Mexico & Nafta - December 2008 (ISSN 1741-444X)

On 24 November Manuel Espino, the former president of the ruling Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), called for changes to Mexico's anti-drugs policy. Espino's call is, effectively, a demand to President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa to sack Genaro Garcí­a Luna, the minister of public security. Espino represents the hard right of Mexican politics and his attack suggests that Calderón's attempt to appease the traditionalist wing of the PAN by appointing Fernando Gómez-Mont as interior minister has failed. As the Left also has Garcí­a Luna in its sights, Calderón and his government are now under extreme pressure over their failure to stop the killings by gangsters.

Rashly, Calderón raised the stakes over Garcí­a Lima by declaring, from Lima, Peru, where he was attending the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit on 23 November, that if there was any doubt about Garcí­a Luna's honesty he would not be a minister. What is interesting about Calderón's defence of Garcí­a Luna is that it is isolated. None of the other law and order ministers have backed Garcí­a Luna as strongly as Calderón has. Equally, Calderón has not endorsed any of them as strongly as he endorsed Garcí­a Luna.

There is, however, considerable doubt about Garcí­a Luna on several counts.  These issues range from the highly-paid employment he has consistently given to his sister in a series of appointments in ministries and agencies he headed, to his attitude to the corruption that appears to have riddled the country's anti-organised crime unit, the Subprocuradurí­a de Investigación Especializada en Delincuencia Organizada (Siedo).

Garcí­a Luna is particularly vulnerable because the anti-corruption investigation, Operación Limpieza, has nabbed some people close to him, notably Mario Arturo Velarde Martí­nez, who was arrested on 20 November. Velarde worked as private secretary for Garcí­a Luna for six years when the latter ran the Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI). Velarde is the fifth of Garcí­a Luna's close associates to have been arrested in Operación Limpieza, which is designed to purge senior ranks of the federal law enforcement agencies of people in the pay of drug gangsters.

It has now emerged that a lot of AFI agents seconded to the Siedo deserted when the anti-corruption investigation, Operación Limpieza, began to arrest senior members of the Siedo in July 2008. The exact numbers of desertions are unclear, but the government is being heavily criticised in the media for the Siedo scandal. The media is putting pressure on Garcí­a Luna to take responsibility for the scandal and go, even though the Siedo is actually answerable to Eduardo Medina Mora, the Procurador General de la República.

The scandal detonated on 20 November when officers from the Siedo detained Noé Ramí­rez Mandujano, who had been head of the Siedo for the first 20 months of President Calderón's administration.   Ramí­rez is accused of having taken US$450,000 a month from the Beltrán Leyva brothers, who run the main faction of the Sinaloa gang, now known as the Pacifico gang. In return, according to Medina Mora, Ramí­rez Mandujano gave his paymasters information about investigations and operations.

Ramí­rez, who was dismissed as head of the Siedo on 31 July, voluntarily came into the Siedo to answer questions but was then detained. Since leaving the Siedo he had been Mexico's representative to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. The Siedo is in the forefront of the war against organised crime and has been the subject of a series of investigations this year. The government claims to have found that the Siedo was riddled with corruption and took orders from the Beltrán Leyva brothers. On 24 November Ramí­rez Mandujano was remanded in custody, for further questioning, for 40 days.

Genaro Garcí­a Luna is vulnerable not only because of the accusations against his close colleagues but also because of the way he has dealt with accusations from Javier Herrera Valles, a senior police officer who wrote two letters to President Calderón accusing Garcí­a Luna of making questionable decisions.

Herrera
Garcí­a Luna's reaction to the two letters to President Calderón sent by Herrera puts a major questionmark against his judgment. The first letter was sent in February this year and the second in May. In both Herrera asked the president to investigate what he saw as questionable decisions by Garcí­a Luna.

Garcí­a Luna's apparent response to Herrera's accusations has been to sack and then arrest Herrera. On 24 November, the authorities confirmed that Herrera's brother, Arturo, a senior federal police officer in Tabasco, was also under arrest. There is no evidence that the authorities have bothered to investigate Javier Herrera's accusations.

Javier Herrera himself was arrested on 17 November. The official PGR press release claimed that Herrera had come in to answer questions. In fact he had been chased through the streets of Mexico City by unidentified officers from the Siedo and was beaten up before being arrested at gunpoint. Herrera's son, who was with him when he was arrested, said that none of the arresting officers, who claimed to have the authorisation of the Siedo, showed any identity papers.

Herrera is a former head of the Policia Federal Preventiva (PFP). He originally took leave of absence from the police after sending the letters to President Calderón denouncing Garcí­a Luna in February.  Ironically, he was sacked from the PFP  for failing to turn up for work on 10 October by the force's then acting head Ví­ctor Gerardo Garay. Garay was himself arrested, accused of being in the pay of the Beltrán Leyva brothers on 31 October, and is now also in jail.

Herrera had not hidden his unhappiness with Garcí­a Luna, who has been in office since President Calderón took power on 1 December 2006. Herrera has leaked documents which he said pointed to irregularities and potentially also corruption in the security ministry following Garcí­a Luna's arrival. Herrera has a solid reputation in Mexico: he ran the country's highway patrol and has been a police officer for 30 years. Meanwhile, Garcí­a Luna is widely seen as an ineffective placeman. 

Espino
Espino's attack on Garcí­a Luna was unusually deft. He said that it should not be a president's duty to launch a last-ditch defence of a senior minister. “Ministers," Espino said, “should be those people who are trusted by their fellow citizens not only for their record of achievement but also for their loyalty and honesty." On all Espino's points Garcí­a Luna is found wanting, the government's critics say.

Espino also called for a change in the government's security policy, which he said was simply not working. The government's line, spouted by Eduardo Medina Mora, the former secret policeman who now runs the Procuradurí­a General de la Republica, is that its policy is beginning to deliver. Medina Mora denied that the arrest Ramí­rez Mandujano had affected the fight against organised crime.

From 1 January to 21 November, 4,426 people have been killed by the gangs in Mexico. The death toll is considerably up on the 2,700 killed by the gangs in 2007.

Garay: On 31 October the government suspended the acting head of the main national police force, the Policia Federal Preventiva (PFP). The suspension was another embarrassment to the authorities. The police chief, Victor Gerardo Garay Cadena, announced that he was temporarily resigning so that the accusation that he was in the pay of the Sinaloa drug trafficking gang could be investigated. Garay Cadena is accused of being on payroll of a chieftain in the Sinaloa gang, Jesús “El Rey" Zambada, who allegedly controlled drug trafficking through Mexico City's international airport. Zambada was arrested on 20 October.

Interpol: On 18 November the anti-corruption squad, the Siedo, announced the arrest of a director of Interpol, Ricardo Gutiérrez Vargas. The Siedo arrested Gutiérrez as part of its Operación Limpieza, which is designed to catch police and other law enforcement officers in the pay of organised crime. Gutiérrez was seconded to Interpol from the Agencia Federal de Investigaciones (AFI). He was actually arrested on 16 November.

Chihuahua: On 16 November representatives of the business sector, religious leaders and 62 of the state's 67 mayors called on the national government of President Calderón to rethink its deployment of soldiers in Chihuahua. Chihuahua accounts for the vast majority of people killed in Mexico so far this year (1,368 of a total 4,281), according to the latest count by Reforma, a Mexico City newspaper. Sinaloa (548) and Baja California (434) ranked second and third. The Chihuahuan protest is the first sign that the government's failure to curb the killing by drug gangs is having a political effect: a torch-lit anti-crime march in Mexico City earlier this year was more focused on kidnapping than gang killings.

The Chihuahuans wrote an open letter to President Calderón saying that the murder rate was completely out of control. They called on the president to rethink the Operativo Conjunto Chihuahua. Aside from business leaders, Roman Catholic bishops and evangelical leaders also signed the letter, as did the rectors of all the universities in the state.

Tijuana: The federal government sent marines, soldiers and federal and state police officers onto the streets of Tijuana on 18 November. They replaced municipal policemen in over half of the city's nine boroughs. The mayor of Tijuana, Jorge Ramos, announced the move. Ramos said that the feds and state police would police half the city, which is on the border with the US, for a month. In the meantime the 2,000 municipal policemen, who have been unable to dampen down an increasingly gory gang war between factions in the Arellano Félix gang, will be purged and retrained. Ramos denied that Tijuana was now under martial law. Soldiers and marines will, however, patrol the streets rather than policemen. The feds will patrol four of the nine boroughs of the city and the state police one other.

So far this year 650 people have been murdered by gang members in Tijuana, according to the local press, though the Mexico City newspapers, which are also keeping a national score, say that this is an overestimate. It is significant that the government has moved in Tijuana, which is in Baja California, a state controlled by the PAN, rather than in Chihuahua where twice as many people have been killed by gangsters so far this year. Chihuahua has reverted to the PRI after being run by the PAN for only one sexenio in the 1990s. For years, the PAN won most votes in elections in Chihuahua but its candidates were never allowed to take office by the federal government.

• Sinaloa

On 19 November three members of the Agencia Federal de Investigación were killed in an ambush in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state. The three AFI agents were travelling in a car with four other state police officers when they were ambushed, two of whom were also killed. It is worth noting that most, if not all, of the 27 agricultural labourers who were working on an alleged drug gangster's estate in Sinaloa were released. They had been reported kidnapped on 10 November.

• César Nava

The rumour in Mexico City is that President Calderón's outgoing private secretary, César Nava, will take over the role the late José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos had of advising the interior ministry on security and law and order reform. Vasconcelos was killed in the plane crash on 4 November which also killed the then interior minister, Juan Camilo Mouriño.