| | |  Editorials | Issues | June 2009 
Drug Ties Everything with Mexico Vote Looming
 Dudley Althaus - Houston Chronicle
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 |  | No one can deny that the problem flourishes here.
- David Monreal |  | | |
Fresnillo, Zac. - The claws of collusion dig deep in Mexico these days. Senators, governors, mayors and police chiefs have been arrested or accused of serving as pawns and protectors of vicious drug cartels.
With July elections looming and the government struggling to run the gangsters to ground, accusations of cooperating with drug traffickers have become the latest currency of the country's politics.
Public officials, once considered all but immune, are suddenly finding themselves in investigators' cross hairs.
"For the first time they are going after state and local governments with ties to the traffickers," said Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.
Federal police recently arrested 10 mayors and at least 17 other public officials on charges of protecting gangsters in central Michoacán, which has long been a narcotics production and trafficking center.
Michoacán is hardly alone.
Opposition politicians have called for the resignation of the governor of Morelos, just to the south of Mexico City, after the former chiefs of the state and capital city's police were arrested on drug corruption charges.
And a simmering political feud exploded two weeks ago in Zacatecas between a federal senator and the governor following the jailer-aided prison break of 53 men linked to Los Zetas. The senator and governor have traded accusations of gangland ties.
"No one can deny that the problem flourishes here," said David Monreal, 42, the mayor of Fresnillo, a midsized city in central Zacatecas where mobsters have shot it out with soldiers and federal police four times in the past 18 months. "They're everywhere," Monreal said of gunmen belonging to the Zetas, a feared criminal band hailing from the cities along the South Texas border. "They circulate freely in the streets."
Collusion at every level of government has afforded gangsters cover amid President Felipe Calderón's 30-month campaign against organized crime. Mobsters do business in plain sight. Officers recruited from municipal and state police forces too often serve as the criminals' gunmen and bodyguards.
By one expert's estimate the drug cartels have corrupted as much as 60 percent of the country's 2,500 municipal governments.
Zacatecas villages and cities, once famed for a charming colonial-era vibe and their residents' mass migration to the United States, have been tormented by shootouts and gangland executions, kidnapping and extortion.
Residents of one crime-plagued Zacatecas town in February successfully demanded that Army troops replace their police.
"We are in a country convulsed by public insecurity," said Carlos Pinto, the second-in-command of the Zacatecas state government. "We have had some lamentable events, but I don't think we have such grave problems as in other states."
Maybe.
JUST STEPPED ASIDE
Surveillance videos of the May 16 escape from a prison near the Zacatecas capital suggests jailers opened cells or simply stood aside while Los Zetas and other criminals filed outside to waiting cars. The entire operation took less than five minutes.
Gov. Amalia García ordered the arrests of the warden and the prison guards and fired her public security aide.
But Ricardo Monreal, a Zacatecas kingmaker who quit García's Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, six days before the escape, charged that the corruption went far higher than the jailers.
A day after Ricardo Monreal's accusations, a front page article in Mexico City's leading newspaper detailed soldiers' January seizure of 14.5 tons of marijuana from a rural Fresnillo warehouse owned by one of Monreal's brothers. No one has been charged.
"This is because of the political season," shrugged Fresnillo mayor David Monreal, another brother of Richardo Monreal, who plans to run for governor in elections next year.
Opposition politicians accuse Calderón's government of using the current arrests for political gain.
Behind in the polls, Calderón's National étion Party, or PAN, has made the anti-crime crusade a cornerstone of its campaign.
While two of the arrested Michoícán mayors and the Morelos governor hail from Calderón's party, the accusations have fallen heaviest on opposition politicians. "It's a risky strategy that could become politicized if the arrests are seen as being heavily weighted against a single political party," said Selee, the U.S. analyst. "But it's the right strategy to put an end to the impunity that some public officials have enjoyed in their dealings with organized crime," he said. |
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