| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | November 2008 
Mexico Drug War Hindered by Deep Police Corruption
 Anahi Rama - Reuters
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 |  | Badly paid and ill-equipped, many police are easy prey for cartels who slip them money to turn a blind eye to drug shipments or help them distribute narcotics. |  | | | |
Mexico City - Mexican drug gangs are increasingly paying off police, from lowly municipal cops to top security aides in the government, to weaken President Felipe Calderon's war on drugs.
Mexico has arrested four top anti-drug officials in recent weeks, accusing them of receiving up to $450,000 a month for tipping off smugglers about police operations. Another 30 anti-drug police have been fired on suspicion of corruption.
The former head of Mexico's organized crime bureau, Noe Ramirez, was one of those detained in a program to smoke out police working for drug barons. He sold secrets to the traffickers in the Pacific state of Sinaloa, prosecutors say.
Mexico this month arrested its main liaison with Interpol who was also accused of working for drug lords.
Endemic police corruption - ranging from traffic violation bribes to aiding drug gangs - has long plagued Mexico but the traffickers' rising power and wealth and an escalation of the drug violence has taken police graft to a new level.
The narcotics trade in Mexico is reckoned to be worth $40 billion a year and some cops even work as hitmen for drug gangs to kill colleagues and rival traffickers.
"When there's that much money involved, it is a very corrupting influence, it is like trying to stamp out a cancer," said Thomas Schweich, former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement.
Badly paid and ill-equipped, many police are easy prey for cartels who slip them money to turn a blind eye to drug shipments or help them distribute narcotics.
"They pay you up front, always more than what you get legally in your bi-monthly payment," a state-level policeman in the violent city of Tijuana said, referring to cartel bribes.
"I've done it a few times to give them a heads up when there's a police maneuver or a road block planned," he added.
TURNS TO ARMY
Aware of widespread police corruption, Calderon turned to the army to lead the drugs war when he took power in late 2006, but insists he is determined to clean up the police.
"We are facing a corruption rooted deep in the past and that has shamefully penetrated ... the organs of justice, the police and the judiciary," Calderon told reporters at a summit meeting in Peru at the weekend. "My government has taken on the commitment of fighting crime ... and corruption."
Informal alliances between corrupt police and drug gangs are frustrating soldiers who set up road blocks, scour towns and search houses across Mexico for drugs and guns under the offensive launched by Calderon.
Critics warn it may only be a matter of time before the cartels also infiltrate and corrupt Mexican army units at the center of the president's campaign.
More than 4,300 people have been killed in drug violence this year as Mexico's most-wanted man, kingpin Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, fights rivals and the security forces.
Drug gangs have killed hundreds of police since Calderon launched his drug fight, some because they worked for rival drugs and others to fill police forces with fear.
Mexican police receive an average of $375 a month - well below the $660 that even the government says is just enough for workers to feed their families and cover basic needs.
Mexican and U.S. anti-drug officials often praise the bravery of honest Mexican cops working in tough conditions, and there are many.
But Calderon also plans a huge cleansing of the country's disjointed, sprawling police forces, which number some 3,000 at the municipal, state and federal levels, according to a study at the University of California, San Diego.
He has also launched an overhaul of the justice system, weeding out corrupt judges and introducing oral trials, and plans new prisons, a crackdown on money laundering and tougher oversight for politicians' and officials' bank accounts.
Even with big purges and investment in police academies, ending Mexico's culture of impunity may take decades, while traffickers will seek to corrupt new cops and take advantage of weak police training.
"The training is strictly operational. There is a real lack of police ethics and human rights programs," said Julian Gudino, a drug trade expert at the Institute for Security and Democracy think tank in Mexico City.
(Writing and additional reporting by Robin Emmott in Monterrey and Lizbeth Diaz in Tijuana; Editing by Kieran Murray) |
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