Mexico's bulimic police purges

Time:

Few rituals are more futile than the "housecleaning" of Mexico's police forces. So deep, broad and brazen is cop corruption south of the border that removing it makes eradicating rats from landfills look easy. Mexico stages quasi-annual purges of officers high and low - last year it was 284 federal police commanders - and yet every year it seems to find itself with an even more criminal constabulary. This year's scandals, however, are especially appalling.

Over the summer, President Felipe Calderon's anti-drug czar, Noe Ramirez, resigned abruptly. This week, the likely reason became apparent after Ramirez was detained and accused by federal officials of taking $450,000 to keep Mexico's most powerful narco mafia, the Sinaloa Cartel, informed about police anti-drug operations. He is the highest-ranking government official to be nabbed in this year's anti-corruption sweep.

But not the only one. Last month five top officials at the federal organized crime task force were collared for the same crime - after being fingered by an informant who, astonishingly, worked for both the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and the Sinaloa narcos. Days later the federal police chief, Gerardo Garay - whose predecessor, Edgar Millan, was murdered by narco hitmen last May, allegedly with the aid of a federal cop - resigned after being linked to a Sinaloa capo. Mario Velarde, a top boss of the federal police force's anti-drug unit and a former private secretary to Garcia Luna, was also detained this week, for leaking info to the narcos. Ramirez and all the accused deny the charges. But, as one federal security analyst says, it's no longer strange in Mexico's police purges "to see today's butchers become tomorrow's cows."

Mexico's real carnage, meanwhile, gets ghastlier by the day. This year the nation has logged some 4,300 drug-related murders, and analysts fear Mexico could actually double last year's record of 2,500. The spike in killing is largely due to the war Calderon declared last year on the drug cartels. He's deployed more than 25,000 federal army troops in the campaign; but the narcos have lashed out with insurrection-style violence against a harrowing number of law enforcement officials, from beat cops to top cops like Millan, as well as prosecutors and judges. The cartels, whose homicidal repertoire includes an orgy of beheadings, upped the terrorist ante in September when they allegedly threw grenades into a crowded plaza in Michoacan, killing eight people. (See pictures from Mexico's drug wars.)

The cartels, which run a $25 billion-a-year trafficking industry in Mexico, have also intensified their campaign of co-opting police. Not that Mexico's woefully undertrained and underpaid cops are that hard a mark. But the relentless revelations of the breadth of the corruption - including allegations that officers under Mexico's Public Security Minister, Genaro Garcia Luna, were involved in high-profile kidnappings - seem to make a mockery of Calderon's efforts to stamp it out. "This is Calderon's Iraq," says Sergio Aguayo, a security expert at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City. "He declared war against the cartels, but he wasn't prepared for the size of the threat the cartels turned out to represent." Many cases in the latest purge, which is indeed called "Operation Housecleaning," are based on the testimony of an unidentified cartel informant in U.S. custody. Still, Calderon faces critics who worry the arrests are an attempt by the Mexican president to find scapegoats for his anti-drug quagmire and to secure U.S. anti-drug aid.

...

All the more reason why the U.S. and the incoming Obama administration need to lend Mexico, America's third-largest trading partner, a more serious hand in reforming and professionalizing its police forces. This year Washington approved $400 million for Mexico's anti-drug fight in 2009, part of a three-year aid package known as the Merida Initiative. But critics say the plan focuses too much on interdiction hardware like helicopters and not enough on software like an overhaul of Mexico's police and judiciary - especially higher pay for cops, many of whom earn a measly $5,000 a year, and the creation of more modern investigative units. Without it, Calderon will continue to rely on his army in this fight; but in the long run, armies make for lousy drug interdiction forces.

...

While there have been some cop killings it is not entirely clear they are related to Calderon's attempt to establish the rule of law. In many cases those killed were on the take from rival drug gangs and were caught up in the red on red war waged by the criminal insurgency. My speculation is that most of the killed were members of rival criminal insurgent gangs and those who dealt with them through a "business" relationship.

We faced a similar problem with the Iraqi police and the counterinsurgency strategy gave the Iraqis time to train the cops to act more responsibly. But it would not have worked if US and Iraqi forces had not been able to protect the people. By doing that we got the intelligence we needed to find and destroy the enemy. At this point who in Mexico would take information about the criminal insurgents to the police? It would be reasonable to fear that the cop you told will tell the narco terrorist what you said or may even do the dirty work for them. That is why using the troops is so important at this stage of the conflict. To get intelligence the people have to find someone they trust to tell what they know.