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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | May 2007 
Calderón to Send Elite Military Unit Against Cartels
 Sean Mattson - San Antonio Express-News
| | Some analysts believe Calderón is taking a high stakes gamble by personally claiming responsibility for the new unit. |
Monterrey, Mexico — Drug gangs be warned: Mexican President Felipe Calderón is sending the army after the bad guys. Personally.
Mexico's newest weapon on the war against drug traffickers is an elite military unit that will answer directly to the president.
The Corps of Federal Support Forces could see action as soon as August. Just the fact that he created it reaffirmed widespread suspicions that the president has lost faith in police forces corrupted or intimidated by organized crime.
But the move also rekindled memories of another elite military group whose members deserted and became the dreaded Zetas of the Gulf Cartel. The Zetas hired themselves out as enforcers for the cartel, which operates along the Texas-Mexico border and is blamed for much of the violence rattling Mexico in recent years.
Some analysts believe Calderón is taking a high stakes gamble by personally claiming responsibility for the new unit.
"It's a risky decision," said Martín Gabriel Barrón, an investigator with the National Criminal Sciences Insitute, or INACIPE.
Calderón, he said, "will have to assume the consequences of a positive action or negative action of this special corps."
The president's nearly six months in office have been marked by the mobilization of thousands of soldiers to combat organized crime.
Soldiers have executed search warrants, installed random checkpoints in urban areas and died in ambushes at the hands of alleged drug gang triggermen.
These are responsibilities and risks that some argue are the job of police agencies, and the president has been criticized for giving the army new duties it is not designed to carry out.
"There aren't many options," said Jorge Chabat, an academic specializing in security issues. "Ideally ... functioning police (would do this work) but these don't exist."
The presidential order to form the elite military unit cited a Mexican supreme court ruling that allows the armed forces to intervene in the best interest of public safety. It gave political, social and legal validity to the military's actions, said Javier Oliva, a political scientist with the National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM.
The decree also recognized that the army needs special training to do policing.
"The problem is that we have to train the military not to kill but to arrest," Barrón said.
Polls suggest the Mexican public places more trust in the military than just about any other institution in Mexico. But early this decade, the Zetas surfaced in Nuevo Laredo and in other border cities in the state of Tamaulipas.
Mexican authorities in 2003 reported that the Zetas' founding leadership consisted of at least 31 deserters from an elite military unit.
Desertion remains a huge problem for the armed forces generally. An estimated 100,000 to 150,000 members of the Mexican military deserted between 2000 and 2006.
Calderón substantially increased salaries for the military after taking office. But organized crime still pays significantly better, said Andrés Lozano, a congressman with the opposition Democratic Revolution Party, adding that little has changed in the underlying conditions that drive police and soldiers to work with drug gangs.
"The reality is that many (people) see an alternative in organized crime," he said, noting that Mexico needs to provide more education, jobs and a stronger legal system to combat drug mafias in the long term. "Organized crime (gives them) money immediately and the possibility to grow economically."
mattson.sean@gmail.com - News Researcher Kevin Frazzini contributed to this report. |
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