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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | January 2008 
War on Drug Cartels Sees Some Progress
 Sean Mattson - San Antonio Express-News
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 |  | Concentrating a mid-and long-term policy only on soldiers ... is not going to give, as a result, a substantial decrease in the insecurity of the country, and especially in the border municipalities of the north of Mexico.
- José María Ramos |  | | | |
Monterrey, Mexico — Two gunbattles in Mexican border cities last week showed narco-traffickers increasingly willing to strike at the government for meddling with the multibillion-dollar business of getting drugs to a hungry U.S. market.
The attacks brought renewed attention to the cartel wars along the South Texas border, but cop killing in Mexico already was nearing epidemic levels.
In last week's violence, two federal officers were killed and eight officers and five soldiers were wounded, according to government accounts.
Police and soldiers killed three gunmen and jailed 10 alleged drug cartel members in Monday's shootout in Rio Bravo, which officials said began when heavily armed men attacked law enforcers at a roadblock.
A day later, assailants escaped after killing two federal police officers on the busy streets of nearby Reynosa.
"The government ... has taken a firm decision to confront (criminal gangs) and, well, this is the response," said Juan Francisco Rivera, a federal congressman who is chairman of the lower Chamber of Deputies' public security committee.
President Felipe Calderón responded by sending more soldiers and federal officers to the region, a move often made after violent attacks on police officers. The president Wednesday promised more money for modernizing the police force and reiterated his promise to win the war against drug gangs.
"The war will be won by the government," Rivera said.
Last year, 269 police officers and 33 soldiers were among the record 2,200-plus killed in narcotics-related violence, according to an unofficial tally by newspaper chain Grupo Reforma.
Fighting back
As one violence-wracked year blurs into the next, it is sometimes hard to distinguish any real change in the cartel war or the government's means of fighting it.
But national security experts said Calderón's 13 months in office already have produced some marked changes.
The recent years of violence can be traced to both cartel turf wars and what former President Vicente Fox called his government's "mother of all battles" against organized crime.
Under Fox, the government jailed top cartel leaders, prompting leadership shakeups amid the rivalries marked by grenade attacks, beheadings and daytime gangland executions in plain public view.
"There wasn't an integral strategy, simply (the government) was dedicated to trapping leaders of some of these gangs and didn't know how to deal with the undesirable consequences," said Jorge Chabat, a national security expert with CIDE, a Mexico City university.
Now, the strategy appears to be targeting rank and file gunmen, which "is certainly the right focus because the problem, I insist, is the violence," he said.
Chabat and others said Calderón's middle-term plans of improving police training, intelligence systems and the judiciary are positive changes, even if the overall strategy isn't entirely clear to all.
"It is still difficult to define with clarity the public security policy of the government," said Gustavo Fondevila, a police and legal system expert, also with CIDE.
"The impression that (the government) is giving is that it is swinging out wildly and sometimes it succeeds," he said.
Fondevila sees the government at a crossroads between the traditional response of "more weapons, more personnel and more patrols" while "starting to do much more interesting things," including beefing up funding for academic research on criminal activity.
Army vs. criminals
In the meantime, however, Calderón will have to continue fighting an intensified war against heavily armed and diversifying criminal enterprises.
"In the framework of this strategy in the first year of government, we fought without easing up to repel the criminals and eradicate them from our public spaces," the president said Wednesday.
He said criminal gangs have branched out from international trafficking. They now cultivate local drug consumption markets, kidnap, steal vehicles and extort, "all under a logic of territorial control and intimidation of society," Calderón said.
With even the best federal police forces unable to crack down on these criminal empires on their own, the military will probably remain Calderón's weapon of choice.
But this exposes a poorly paid and desertion-prone army to corruption, and many academics worry about using the military for police tasks it was not trained to do.
"Concentrating a mid-and long-term policy only on soldiers ... is not going to give, as a result, a substantial decrease in the insecurity of the country, and especially in the border municipalities of the north of Mexico," said José María Ramos, an investigator with the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a Tijuana-based university.
Tamaulipas state, which borders Texas from the Gulf of Mexico to northwest of Laredo, is controlled by the Gulf Cartel, whose alleged leader Osiel Cárdenas was extradited to the United States last year and awaits trial in Houston.
The strategically important state includes the seaport of Tampico and the land port of Nuevo Laredo. The cartel's armed wing, the Zetas, was formed by an elite team of army deserters.
After this week's clashes, police said they seized an impressive array of weaponry, including two military-caliber machine guns, a grenade launcher and grenades along with the usual haul of pistols and assault rifles.
These "are practically true arms of war," said Javier Oliva, a national security expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "This doesn't just speak to the possibility of buying it, but the ease there is to acquire this type of weaponry."
mattson.sean(at)gmail.com |
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