| | |  Editorials | August 2008 
Mexico's Boiling Point
 Houston Chronicle
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 |  | It will take far more than periodic street protests to reduce Mexico's uncontrollable security problems. |  | | | |
When the United States sneezes, Mexico gets sick. Conversely, a spike in organized crime and kidnappings across our southern border provokes a shiver of apprehension in the United States.
It is a chilling time in Mexico. For years, the rich could mostly insulate themselves from the street crime and police corruption that made the poor so powerless.
In the last few years, however, power struggles between narco-traffickers, a wash of drug money used to bribe authorities and a president bent on fighting corruption have coincided with soaring levels of crime against the rich, as well.
The lawlessness, perhaps most corrosive in its invisible forms, has also taken a horrifying public face. More than 500 police officers — federal and local — have been killed since Mexico's President Felipe Calderon unleashed an anti-crime initiative in 2006. The deputy police chief in Playa del Carmen, a popular vacation destination for Texans, was killed gangland style this week.
Kidnappings — often incredibly audacious and elaborate — also have skyrocketed. More than 430 took place in 2007, an increase of 35 percent in one year.
The wave has only gotten worse: The Mexico City prosecutor's office calculated a 76 percent rise in kidnappings in the first four months of 2008, compared with the same time period last year.
These numbers almost certainly are too low, because families of many victims don't report the crimes to police, whom they suspect of corruption.
This is not alarmist paranoia: This month, two police officers and one civilian were taken into custody in the kidnap-murder of a young boy from one of Mexico's wealthiest families.
The crime jolted a nation that seemed to have become numb. Fernando Marti, 14, was riding to school in an armored car with his bodyguard and driver when they encountered a road block manned by more than a dozen armed men in the uniform of Mexican federal police.
The driver and bodyguard were discovered bound in a car trunk. The driver was strangled; the bodyguard lived. Though the boy's family hired a private investigator and paid ransom, there was no sign of him until two weeks ago, when his corpse, too, was found in a car trunk.
Outraged, Mexicans have flooded the Internet, publications and airwaves with protests. A businessman and former kidnap victim, a friend of Marti family, took out full-page ads in Mexico's newspapers. "Mexico doesn't deserve this," he wrote.
On Aug. 30th, organizers plan a massive anticrime rally. Though they may seem only symbolic, in truth such protests have had more effect than anything else in prodding the Mexican government to act against crime.
Mexicans held similar, massive rallies in 1997 after more than 1,000 kidnappings occurred in one year, and again in 2004 after the kidnap-murder of two boys in the same family.
Government officials responded with reforms, prosecuted corruption — and kidnappings plummeted in the following years. But crimes began to climb upward again.
It will take far more than periodic street protests to reduce Mexico's uncontrollable security problems. The worst case scenario would be for nongovernmental forces to take the job into their own hands. Only by clamoring insistently, however, can Mexicans provoke the governmental resolve, at all levels, to end corruption.
There is scant evidence that the organized crime manhandling Mexico could wreak the same type of havoc in the United States. But many U.S. executives do business in Mexico; millions of U.S. residents have family there; many others vacation there.
A developing democracy that shed one-party rule less than a decade ago, Mexico desperately needs security. Americans also have a strong interest in it. The economic and social consequences of Mexico's crime affect the whole region.
Mexico does indeed deserve better. |
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