This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 2nd, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Mexico appears to have elected a new president,

but it's not clear that the leader of a formerly corrupt political

party will be willing to tell Washington to end the American-led war on drugs.

Juan Carlos Adago is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, he comments.

In what position, in what economic health, and obviously there's a war on drugs raging in Mexico.

How does Felipe Calderon leave Mexico?

I think that you can claim that Felipe Calderon has been a disappointment.

He came to power under legitimacy cloud the way he was

elected through a very small margin of votes, less than 40,000 votes.

Many people still believe that there was fraud involved in his election,

although those claims have been debunked but he launched his war

against the drug cartels in order to assert himself and assert his authority

precisely because of those doubts about his election.

And six years later, we can see that it has been another failure.

60,000 people at least have died in drug-related violence.

Drug trafficking continues to be as strong as ever,

so we cannot claim that all these violence

has inflicted real pain for the cartels.

So I think that that's gonna be his main legacy,

his failed war on drugs that leaves Mexico in a very very

...