Kidnapping, murder and mayhem
June has been a bad month for Mexico's efforts to combat violent crime. Not only did the pace of gang killing accelerate during the month, but the police also came in for heavy criticism. The disastrously heavy-handed police raid to catch underage drinkers at a nightclub in Mexico City is considered elsewhere in this report (see p7 and 8). Equally damaging for the police were the reports at the end of the month that police officers were themselves regularly tortured. Their commanders said that this was to train them to withstand torture.
On 1 July the Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CNDH) censured the municipality of León for allowing their special forces police to be tortured and put under extreme pressure. León is one of the main cities in Guanajuato. This state, and city, is a bastion of the ruling Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). The course, in which the special forces were tortured, took place in 2007.
Videos released to the press showed that the torture sessions were severe. Interestingly, some of footage clearly showed that foreign advisers were supervising what was happening. The nationalities of these onlookers was not clear.
The CNDH issued a statement that organised crime should not be fought by criminal behaviour. “It is not through the use of any criminal technique that organised crime can be fought nor [are such techniques] appropriate for the training of members of the security forces," the CNDH said. The CNDH reiterated that torture was outlawed in Mexico and was a crime which, internationally, had no statute of limitations.
The municipality of León argued that the “training exercises" did not represent torture. The head of Leon police force, said that his men would find themselves in high stress situations and that the training exercises were designed to show them the problems they might confront on the field.
What is odd about what has been happening in León is that the city has escaped most of the violent crime which has swept across Mexico this year (costing 1,900 lives to date). Indeed in the whole of Guanajuato, only three people were killed by gang members in June 2008, compared to 505 people for Mexico as a whole. June 2008 saw the highest death toll since President Calderón took office on 1 December 2006.
Typical of the violence in Mexico was the kidnapping and murder of Karina Reyes Luna, a niece of Hipólito Reyes, the archbishop of Xalapa. Reyes Luna's body was found on 15 June, three days after she had been kidnapped. The public horror at what happened to the young woman, aged 23, may tempt the federal government to change its strategy. The government has made its offensive against drug-gangs its policy centrepiece. The middle-classes, however, are probably more worried about kidnapping than they are about drug crime, whose victims tend to be either gang members or police officers.
Academics tracking the changing trends in violent crime in Mexico suggest that the increase in kidnapping is a by-product of the government's offensive against organised crime. Some claim that as drug related crime has become more dangerous for gangs they have switched to kidnapping.
As in the rest of the Latin America, the very wealthy in Mexico can afford bodyguards and armour-plated cars in an effort to deter kidnappers. Middle-class Mexicans, however, have become a profitable source of victims or the gangs. To some extent, the gangs are making up in volume for what they have lost in ransom values.
President Calderón, who launched the anti-drug gang offensives when he took office in December 2006, is already fretting about the mid-term elections in July 2009. His anti-gang polices have yet to deliver tangible results: indeed the death toll this year is on course to hit 3,500, up from 2,700 last year. The huge media coverage of what happened to Karina Reyes Luna, and the academics' arguments may tempt the government to switch resources from the fight against drug gangs to combating kidnappers.
Karina Reyes Luna was snatched on 12 June. Her family did what the kidnappers wanted and did not tell the police that she had been kidnapped. The family also delivered US$500,000 in ransom, even though the kidnappers had demanded US$1m. On 15 June her body was found in a plastic bag, just after her uncle had prayed publicly for his niece at a mass.
No-one knows how many people have been kidnapped and ransomed in Mexico, but almost everyone in Mexico knows a victim family. Mexican gangsters were the first to come up with idea of the secuestro expreso. In this crime, a victim is picked up by a gang and driven around a city from cash machine to cash machine. At each cash machine the captured person makes a withdrawal and hands over the cash. Most victims feel far too vulnerable to provide the police with descriptions when they are released.
Several organisations including the Consejo para la Ley y los Derechos Humanos claim that Mexico has now overtaken Colombia as Latin America's kidnap capital. According to the organisation there were more than 1,000 “high profile" kidnappings in Mexico in 2007. High profile means kidnappings where the ransom demand was over US$100,000.
Kidnappers have become much more brutal in recent years. Most victims are now tortured almost as a matter of course. Gangsters appear to believe that violence, or the threat of violence, especially against children, encourages victims' families to cough up.
The Consejo para la Ley y los Derechos Humanos argues that the surge in kidnapping is a result of the government's enhanced efforts to combat organised crime. It is also worth noting that there is also a considerable overlap between drug and kidnapping gangs. On 14 June a joint police and army operation led to the arrest of Rosario Flores Rojas, a former police chief in the city of Ensenada in Baja California. He is accused of heading the Comando Negro, which provided security for drug gangs and also dabbled in kidnapping.
The frequent involvement of senior policemen in organised crime has long been a feature of Mexican life. This is one reason why Mexican politicians were so sensitive about the US Congress's decision to insert conditions into the Iniciativa Mérida package of military aid for combating drug gangs. One condition stipulated that Mexico had to prove that it was purging the police of corrupt officers.
The problem of corruption has spread beyond the police. On 18 June four ex-special forces soldiers were arrested in the western state of Jalisco after they chucked a couple of grenades into a parking lot at a police station, killing one officer. Jalisco, like Guanajuato, has been comparatively free of gang crime and the reasons for the attack are far from clear. Fernando Guzmán Pérez, the head of the state of Jalisco's security ministry said that the four soldiers were all former members of the elite Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales (Gafes).