Pubdate: Fri, 26 Jan 2001
Source: Houston Chronicle (TX)
Copyright: 2001 Houston Chronicle
Contact:  Viewpoints Editor, P.O. Box 4260 Houston, Texas 77210-4260
Fax: (713) 220-3575
Website: http://www.chron.com/
Forum: http://www.chron.com/content/hcitalk/index.html
Author: Dudley Althaus

ANTI-DRUG PLAN SPURS DOUBTS

Mexican Experts Fear Corrupt Police Will Hinder Fox's Crusade

MEXICO CITY -- Moving to keep a key campaign promise, President Vicente Fox 
has launched a major "crusade" against crime and drug trafficking that he 
vows will mark a new era in Mexico's long-troubled war against organized 
criminals.

But some experts worry that the country's inefficient and corrupt police 
are not up to the task Fox has set for them. Others fear that the 
government and the public are not prepared for the violence that a 
concerted anti-crime effort could spark.

"Today, we ratify our war without quarter against the pernicious criminal 
mafias," said Fox, who announced the initiative while on tour of the 
Pacific coast state of Sinaloa, a hotbed of Mexico's drug trade. "It will 
perhaps be a bitter struggle, because of the perverse influence of dirty 
money. Nevertheless, I'm certain we will fulfill our commitments."

Besides drug trafficking, Fox said, his campaign would target ordinary 
street robberies, carjackings and kidnappings, which in recent years have 
become a fact of life in many Mexican cities.

Fox said another priority of his crusade will be to try to eradicate the 
official corruption that has allowed organized crime to flourish and to 
build greater cooperation between federal, state and local law enforcement 
agencies. Often in the past, those agencies have been at virtual war with 
one another, sometimes in defense of their varied criminal paymasters.

And, perhaps influenced by the easy escape from a maximum-security prison 
of a major drug criminal last weekend, Fox pledged that his government 
would work to clean up the rampant corruption in Mexico's prison system.

"Delinquency finds a welcome space in societies that condone corruption," 
Fox said in a speech Wednesday that launched the campaign. "Legal norms and 
police tools become inoperable in the face of corruption and impunity."

Fox's initiative appears to be leaning more on the armed forces than 
federal police.

The recently formed Federal Preventative Police, whose ranks are filled 
with former soldiers, will be at the forefront of Fox's crusade. His 
attorney general, Rafael Macedo, is a former army general who headed the 
service's judicial office.

Campaigns against Mexico's powerful drug gangs are not new. Every Mexican 
president of the past several decades has made well-publicized attacks on 
the country's entrenched crime syndicates the cornerstones of their public 
policies. And each of those efforts has failed.

However, some analysts said that while Fox's crusade may also prove a 
failure, it could at the same time unleash a wave of violence that the 
police cannot control.

"The "Colombianization" (of Mexico) is possible and Mexico can wind up with 
trustworthy elections but ungovernable cities," political scientist Sergio 
Aguayo, an expert on Mexican national security matters, wrote in an opinion 
column in the newspaper Reforma.

"Colombianization" has become a catchword to describe a country wracked by 
a high level of drug-related violence. Since the 1980s, U.S.-promoted 
efforts to combat cocaine-smuggling cartels have contributed to a wave of 
violence that has penetrated nearly every corner of the Andean country.

"Sometimes, the cure is worse than the disease," said political scientist 
Jorge Chabat, who specializes in U.S. and Mexican anti-narcotics policies 
at a Mexico City think tank. "The government still has weak institutions, 
and the enemy is very powerful."

"There is more political will to confront the problem," Chabat said, "but 
with what police? With what tools?"

The Fox government, which ended 71 years of one-party rule when it took 
office Dec. 1, has also begun efforts to overhaul the federal attorney 
general's office and its 3,000-member judicial police force, which is 
charged with drug enforcement.

However, Chabat and other analysts say the changes so far have only 
scratched the surface of the problems, the greatest of which is 
institutionalized corruption in the police and other security agencies.

That corruption was highlighted again in recent weeks by two examples. In 
late December, authorities arrested the attorney general's top 
representative to the border state of Chihuahua on charges of trying to 
sell a key law enforcement post.

And last weekend, convicted drug gang leader Joaquin Guzman -- called El 
Chapo or "Shorty" -- reportedly bribed his way out of a maximum security 
prison in Guadalajara, apparently out of concern that the Fox government 
would make his confinement more uncomfortable or possibly extradite him to 
the United States.

Since Mexico has become a major producer of marijuana and heroin, and a key 
transit point of South American cocaine bound for the United States, the 
country's smuggling gangs have become powers unto themselves, bribing 
police and politicians alike, operating with near total impunity.

"It's a war that doesn't have an end, it's a war without a solution," said 
Luis Astorga, a sociologist at Mexico's National Autonomous University who 
investigates the narcotics industry. "Perhaps, there are good intentions to 
break the links between government and organized crime, but I have the 
impression they haven't prepared enough to undertake the task."

Astorga, who has written extensively about the relationship between Mexican 
authorities and the narcotics smuggling gangs, warned that cleaning up law 
enforcement, while necessary and commendable, could also serve to free 
corrupt officials from any political control, making the situation worse at 
least in the short run.

"There will be more freedom of action, more autonomy," on the part of 
former police officials to work openly with the drug gangs, Astorga said.

That occurred in the mid-1980s when then President Miguel de la Madrid 
disbanded Mexico's feared secret police, the Federal Security Directorate, 
when its ties to drug traffickers became too obvious.

Several former commanders of the agency quickly emerged as some of Mexico's 
leading drug lords.

Using the army in the drug war has been tried before, with decidedly mixed 
results.

Former President Ernesto Zedillo put army officers in charge of 
anti-narcotics efforts across Mexico in the mid-1990s with little success.

The policy hit bottom in February 1997 with the arrest on corruption 
charges of Army Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, whom Zedillo named national 
drug czar.

Some analysts say that despite the periodic crackdowns on smugglers by a 
succession of Mexican administrations, the Institutional Revolutionary 
Party, or PRI, long ago reached an "understanding" with organized crime 
gangs that allowed profits to be shared between officials and criminals.

While such an arrangement eroded the authority and legitimacy of the 
government, the analysts say, it also permitted Mexico to escape the sort 
of drug-related violence that has shaken Colombia and other countries.

Now, as Fox vows to take on the Mexican drug gangs in a frontal assault, 
some experts worry about the consequences.

"Through the years, a fabric of corruption, impunity and indifference was 
weaved, which facilitated the growth of criminal power," Aguayo wrote in 
the Reforma column. "The arrival of the new government signified a change, 
an alternation, to the understanding that so benefited the drug traffickers.

"Although we can't blame the Fox government for an inherited corruption, we 
hope -- we demand -- that they show us that they have a strategy behind 
their action," Aguayo continued.

"If they are going to break the understanding that the government had with 
the drug barons, do they know that the answer will be war?"
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens