Word: calders
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Over the summer, President Felipe Calderón's antidrug czar, Noe Ramirez, resigned abruptly. The likely reason became apparent this week after Ramirez was detained by federal officials and accused of taking $450,000 to keep Mexico's most powerful narco mafia, the Sinaloa Cartel, informed about police antidrug operations. He is the highest-ranking government official to be nabbed in this year's anticorruption sweep. (See pictures of crime-fighting in Mexico City...
Mexico's real carnage, meanwhile, gets ghastlier by the day. This year the nation has logged some 4,300 drug-related murders, and analysts fear that Mexico could double last year's record of 2,500. The spike in killing is largely due to the war Calderón declared last year on the drug cartels. He has deployed more than 25,000 federal army troops in the campaign, but the narcos have lashed out with insurrection-style violence against a harrowing number of law-enforcement officials, from beat cops to top cops like Millan, as well as prosecutors...
...that Mexico's woefully undertrained and underpaid cops are that hard a mark. But the relentless revelations of the breadth of the corruption - including allegations that officers under Mexico's Public Security Minister, Genaro Garcia Luna, were involved in high-profile kidnappings - seem to make a mockery of Calderón's efforts to stamp it out. "This is Calderón's Iraq," says Sergio Aguayo, a security expert at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City. "He declared war against the cartels, but he wasn't prepared for the size of the threat the cartels turned...
...cartels' ability to infiltrate officialdom has grown so convincing that many Mexicans have trouble believing the government's assertion that a fiery Learjet crash this month on a busy Mexico City avenue - which killed Calderón's Interior Minister and de facto Vice President, Juan Camilo Mourino, and top security adviser Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos - was an accident and not narco sabotage. That dwindling public confidence has done nothing to help the Calderón administration fend off the effects of the global economic crisis. This year the Mexican peso has lost about a fifth of its value against...
...plan focuses too much on interdiction hardware like helicopters and not enough on software like an overhaul of Mexico's police and judiciary - especially higher pay for cops, many of whom earn a measly $5,000 a year, and the creation of more modern investigative units. Without it, Calderón will continue to rely on his army in this fight, but in the long run, armies make for lousy drug-interdiction forces...