Ay carumba, that's mucho dollares! But that's the number Mexico's federal government (per Secretary of Public Security Genaro Garcia Luna) estimates is being paid to corrupt local police across the country. Luna noted: "That sum, he said at a conference on drug-trafficking, 'is the portion the government doesn't pay police officers so they can live with dignity.' With 33,000 officers in the federal police force and another 430,000 serving on disparate state or municipal forces, that estimate would mean the cartels pay out an average of more than $200 per officer each month." AOLNews.com (August 25th).
Local corruption is fatally epidemic, at virtually every level within the country. For example, in the small town of Santiago, a suburb of the manufacturing and business hub of Monterrey, seven out of Santiago's ten police officers were arrested (along with the mayor's bodyguard) for the brutal execution of mayor Edelmiro Cavazos, whose body was found bound and gagged on August 18th. Assumptions are that the hit was ordered by the local drug lords and that, allegedly, the officers in question were on cartel payroll. Estimates place the number of people killed in Mexico in the drug wars since Mexican President Felipe Calderon took office in December of 2006 at 28,000, almost the same number of American military casualties for the entire Iraq war since it began in 2003. 2,076 of these Mexican fatalities were cops.
Corrupting federales is not to be taken lightly, but in so many communities, the local cops might as well were cartel uniforms, because their loyalty is most certainly not to the people that they were engaged to protect. No city has been as bloody as Ciudad Juárez (across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas), and its mayor José Reyes Estrada Ferriz has struggled with a police force that has been beyond redemption in the battle against organized crime. "When he assumed the mayor's office in July 2007, Reyes Ferriz forced all Juarez cops to take 'confidence' exams. He then fired about three-quarters of the force, lured new hires with increased salaries and required that rookie cops go through police school." AOL.
The good mayor has become a vital force in a new movement that may result in disbanding the local police in their entirety and replacing and reconstituting them as a new state-level police force, all across Mexico: "Reyes Ferriz… is part of a group of local and state leaders that … [has] endorsed a fundamental reorganization of Mexico's police forces. The vote of the Special Commission of the National Public Security Council isn't binding, but supporters hope it will jump-start a more formal legislative process to refocus Mexico's failing war on the drug cartels." AOL.
The goal is to take a fractionalized 2,400 separate municipal police forces and organize them into 32 operating groups at a statewide level, not beholden to the local mayors and other "local political forces." You can bet that most cities and towns will fight this effort, tooth and nail; it deprives local authorities control over their own communities and makes mundane tasks like traffic control a bureaucratic nightmare. But when you have an effective civil war in which a huge part of the problem is the corruption of local cops, extraordinary measures are essential. Will this effort succeed? Would it really make any difference? Or is Mexico doomed to become a war lord-driven, lawless narco-state… like… er… Afghanistan?
I'm Peter Dekom, and I am grateful that at least Afghanistan is not on our border!
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