lasting impact on the volume of drugs being bought and sold, or, for that matter, if there is any point to the so-called war on drugs, are different questions. By certain measures, the drug traffickers could be said to be winning the war; they have certainly become an integral part of the Mexican landscape. Arturo Beltrán had been living undisturbed in Cuernavaca before his death. The Navy was called in for the assault on the luxury apartment building where he was staying because the Army was so infiltrated by traffickers that it could not be relied on to keep the operation secret. Before Arturo’s brother Carlos was arrested, he had been driving around his home state of Sinaloa unmolested and undisguised—even though Sinaloa has been under intensive Army and security patrol for three years. The archbishop of the state of Durango has been complaining since last April that el Chapo himself is often in residence at a ranch north of the state capital. For his pains, all the bishop got was a fright at a highway checkpoint set up by unidentified men.

Even the manner of Arturo Beltrán Leyva’s death revealed how the drug culture has penetrated law enforcement. A leaked series of photographs showed masked men in civilian dress lifting the trafficker’s bullet-ridden corpse to strip it. In the next photo, the naked body is lying on the floor. The medallions and jewelry he wore in life are photographed on his bloodied chest. Finally, in a compelling and revolting drug-world-style display, the corpse is entirely covered in blood-stained money. The government will now never be able to establish to the public’s satisfaction whether Beltrán Leyva died in the course of a shoot-out, or was simply executed. (The finger-pointing following the photographs’ publication had not ended as of this writing.)

Early last year, a member of the Michoacán trafficking group La Familia called a local television station during its prime-time newscast, identified himself as Servando Gomez Martinez, a.k.a. la Tuta, and ranted for a while. In addition to the threats and bouts of self-pity, he had a message: the government of Felipe Calderón should halt its war against the drug trade and negotiate. Didn’t President Calderón realize, la Tuta said, that no matter how many traffickers might be killed tomorrow—even if he or everyone was killed—more traffickers would spring up to take their place the following day?

What was missing from la Tuta’s diatribe was the fact that that, no matter who replaced him, no one could give him back his own life. But he was right on the other count: Yesterday’s successfully eliminated clandestine route (through the Caribbean, say, in the late nineteen-eighties) was replaced by a fresh one (through Mexico, in this case), and today’s dead trafficker will be replaced by tomorrow. Far more countries are being damaged by trafficking than when Richard Nixon launched his war on drugs forty years ago. What it adds up to, at best, is a tug-of-war. Meanwhile, we are left with Calderón’s holiday victory; the image of Beltrán Leyva’s money-plastered corpse; and the certainty among frightened Mexicans that the death of a drug kingpin will lead to bigger, more violent turf wars in the weeks to come.