Hitting Below the Border, Again

Mexico is one of my absolute most favorite countries. I have lots of attorney friends in and around Mexico City, and it is has so many of my favorite travel destinations… from historical and “beachy” to culinary/cultural. There is a mixture of super-sophisticated with down-home friendliness. Among my favorites – “let go and relax” – is the fishing village/beachy venue of Zihuatanejo in the “sleepy” State of Guerrero, also home to such wondrous touristy places such as Acapulco.

Of course, there are parts of Guerrero that are better known for that “rat-tat-tat” that is not exactly the sound of a woodpecker at work. It could be an AR15 semi-automatic assault rifle bought at a Texas gun show without a background check, smuggled across the border, or some older AK-47 someone just had lying around. But finding a bullet-riddled body or two lying in the street might be bad for the tourist industry, but it’s business as usual among the various cartels plying their narco-trade, protecting their path to the lucrative U.S. market.

Police in this area are notorious, often linked rather directly to the cartels… and while it’s not quite as rough as the slaughter in the border regions, corruption countrywide has gotten totally out of hand. With low pay and little in the way of a tax base to pay local officers remotely adequately, the exception seems to be a clean cop, and way too many are simply foot soldiers to cartels, or at least paid to look the other way.

Be a little guy who gets in the way of swaggering police officers, already so lawless that their behavior is often arrogant, violent and unchecked, and prepare to get beaten up or perhaps to meet your maker. But sometimes, the locals just can’t take it anymore. “Hundreds of armed vigilantes have taken control of a town on a major highway in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero, arresting local police officers and searching homes after a vigilante leader was killed. Several opened fire on a car of Mexican tourists headed to the beach for Easter week.[Uh oh!]

“Members of the area’s self-described ‘community police’ say more than 1,500 members of the force were stopping traffic Wednesday at improvised checkpoints in the town of Tierra Colorado, which sits on the highway connecting Mexico City to Acapulco. They arrested 12 police and the former director of public security in the town after a leader of the state's vigilante movement was slain on [March 25^th]…

“‘We have besieged the municipality, because here criminals operate with impunity in broad daylight, in view of municipal authorities. We have detained the director of public security because he is involved with criminals and he knows who killed our commander,’ said Bruno Placido Valerio, a spokesman for the vigilante group…Placido said vigilantes had searched a number of homes in the town and seized drugs from some. They turned over the ex-security director and police officers to state prosecutors, who agreed to investigate their alleged ties to organized crime.” New York Times, March 30, 2013. I kind of remember that this need for real protection from rising criminal elements was exactly how and why the Mafia was first founded in Sicily. One nasty group displaces another nasty group that already displaced the cops.

Taking down masses and even entire towns of corrupt cops is nothing new in Mexico. There are constant reports of official Mexican federal efforts to eliminate corrupt cops. These are just a few of those stories: Back in December of 2011, the port city of Veracruz’s 800 officers and 300 administrators were fired, and Mexican officials brought the Navy in to patrol the port city. In August last year, they fired the entire police force charged with guarding Mexico City’s International Airport. Or this one: “Soldiers and Mexican Federal Police officers took control of the police department in Guadalupe, a city in the Monterrey metropolitan area, as part of a ‘reorganization and cleansing’ operation, and arrested 12 state and municipal officers, officials said.” Latin American Herald Tribune, March 13^th.

It seems that demand for illicit drugs continues unabated in the United States, despite trillions of dollars dedicated to stop narcotics-related crimes. No one is really looking at new ways of dealing with this issue, but perhaps it’s time. Add rampant police corruption in Mexico to our virtually unlimited ability to supply the latest and greatest automatic weapons to cartels, allowing firearm “private sales” (even at gun shows) to occur without background checks (40% of all guns sales in the United States) and the ease of smuggling weapons across the U.S. border into Mexico… and well, you’ve got the mess we call the Mexican criminal justice system. We are as responsible for the drug bosses for what’s going on, and despite about $1.9 billion of targeted U.S. aid to fight drug trafficking, the nasty trade just keeps on coming!

I’m Peter Dekom, and eventually, Mexico might just stop fighting the battle necessitated from the failure of the United State to deal with its narco-demand curve.