Mexican army faces tough war with drug cartels
By Sam Enriquez and Hector Tobar, Times Staff Writer
6:45 PM PDT, May 16, 2007


APATZINGAN, Mexico -- Flying low over the colonial City Hall here, the helicopters of the Mexican Army are supposed to make people feel safe.

Down on the ground, though, the police chief was shot in an ambush Tuesday and resigned on Wednesday, the second top law-enforcement official to take off from this agricultural city tucked in the mountains of southern Michoacan state.

At least five drug-trafficking organizations operate in and around Apatzingan, the front line of President Felipe Calderon's campaign to fight back against the traffickers by deploying army troops.

"We're waiting for the level of safety that we all want," said Mayor Antonio Cruz Lucatero, who backs the army presence in Apatzingan. "Not just in our city, but the whole state and the whole country."

If this town is any measure, that will take awhile. In January, the president donned an army cap and jacket and came to Apatzingan to tell army soldiers stationed here that they were fighting a "head-on battle against crime."

Nearly five months later, on May 9, soldiers from the 51st Infantry Battalion fought a pitched battle in the city center against a group of alleged traffickers holed up in a home. Four alleged traffickers were killed in the shootout, with soldiers employing grenades on video broadcast later on national television.

A narrow victor in last year's presidential election, Calderon has made the war on drugs the centerpiece of his young presidency. He has sent troops to Michoacan and neighboring Guerrero, and to the border cities of Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo.

But many see potential disaster in Calderon's decision to use the most trusted security force in Mexico as the vanguard of his anti-drug effort.

"It's like a poker game, and Calderon has put the army on the table," Antonio Ramos, a longtime local newspaper and television commentator, said in an interview. "The risk now is corrupting the last honest institution, the army. The truth is the army doesn't have the capacity to win."

Mexico's military boasts more than 200,000 troops, but only 90,000 are combat-ready, according to Javier Ibarrola, a military analyst in Mexico City. Some 30,000 troops are currently employed nationwide in the anti-drug campaign. Ibarrola and other analysts say that the army would be hard-pressed to get more soldiers into the effort.

The army is straining under the budgetary pressures and inefficiencies that affect many other institutions in Mexico. Low wages lead to a high rate of desertion. One in eight soldiers simply pack up and leave every year.

Meanwhile, many question the legality of using the military to carry out police functions.

"The army has declared a de facto state of siege in these places," said Raul Benitez, a professor at American University in Washington specializing in security issues. "It has done so without the necessary judicial steps required for a state of siege ... But the truth is the Mexican government doesn't have any other operations force it can send in."

On Tuesday, Mexico's official human rights ombudsman called on Calderon to refrain from using the army in the anti-drug efforts, citing dozens of alleged human rights abuses, including rapes, attributed to soldiers in Michoacan.

Army troops have been stationed in the southern Mexican state since last year, when Mayor Cruz Lucatero said he needed help combating a force of hit men working for the Gulf Cartel in the city.

Troops began to patrol the city. This week they were unable to prevent the attack on Apatzingan's interim police chief, Jose Alfredo Zavala Perez, who was shot and wounded Tuesday in an ambush.

On Wednesday, shortly after being treated and released at a local hospital, Zavala Perez resigned, leaving the police force leaderless.

Zavala Perez had replaced another chief who simply walked off the job last July. The old chief, under a cloud of suspicion of links to drug bosses, announced he was taking a "vacation" from which he never returned.

"The attack was not against me, personally," Zavala Perez said in a radio interview Wednesday after fleeing Apatzingan with his family. "It was an attack on the institution."

Such vacuums of power in local police have become common in Mexico. Since 2005, dozens of police chiefs and officers have abruptly resigned after encounters with suspected drug traffickers in several Mexican states, including Veracruz, Tabasco and Campeche.

Federal police have been little help. The Federal Judicial Police was notoriously corrupt, and was disbanded. An effort to remake the federal police is only beginning. The elite Federal Investigations Agency was created in 2001, but has not shed that corrupt legacy, analysts said. Last week, Calderon created the Corps of Federal Support Forces, an army unit specializing in anti-drug efforts. The unit will answer directly to his office.

"Everyone who studies this problem has the same diagnosis," said Benitez of American University. "It's urgent to professionalize all aspects of police work: prevention, investigation, and intelligence against organized crime. The police need more resources, better training and better technology."

But police and judicial reform will likely take years to produce results. Until then, there is the army, an institution that struggles to retain its personnel.

Lieutenants and other low-ranking officers in the army earn monthly salaries ranging from $400 to $600. Many desert or resign each year to join private-sector security companies. A few join the traffickers.

"A drug-trafficking group can afford to pay a soldier several times what he earns in the army," said Jose Luis Pineyro, a Mexico City specialist on military issues. "There isn't a government in the world that can compete with what drug traffickers can pay."

To keep its elite Special Forces troops from deserting to the drug cartels, as several dozen have done, the army recently raised the monthly salary for soldiers to about $1,100 per month. Pineyro said the cartels simply doubled that amount as the standard pay for its own "troops."

The so-called Sinaloa, Juarez, and Milenio cartels form one alliance in the Apatzingan region, the Gulf Cartel and "La Familia" another.

"They are people with little education or culture but a lot of money," columnist Ramos said of the traffickers. "Their fights are emotional. They are motivated by anger and pride. And they fight like people with empty stomachs."

One such fight was the May 9 battle on Melchor de Talamantes street. On Wednesday, a half dozen city police stood guard over the one-story brick house where three men and a woman died in the shootout with soldiers.

Locals says that the freshly-painted houses in the neighborhood are evidence of the new, illicit money that's poured into Apatzingan.

Armando Bustos, the city police officer in charge of guarding the crime scene, said he had lived for seven years in Southern California's San Gabriel Valley, working at a car wash and living with an uncle before returning home to Mexico.

"Am I scared? The whole world is scared," Bustos, 28, said in English. "I went to Alhambra High School and I'd go back there in a minute if I could. I think I will. This is too freaking dangerous."

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