Mexico & Nafta - February 2009 (ISSN 1741-444X)

The good news for the federal government is that, outside Chihuahua, the pace of killing by gangsters appears to be slowing down from the 700-800 a month levels the drug gangs achieved in October and November 2008. This improvement has been balanced by clear evidence that local police forces are in league with the gangs and, secondly, that the public has had enough of this state of affairs and may be prepared to take matters into its own hands.

The evidence for state police complicity in organised crime is mounting. On 7 February, a state policeman in Zacatecas was arrested after he, and nine other   gangsters (four of which were killed), attempted to ambush a patrol of soldiers and federal police officers. The second piece of evidence for the uncertain loyalty of the state police was the arrest, on 9 February, of the head of public security in Cancún (and thus the commansder of the municipal police force) over his alleged involvement in the assassination of a retired general on 3 February. The general had been brought in by the mayor of Cancún to advise him on security issues, thus potentially threatening the role of the local police.

It is worth noting that Mario Villanueva, a former governor of Quintana Roo, the state in which Cancún lies, is the only senior politician to have been jailed for his links to the drug trade. Villanueva was an archetypical member of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the party which heads the opinion polls for the forthcoming congressional elections.

The arrest of the municipal policeman and the head of public security in Cancun suggest that municipal police forces, which are poorly paid and poorly trained, are hopelessly compromised. Indeed at the end of January, in the municipality of Villanueva (Zacatecas), locals took the law into their own hands and summoned the army to take over from the municipal police force.

Arguably, the federal government is also running out of patience with all levels of police. Army generals now hold all but one of the top operational jobs in the police forces reporting to Genaro Garcí­a Luna, the controversial minister of public security, who had been attempting to establish a national police force.

Tension between the army and mostly corrupt local police forces has been high ever since President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa started to deploy the army against the country's drug gangs in December 2006. The Zacatecas arrest is is the first time, however, that a local police officer has been caught red-handed attacking the army. The arrest adds more evidence to the widespread assumption across the country that most local police forces are in league with organised crime.

In the small town of Villanueva (pop. 32,000) the locals had protested so strongly against their local police that the army was deployed to replace the municipal police on 24 January.

For a week, the army replacement went well and peacefully. Then on 2 February, Rómulo Madrid Olague, the municipality's head of public security, was gunned down as he left home in the centre of the town. The fear locally is that the killing was a reprisal by gang members, who were irked by the locals'ejection of the complaisant local police.

The locals had wanted all 42 local police officers dismissed, claiming that they were all in league with gangs, who had been kidnapping with impunity in the municipality. In the first half of January, the local community had forked out M$500,000 (US$34,000) to release a retired teacher, a local shopkeeper and a credit company owner, all kidnapped.

Villaneuva is typical of tracts of Mexico. Like much of Zacatecas, most families have at least one member working in the US and sending money home. Locals say that the Los Zetas killers, working under contract for the Golfo gang, have been running the area for years and that the problem started under Ricardo Monreal, the previous state governor. Zacatecas is one of the few states controlled by the leftwing Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD).

In the 7 February incident in Zacatecas, gangsters tried to ambush a patrol by a joint army and federal police unit. The patrol beat off the ambush, though an army lieutenant was killed and two soldiers wounded. Four of the attackers were killed and four others arrested, including the (unnamed) municipal police officer from Fresnillo.
 
The declining public confidence in the municipal and state police has been a feature of public opinion surveys throughout the past decade. It now seems that the public is prepared to act. Opinion polls indicate that ordinary Mexicans trust the army far more than they trust the police. Worryingly, however, there are indications that this confidence in the army may not endure if it fails to deliver enhanced security.

Chihuahua, where, like Zacatecas, the army has been deployed for the past couple of years, may be seeing the emergence of death squads, which have so far been noticeably absent in Mexico, despite the decline in public confidence in the bulk of the police. Mexico has 203,000 state police and 152,000 municipal police but only 20,000 federal police. There are 162 separate police forces across the country. In Central America, Colombia, South America and in Mexico 20 years ago, death squads started up when the state was too weak to deal with challenges to its authority.

On 15 January a group in Chihuahua calling itself the Comando Ciudadano pro Juárez (CCJ) issued a statement saying that it would kill one criminal a day. The statement seems to have been a reaction to the kidnapping of two young ranchers, Jorge and César Muños Reyes. One was killed and the other only released after the family paid a huge ransom.

Businessmen in the state then got together and decided to do something to halt the kidnappings and murders. The CCJ said in its statement that it was financed by businesses and invited people to send emails suggesting “bad people" that deserved to die. It is not clear whether the CCJ has delivered on its threats yet.

The death toll in January 2009 in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, the most dangerous place in Chihuahua, was 148. The rising murder rate in Ciudad Juárez is bucking the national trend, which showed a decline from the level of between 700 and 800 killings a month hit in both October and November 2008. According to a Mexico City newspaper, Reforma, the national gang murder rate in the month of January was 450.

The January death toll in Ciudad Juárez, however, was three times the rate for January 2008, when 55 people were murdered by gangsters in the city. In the whole of 2008, over 1,600 people were killed in and around Ciudad Juárez. Across the whole of Mexico, between 5,200 and 5,600 people were killed in 2008.

Even more worrisome is that the brutality and scale of the killings in Ciudad Juárez has increased. Groups of between five and eight people have been butchered this year, with some decapitated. Sometimes it is not clear whether victims are even dead before being beheaded.  

To be fair, the situations in Chihuahua and Zacatecas are extreme, but it is worth noting that the government has deployed the army in 10 of Mexico's 32 states. The federal government has been using the army to beat back the gangs in the worst affected states (starting with Michoacán, another PRD-run state) ever since it took office in December 2006. The only places that remain largely free of gang violence are the big cities, notably Mexico City (run by the PRD) and Guadalajara (a fief of President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa's Partido de Acción Nacional [PAN).

Retired General assassinated
The assassination of a retired general on 3 February opened up a new front in the war between the government and the gangs. This was the first time that a senior general was murdered by gangsters. Gangs have previously attacked military installations and ambushed and killed soldiers on active duty. Never before, however, had they targeted a retired general.

What made the case even more sensational was the arrest on 9 February of Francisco Velasco Delgado, the head of public security in Cancún (known, apparently as “El Vikingo") for his alleged role in the killing of the general, his aide and his driver. The army deployed armoured cars around the Cancún police headquarters in the run up to the arrest of Velasco, presumably fearing that the police might fight to protect him.

The assassinated general was Mauro Enrique Tello Quiñónes, 63. He had served in the president's security force and as commander of the military region covering the violent, gangster-ridden state of Michoacán. Tello retired on 1 January 2009 and had been appointed, on 2 February 2009, to advise the mayor of Cancún on security issues. Even though Tello failed to achieve the rank of full general (he was only a General de Brigada), he was so prominent that the defence minister, General Guillermo Galván Galván, and President Calderón each took a turn as guards of honour for his coffin as it lay in state.

There was evidence that the general and his two men were tortured. The general's feet appeared to have been burned and his fingers and wrist broken. He was also beaten up and shot 11 times.

Tello was controversial, though he ended his military career in Michoacán, where he commanded the country's 21st military district, headquartered in Morelia, the state capital. He was appointed to this job in 2005 by former president Vicente Fox, despite fierce opposition from human rights' activists. Indeed, Tello spent a year in custody after acontroversial incident in 1997, when days after a raid on drug pedlars and other petty criminals in the Buenos Aires district of Mexico City, six of those arrested were found dead.

The Mexico City authorities eventually dropped the murder charges filed against Tello in 1998. Human rights activists claim that what Tello and his fellow generals did when they ran the police in Mexico City for the PRI demonstrates how dangerous it is to use the army as a police force.

Terrorism: On 4 February Mexico asked to be excused from hosting a forum on terrorism, scheduled by the Organization of American States (OAS), for March. This is a reversal of Mexico's usual policy of offering to host almost any summit or high profile meeting. The acting Mexican ambassador to the OAS pleaded lack of money, but a more likely reason is the security headache such a meeting would create for the local authorities. The OAS meeting would be an obvious target for gangs. The meeting will now be held in Washington on 4-6 March.

Congressionals
There are mid-term congressional elections in July and several social movements are threatening to make law and order the key issue, above even the economy. The latest movement to launch is led by Isabel Miranda de Wallace, who announced that she was setting up the so-called Movimiento Blanco.
Wallace is a prominent critic of the police, which has failed to rescue her son, Hugo, a businessman who was kidnapped in 2006 and has not been seen since. Her movement is unlikely to run its own candidates, though it will vet candidates to try to ensure that gang nominees are revealed.

FAP
The mayor of Cancún, Gergorio Sánchez Martí­nez, is one of the few elected on the Frente Amplio Progresista (FAP) ticket. The FAP is loyal to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a radical, who still does not accept that he was defeated in the 2006 presidential election.  

Silencing critics?
On 5 February another senior officer in the Policia Federal Preventiva was remanded in preventative custody. The officer is Javier Herrera Valles, a former coordinator of regional security for the PFP. In 2008, he accused the public security minister, Genaro Garcí­a Luna, of allowing the country's law enforcement agencies to become riddled with corruption by the drug gangs. The government, effectively, ignored these allegations.