Pubdate: Thu, 30 Jun 2005
Source: Economist, The (UK)
Copyright: 2005 The Economist Newspaper Limited
Contact:  http://www.economist.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/132
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Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/mexico

THE WAR ON THE BORDER STREETS

Americans' demand for illegal drugs has created powerful crime
syndicates in Mexico. The country's police, only partly reformed,
struggle to keep up

In his office in a small house just south of the border with the
United States, Jess Salazar Almaguer hands visitors copies of prayers
for peace. Mr Salazar, the vicar-general of the bishopric of Nuevo
Laredo, is tired of the violence that has beset his city. Mara, queen
of peace, plead for us, the prayer reads.

But Mr Salazar reckons that temporal powers can help too. People out
of work need money, so they sell drugs.

The American authorities need to change their way of thinking.

Mr Salazar is not alone in this belief.

The failure of drug prohibition in the United States is wreaking havoc
in northern Mexico. In the past, much Colombian cocaine reached the
United States through the Caribbean. Repression has made that route
riskier.

But instead of checking the overall flow, this has merely re-routed it
via Mexico. According to an assessment by the United States'
government, last year 92% of cocaine entering the country did so
through Mexico, up from 77% in 2003.

The story is the same for other drugs.

The United States Department of Justice's latest National Drug Threat
Assessment notes that marijuana production in Mexico increased by 70%
in 2003 (the most recent year for which figures are available). It
also gives warning that Mexico's output of heroin and methamphetamine
is increasing. Anthony Placido, an official at the Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA), told Congress recently that methamphetamine
seizures on the United States southern border are up 74% since 2001.

According to the threat assessment, Mexican criminal gangs exert more
influence over drug trafficking in the US than any other group.

Mexicans now control 11 of the 13 largest drug markets in the United
States, according to an American official.

The effects of the tightening grip of Mexican organised crime are
being felt south of the border as well as north of it. It is not our
problem, but we have to pay for it, says Raymundo Ramos, a
human-rights activist in Nuevo Laredo. His city, the busiest crossing
on the border, has this year found itself in the middle of a turf war
between rival gangs.

According to reports in Mexican newspapers, at least 300 people have
died in drug-related violence in six of the country's northern states
so far this year. Many were the victims of execution-style killings.

Mexican and American officials agree that the rising violence stems in
large part from a battle to fill a power vacuum left by the arrest of
two prominent traffickers. In 2002, Mexican police detained Benjamn
Arellano Felix, the head of the Tijuana cartel; in 2003, they arrested
Osiel Crdenas Guilln, who headed the Gulf cartel.

According to Mr Placido's testimony, a group called the Federation
(also known as the Sinaloa cartel) has been trying to capitalise on
the weakness of the Tijuana and Gulf gangs to take over their territory.

Far from combating the drug mobs, the police in Mexico have all too
often been their allies.

In that respect, however, there are a few hopeful signs of change.

The efforts of Mexico's president, Vicente Fox, to enact sweeping
reforms of the police and of the criminal-justice system have fallen
foul of congressional opposition. But his government has shown much
willingness to try to do something about drugs.

In 2002, the government formed the Federal Agency of Investigation
(AFI), an elite force partly modelled on the American FBI. It is
proving to be more effective than any other police body has been in
the past in Mexico. And reforms of the judicial system, though blocked
at the federal level, are slowly proceeding state by state.

The AFI apart, corruption and incompetence remain hallmarks of
Mexico's police. It not always clear which of the two is the bigger
problem.

Jorge Chabat of CIDE, a university in Mexico City, notes that part of
what distinguishes the AFI's members are such mundane skills as being
able to use a computerskills which most Mexican police seem to lack.
Other things, too, differentiate the AFI from the norm, notes the
American official.

It has a cadre of young, college-educated officers whom it has kept
separated from older officers who might corrupt them. It has a clear,
merit-based career structure, and presidential encouragement. Mr Fox
is said to attend every AFI academy graduation. All this seems to have
kept the new force relatively clean.

The American official sees the appeal to patriotism as especially
important.

In contrast, our president sure doesn't come to the DEA graduations,
he notes.

Although the AFI is only a small star in the murky universe of Mexican
policing, at least it provides a starting point for rooting out police
corruption. Notably, a joint operation by the AFI and the army in
early June, which saw the suspension of the entire local police force
of Nuevo Laredo, appears to have been at least a partial success.

The operation was triggered by the murder of a new local police chief,
apparently with the help of some of his subordinates. The subsequent
investigation has led to the firing of 100 of the force's 700 officers
who failed either drug or polygraph tests, and to the rescue, on June
27th, of 43 people who had been held captive by drug gangs in Nuevo
Laredo.

Partly because of the creation of the AFI, a past history of mutual
mistrust between Mexican and American law-enforcement officials has
given way to closer co-operation under Mr Fox. But that does not mean
that the drug war is being won. Once (a drug shipment) hits the ground
in Mexico, you might as well say it's in the United States, says the
American official. That is partly because of the lack of effective
co-ordination among the various American law-enforcement agencies
operating on the border.

The sheer scale of the United States' illegal imports of drugs from
Mexico has created some of the world's most powerful and dangerous
organised criminal gangs.

Taming them will be neither easy nor quick.

Despite the manifest failure of the drug war, American officials see
talk of legalisation as surrender.

The result is that Mr Salazar's prayer seems unlikely to be answered
soon.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin