Police casualties in the drug war crossfire in Mexico

NY Times:

The assassination was an inside job. The federal police commander kept his schedule secret and slept in a different place each night, yet the killer had the keys to the official’s apartment and was waiting for him when he arrived after midnight.

When the commander, Commissioner Édgar Millán Gómez, the acting chief of the federal police, died with eight bullets in his chest on May 8, it sent chills through a force that had increasingly found itself a target.

The police say the gunman had been hired by a disgruntled federal police officer who worked for a drug cartel in Sinaloa State, and the inside nature of the killing underscored just how difficult it is for President Felipe Calderón to keep his vow to clean up police corruption and end the drug-related violence racking Mexico.

Since coming to office in December 2006, Mr. Calderón has sought to revamp and professionalize the federal police force, using it, with the army, to mount huge interventions in cities and states once controlled by drug traffickers.

The result has been mayhem: a street war in which no target has been too big, no attack too brazen for the gangs.

Opposition politicians and even some police officials have begun to question whether the president’s ambition has exceeded his grasp, with dangerous and destabilizing consequences for a country that shares a 2,000-mile border with the United States. Bush administration officials have said Mr. Calderón’s efforts might founder unless the United States Congress approves a $1.4 billion package of equipment and training over three years for Mexico’s police.

Top security officials who were once thought untouchable have been gunned down in Mexico City, four in the last month alone. Drug dealers killed another seven federal agents this year in retaliation for drug busts in border towns. Others have died in shootouts.

Drug traffickers have killed at least 170 local police officers as well, among them at least a score of municipal police commanders, since Mr. Calderón took office. Some were believed to have been corrupt officers who had sold out to drug gangs and were killed by rival gangsters, investigators say. Others were killed for doing their jobs.

The president has vowed to stay the course, portraying the violence among gangs and attacks on the police as a sign of success rather than failure. The government has smashed the cartels, he says, forcing a war among the splinter groups. The killing of Commissioner Millán, he has said, was “a desperate act to weaken the federal police.”

“What it signifies is a strategy of some criminal organizations who seek to terrorize society and paralyze the government,” he said last week. “The question is, should we persevere and go forward or simply hide in our offices and duck our heads. No way is the Mexican government going to back down in such a fight.”

The violence between drug cartels that Mr. Calderón has sought to end has only worsened over the past year and a half. The death toll has jumped 47 percent to 1,378 this year, prosecutors say. All told, 4,125 people have been killed in drug violence since Mr. Calderón took office.

But the steady drumbeat of police killings has caused more shock here. On Wednesday, for instance, the second in command of the police in Morelos State and his driver were found dead in the trunk of a car. A placard on the bodies warned against joining the Sinaloa Cartel.

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There is much more.

I have been closely following the drug insurgency in Mexico for several years. What the drug gangs are trying to do now is nationalize what they did locally in places like Nuevo Laredo where the gutted the police and the only people left would ignore them and their wars with other gangs.

In many of the border areas there is no effective law enforcement. It would take a surge of force to the area much like what the US and the Iraqi did in Baghdad that was adequate to protect the people who could point out where the drug insurgents are operating. It would need to be sufficient to cut off their movement to contact with police and rival gangs as well as their shipment of drugs.

Calderon is doing the right thing in attacking the corruption in Mexico, but it will take time to root it all out and replace it with honest law enforcement. The situation Mexico is in now is not unlike where Iraq was 18 months ago. We are starting to see the fruits of the increased force to space ratio in Iraq. It may take longer in Mexico, but it can happen. It will happen sooner if the Democrats will quit throwing roadblocks in the way of the aid we need to send there. Labor bosses are playing games with the lives of Mexican and their police and they need to stop it.

If the Mexican police and army can get enough people on the ground where they can protect the people they will get an exponential increase in intelligence on the drug insurgents. As for the red on red fights between the bad guys, they should find ways to exploit those hard feelings.