Mexico's police need reinforcements

Houston Chronicle:

Mexico's security forces have been swept into the eye of the storm since President Felipe Calderon decided to get tough on the country's drug-smuggling gangs.

Once-untouchable federal officials have been assassinated in the streets. Out-gunned soldiers and police have battled gangsters armed with grenades and bazookas. Local police chiefs have resigned, a few fleeing to the United States for safety. Hundreds of police and soldiers have been sent early to their graves.

Amid a fierce counteroffensive by the drug cartels, the question becomes: How long can, or will, Mexico's thin police line hold?

Calderon and his top assistants say the security forces are up to the task. The gunfights and killings, including the assassinations this month of four top police officials, are signs of success rather than defeat, they say.

"This reaction is precisely a desperate act to weaken the federal police," Calderon said, defending his policies and trying to rally the public to support them. "The effectiveness of a new, cleaned-up police force was hitting the criminals. We're going to continue this frontal attack."

But Bush administration officials, pushing Congress to approve a $1.4 billion, three-year package of equipment and training for Mexico's security forces, warn that Calderon's campaign will founder without the aid.

Analysts on both sides of the border worry that Mexico's underequipped and poorly trained police forces — with long histories of ineffectiveness and corruption — will come up short.

"There comes a moment when the imbalance in resources reverses the relationship between government and cartels," George Friedman, founder of Strategic Forecasting, an Austin political risk firm, wrote in a report on Mexico's drug war this week.

"Government officials, seeing the futility of resistance, effectively become tools of the cartels."

Other analysts point out that many Mexican policemen and officials have long been at the cartels' service. They argue that much of today's sustained violence against police — a relatively new twist in the country's decades-long dance with the drug trade — arises from a fragmentation of a protection system that existed for decades.

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There is much more.

Mexico is desperately in need of its own Gen. Petraeus. It needs a counterinsurgency operation that will protect the people. Many of the witnesses to the gang violence are reluctant to come forward because they know it will make them a target and no one will be there to protect them.

It should also be noted that much of the violence in Mexico is also "red on red" gang wars in which the police and the public are bystanders. But there is a real war going on just across our southern border and Americans have been victims too, as the gangs turn to kidnapping to supplement their drug money. Since the money these guys are fighting over is money they get from dealers and junkies in the US, we have a responsibility to help Mexico defeat these guys.