| | |  Editorials | Issues 
Mexico Seeks to Change its Course in Policing Direction
 Jerry Brewer - mexidata.info
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October 11, 2010
 |  | Operational strategies against organized crime in Mexico must be addressed on an international scale — this is transnational crime. |  | | |
Policing Mexico has become a complex phenomenon. Transnational drug traffickers and gangs, as well as other organized criminal insurgents throughout Latin America, simply follow the drug-laced routes into North America. The return routes for those that do not remain in the north could be paved in gold — given the massive currency return. Mexico, from a policing analogy standpoint, could be described as a speed trap with severely limited “traps.”
The more direct and graphic factual description of the phenomenon is that the routes are drenched in blood and death. This war-like process allows a drug demand to be supplied at all costs, regardless of loss of human life and suffering along the way. To those that wish to just snap their fingers and simply legalize drugs as the hedonistic panacea alternative, we must also clearly understand organized crime as an underground empire that continues to grow and adapts to all illegal supply and demands.
The main challenges inherent in interdicting organized criminal insurgency are lack of resources, and the necessary skills and structure to adequately confront the sophisticated challenges. They must be confronted aggressively and consistently, and you simply can’t legalize one item of contraband and wave it through while you look for the next, and then the one to replace it.
Conceptual exploration must be undertaken in earnest in confronting the essence of organized crime itself, for it is a massive beast that always reinvents itself to meet its obstacles. This has to be President Felipe Calderon’s long range initiative for Mexico’s rule of law and policing strategies.
Mexico has seen and continues to feel the massive corrosion and destructive impact that organized crime has had on their homeland. Operational strategies against organized crime in Mexico must be addressed on an international scale — this is transnational crime.
President Calderon’s focus on overhauling the organizational structure of police, as well as attempting to unite police in citizen and community development, and ”seeking transparency and accountability,” are good proactive and necessary measures. Too, safeguards against the susceptibility of police to be corrupted, and sound internal investigative strategies and oversight of the law enforcement effort, would be monumental achievements.
Failure to plan and place priorities against the amorphous nature of the threat itself from the organized and superior armed and trained criminals, is like settling in behind the walls of a fortress and ignoring what flies in, tunnels under, drifts up, and is placed as a Trojan horse.
Eliminating the thousands of municipal police bodies and putting them under the unified command of state police departments in their respective regions, as proposed by President Calderon, is a wise decision in “organizing to confront organized crime.” These organized principals must filter down throughout the entire criminal justice system from enforcement, to the courts, and the correctional systems.
What President Calderon must have and include in his aggressive policing strategies is a reach from one end of Mexico’s border to the other, as well as a coordinated and supported network of enforcement and interdiction from neighboring nations. Transnational criminal organizations require ethnic networks to facilitate recruiting, provide cover and safe havens, and related linkages that may include a rogue government and similar officials in support.
With over 28,000 people killed in the last four years in Mexico, the problems and solutions are far beyond a “public safety model and fundamental reforms.” This insofar as the international drug trade element alone is so complex and resilient, with a myriad of trafficking routes, methods and world money laundering activities that require international cooperation, coordination and solutions.
Mexico’s 31 states and Federal District require the strengthening of their law enforcement capacities at local levels as well. A unified command structure, that includes the federal police and military, is a genuine necessity. There certainly was no alternative resource for President Calderon, other than a well-armed military, to combat narcoterrorists with their head-on confrontational methods and superior armaments. Local policing structures were never created or designed to fight this type of paramilitary insurgency.
As well, with virtually all forms of international organized crime the illicit trafficking of weapons must be cut short, a critical enforcement component that is needed from border to border. After all, these are the tools of death in human hands.
Too, the empirical nature of organized crime insurgency often shows the armies of people, government officials, rogue intelligence services, and others that facilitate this criminal empire. These acts extend dominance from open warfare to clandestine subversion.
You can’t effectively confront this enemy within your own borders and effectively ignore its power and reach internationally.
Jerry Brewer is C.E.O. of Criminal Justice International Associates, a global threat mitigation firm headquartered in northern Virginia. His website is located at www.cjiausa.org. |
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