In Mexico's drug wars, police given 'trust test'

Hundreds of police have been suspended in a bid to stem trafficking-related corruption.

from the June 27, 2007 edition

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For some experts, the judgment to cast a wide net is misguided. "They are following the same logic as the military strategy, to suspect everyone," says Irma Sandoval, head of the Laboratory of Documentation and Analysis of Corruption and Transparency at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "There is a culture of suspicion generated.... They go after everyone when what they should be doing is going after the guilty ones."

She says it is a sign that, six months after Mr. Calderón approved military helicopter sweeps over marijuana fields and checkpoints on highways and town roads alike, the operation is failing: They have to target the very people leading the effort.

But the government says it has detained hundreds of gunmen and burned lucrative fields of marijuana.

Its greatest success, experts say, has been the world's biggest seizure of drug cash in March – $207 million stashed in a luxury home in Mexico City.

The US has praised Mexico's efforts. Last week, a former governor in the state of Quintana Roo, accused of smuggling cocaine into the US, was arrested on a US extradition request.

The removal of top police officials could signal a step toward changing the institutional framework of public security in Mexico, Ms. Salazar says, as the Calderón administration seeks to unify the two federal forces under one command.

But many say that no true institutional change is taking place. What really is needed, says Ms. Sandoval, the corruption expert, is more civilian oversight, not unlike citizen police committees in the US.

In the meantime, the temptation for corruption lingers. "Insofar as there is demand for corrupt policemen, these drug guys will channel money as much as possible," says John Ackerman, a legal expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "As long as these narcos [traffickers] have this money, and the policemen are earning these miserable salaries, it's pretty cheap for the narcos to pay them off."

"This does demonstrate initiative and dedication on the part of the government to move things forward," says Jose Maria Ramos, a security expert at the research institute Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana. But he says, new officers still face systemic problems. "The police aren't well paid, they aren't valued, society always criticizes them, so they end up seeking shelter [in the wrong places]," he says. "The new ones could end up doing the same."

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