| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | January 2009 
Mexico Security Law Latest Bid to Tackle Spiraling Drug Crime
 Agence France-Presse
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| | Local police in Monterrey, northern Mexico in October 2008. Mexico on Friday enacted a security law aiming to centralize law enforcement efforts after a violent 2008 in which the death toll from suspected drug crime more than doubled to over 5,500. (AFP/Edgar Quintana) | |
Mexico City – Mexico on Friday enacted a security law aiming to centralize law enforcement efforts after a violent 2008 in which the death toll from suspected drug crime more than doubled to over 5,500.
Beheadings, massacres and other gruesome gangland-style killings spread last year, particularly in northern border areas, despite a government clampdown on drug trafficking including the deployment of 36,000 troops launched at the start of 2006.
The new law creates a National Information Center to gather data from federal, state and municipal authorities on "previous convictions, identification, means of support and methods of operation of criminals," the presidency said in a statement.
It also defines rules for evaluating the country's notoriously corrupt police.
A recent official evaluation of more than 56,000 police showed 50 percent were "not recommended," and around a dozen senior police officials were detained for suspected links to drug-trafficking in a scandal last year.
The high-profile kidnap-murder of a 14-year-old boy last July - amid growing violence and hundreds of other abductions - provoked public outrage and demonstrations which forced the government to propose new efforts to clamp down. |
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