| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | November 2008 
Fears Ease Over Mexican Drug Data Leak
 Adam Thomson - Financial Times
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 |  | Local authorities estimate that as much as 80 per cent of the cocaine consumed north of the border passes through Mexico. The US government believes that Mexican traffickers receive more than $13.8bn a year in revenue from illicit drug sales to the US. |  | | | |
Mexican authorities on the weekend said that there was no sign ”so far” that a high-ranking police officer under investigation had leaked information from Interpol’s database to a Mexican drug cartel.
Fears grew last week that sensitive information on criminal gangs held on the international police organisation’s computers had been tapped following the arrest of Ricardo Gutiérrez Vargas, who headed Interpol in Mexico.
Mr Gutiérrez Vargas was arrested as part of ”Operation clean-up”, an extensive and ongoing investigation into police corruption in Mexico. Several high-ranking officers, including Rodolfo de la Guardia García, a former member of Interpol in Mexico, have also been detained.
But Mexico’s Attorney-General’s Office on the weekend reported that the investigations into Mr Gutiérrez’s suspected criminal links ”are related to the possible leak of police information from the national domestic environment, not of Interpol information”. The report added that there was no evidence so far to suggest that any Mexican officer had fed criminal organisations information from Interpol’s database.
Operation Clean-up has so far led to the detention of at least eight current and former high-ranking police officers, and is fast-becoming the most significant probe into police corruption in the country’s recent history. The latest arrest came on Thursday, when prosecutors detained Noé Ramírez, Mexico’s former drugs tsar.
The scale of the operation suggests that Mexico’s drugs cartels had a comprehensive policy of infiltrating the country’s leading security institutions as part of efforts to undermine law enforcement.
In recent years, Mexico has become an important transit country for drugs bound for the US market. Local authorities estimate that as much as 80 per cent of the cocaine consumed north of the border passes through Mexico. The US government believes that Mexican traffickers receive more than $13.8bn a year in revenue from illicit drug sales to the US.
Authorities believe that the bulk of officers arrested as part of Operation Clean-up were on the pay roll of the Beltrán Leyva drugs cartel, which formed part of the Sinaloa cartel, an organisation in which several different groups worked together.
Authorities, however, believe that at the beginning of this year the Beltrán Leyva cartel fell out with the other groups after it was excluded from the proceeds of a large drug deal. |
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