Mexico police evade rule of law

Times:

On a hotel roofgarden overlooking the wealthy Polanco district in Mexico City Carlos Gomez smiles warily as he zips up his jacket to conceal the handgun tucked under his belt. “Things are very dangerous right now,” he says. “There's a lot of violence — too much violence.”

Mr Gomez — handsome, unmarried and in his early forties — is a member of one of the most feared and powerful organisations in Mexico, a group whose members are so far beyond the law that they allegedly kidnapped the 14-year-old son of one of the country's wealthiest businessmen, collected a ransom, then tortured and killed the boy anyway, leaving his decomposing body in the boot of a stolen car.

As any Mexican will tell you, this gang of outlaws is not a drug cartel or a mafia outfit. It is the police.

Mr Gomez — not his real name — is part of it. He earns a meagre $700 (£400) a month as a plainclothes detective with the Procuraduría General de la República (Office of the Attorney General), and is responsible for investigating and prosecuting federal crimes — in theory, at least.

The reality is less comforting: in almost a decade on the force Mr Gomez said that he has solved precisely zero cases. Nada. Not a single one.

“We work with limitations,” he said. “You don't do your job, you just chill out, you take your salary, and you avoid trouble as best you can. Sometimes I get depressed when I think about the situation in Mexico.”

Trouble often comes in the form of officers from rival police departments — there are said to be at least 1,600 of them in Mexico — many of which provide protection to drug cartels or run their own criminal operations. If Mr Gomez raided a “narco store” in the wrong part of town, he would risk being shot or thrown in jail by one of his fellow detectives. Jail can be worse than death so instead Mr Gomez does nothing.

Public distrust of the police has reached such a level that The Times translator made it a condition of the interview with Mr Gomez that it was conducted in a public space, with plenty of witnesses and a CCTV system. Mr Gomez, for his part, said that he was putting his life at risk by talking to the press.

The upshot of police corruption in Mexico has been in an almost total collapse of law and order in recent months, a terrifying state of affairs that seems to have gone largely unnoticed north of the border in the US, even though many Mexicans blame Americans for the troubles. Americans bought the drugs that funded the drugs cartels, which paid off the police, they said. Americans also supplied the weapons.

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There is some more of the blame America first drivel, but the lack of integrity of the police is strictly a home grown problem. The mordita culture of Mexico has existed for generations and the drug insurgents who are also Mexican know how to manipulate it. The drug culture may be a customer but the crooked cops should be held responsible for their activities and not try to shuffle responsibility onto someone else.