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 Editorials | Issues | January 2007 
Calderón Shows Strength Against Drug Gangs
 Ronald Buchanan - Financial Times
| | Faced with a death toll of 2,000 last year alone in bloody wars among drug gangs, Mr Calderón’s first move after becoming presidenct in December was to send some 7,000 troops and federal police to his home state of Michoacán. (Guillermo Arias/AP) |
When, in the middle of an offensive against drug gangs, President Felipe Calderón last week donned a military cap and tunic – with the five stars of commander-in-chief but with the buttons undone – he left himself open to cheap jibes.
Nor were they long in coming, not least from his arch-enemy, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leftwinger he defeated in last July’s election. Mr López Obrador, self-styled “legitimate president”, described Mr Calderón as a “little chocolate soldier”.
Yet the jibe said more about the reasons for the recent meltdown in Mr López Obrador’s once-powerful popular support than it did about Mr Calderón’s admittedly less than military bearing. By donning uniform, Mr Calderón was effectively saying “I’m in charge” of tackling the lawlessness and violence – especially the beheadings and newspaper advertisements openly challenging the authorities – that have become the principal concern of most Mexicans.
Faced with a death toll of 2,000 last year alone in bloody wars among drug gangs, Mr Calderón’s first move after becoming presidenct in December was to send some 7,000 troops and federal police to his home state of Michoacán. Now he has sent a force of some 3,000 to the border city of Tijuana and troops are expected to go soon to other regions beset by drug violence.
Yet already questions are being asked about the effectiveness of such a massive show of force. Mr Calderón’s predecessor, Vicente Fox, proclaimed the “mother of all battles” against drug violence, but some 9,000 drug-related killings followed during his six years in office. Fox’s initiative, however, was sporadic and marred by in-fighting within the forces involved.
So far Mr Calderón’s offensive has led to dozens of arrests and a sharp drop in violence, despite the discovery in Michoacán of a mass grave holding seven victims of the drug gangs.
Even so, there are fears that the violence will re-emerge once troops are deployed elsewhere. “There will come a time when all the soldiers, all the sailors and all the federal police officers won’t be enough to carry out multiple operations indefinitely,” Raymundo Riva Palacio, a leading commentator, wrote in the daily El Universal.
What is needed, he added, is a “second offensive”, this time against the authorities and police chiefs who protect the drug gangs. And not only those in official posts. “Business sector operatives who deal with money laundering, investments and other business matters for the capos,” are cited by Daniel Lund, a pollster and political analyst with Mund Américas in Mexico City.
Mr Calderón has got the message on the need to fight the drug traffickers’ support networks among local authorities: the first thing the army did when it moved into Tijuana was to disarm the notoriously corrupt city police force.
Eduardo Medina Mora, the federal attorney-general, had earlier accused the mayor of Tijuana, Jorge Hank Rhon, of “at best complacency” for failing to purge the force. Mr Hank Rhon’s late father, Carlos Hank González, is said to have coined the phrase: “A politician who is poor is a poor politician.”
Owner of the largest chain of betting establishments in Latin America and of a large private zoo, Mr Hank Rhon’s sole brush with the law came several years ago, when he was arrested for a few hours at Tijuana airport, accused of importing endangered species.
Local corruption is only part of the problem that Mr Calderón has identified. The president is seeking a structural reform of the nation’s many police forces to end the buck-passing and Clouseau-like bumbling on which graft and organised crime thrive.
In one much-publicised case late last year in Mexico City, police had photographs of a road-rage incident in which two bodyguards in a white BMW shot a man dead in daylight. The photographs showed the car’s number plates, there were plenty of witnesses, and white BMWs are relatively rare in the Mexican capital. Months later, however, police still do not even know who owned the BMW. Nor, without a reliable database at local – much less national – level, does it appear that they ever will. |
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