As Mexico battles cartels, army becomes law

Apr. 2, 2009 11:54 AM
Washington Post

PETATLAN, Mexico - President Felipe Calderon is rapidly escalating the Mexican army's role in the war against drug traffickers, deploying nearly 50 percent of its combat-ready troops along the U.S-Mexico border and throughout the country, while retired army officers take command of local police and the military supplies civilian authorities with automatic weapons and grenades.

U.S. and Mexican officials describe the drug cartels as a widening narco-insurgency. The four major drug states average a total of 12 murders a day, characterized by ambushes, gun battles, executions and decapitated bodies left by the side of the road. In the villages and cities where the traffickers hold sway, daily life now takes place against a martial backdrop of round-the-clock patrols, pre-dawn raids and roadblocks manned by masked young soldiers.

Calderon's deployment of about 45,000 troops to fight the cartels represents a historic change. Previous administrations relied on Mexico's traditionally weak police agencies to combat the traffickers who funnel 90 percent of the cocaine that enters the United States. The cartels corrupted local authorities and reached tacit agreements with the national government, limiting the violence while the drugs continued to flow.

After Calderon became president in December 2006, he told Mexicans that the use of the military against the cartels would be limited and brief. But it is now the centerpiece of his anti-narcotics strategy, according to interviews with senior U.S. and Mexican officials and dozens of people on the front lines of the war.

"It can be traumatic to have the army in control of public security, but I am convinced that we don't have a better alternative, even with all the risks that it implies," said Monte Alejandro Rubido, a senior public security official who is overseeing the overhaul of Mexico's police forces.

The military's withdrawal is dependent on the success of the police reforms, according to the government. U.S. and Mexican officials predict that troops will be patrolling the streets for years. In many regions, the army has become the law. But rather than quelling the violence, it increasingly appears to have been drawn into a deepening morass of cartel rivalries, local political disputes and blood feuds.

In the southern state of Guerrero, the army ratcheted up security last year, killing several alleged drug traffickers and making dozens of arrests. That was followed by a two-month stretch in which nine soldiers were abducted and decapitated in the state capital, four policemen were incinerated in a daylight grenade attack near a beach resort and a former mayor was shot 24 times before 1,000 people packed into a plaza for the coronation of a town beauty queen.

Mexicans have greeted the unprecedented deployment of federal troops in their communities with a mix of gratitude and dismay.

"There are a lot of opinions. I personally feel more secure to see the army out in the streets," said Denis Gonzalez Sanchez, a 29-year-old city administrator in Petatlan, a Guerrero beach town of 30,000 where the army began patrols last year after three dozen gunmen massacred the family of a former mayor accused of links to traffickers. "A lot of people feel exactly the opposite: They say that the army is making us less secure. But I always think it's better knowing that they are out there protecting us, that they are watching over us, when there is nobody else to do it."

Mexican officials say the cartels operate on a $10 billion annual budget earned from drug sales in the United States; according to U.S. government estimates, they employ 150,000 people. This year, the Mexican government will spend $9.3 billion on national security, a 99 percent increase since Calderon took office.

Since December 2006, more than 10,100 people have been killed in the strife, including 917 police officers, soldiers, prosecutors and political leaders, according to Milenio, a Mexican media organization. At the same time, human rights complaints against the army have surged 576 percent, according to Mexico's National Human Rights Commission, including allegations of unlawful detentions, forced disappearances, rape and torture.

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Calderon and his advisers have described the military's deployment as an emergency measure while he seeks to reform Mexico's local, state and federal police. He has promised that when the new police forces are ready, the troops will return to their barracks. That process may take until the end of his six-year term in 2012, he said recently.

The government is attempting to vet and retrain 450,000 officers, most at the state and municipal levels, employing lie detectors, drug tests, psychological profiling and financial reviews to weed out corruption and incompetence. Nearly half of the 56,000 officers vetted so far have failed.

The government is also forging agreements with each of Mexico's 31 states and its federal district, Mexico City, for the military to deliver automatic rifles, high-caliber ammunition, grenade launchers and fragmentation grenades to state and municipal officers who obtain federally mandated security clearances. "I can't hand over modern weapons systems to a police officer who has not fulfilled all the requirements," said Heriberto Salinas, a 70-year-old retired army general who commands the Guerrero state police force. "It has to be someone who is vetted and evaluated."

Mexican authorities are increasingly turning to retired army officers to run the police, counting on their discipline and training to resist the corrupting influence of the cartels and their ties to the military to help coordinate joint operations. In addition to Salinas, who came out of retirement at the request of Guerrero's governor, six of the state's eight operations coordinators are former military. At least a dozen governors have tapped retired generals as state police commanders, and hundreds of former military officers are serving at the municipal level. The assistant secretary for strategy and intelligence for Mexico's federal police, Javier del Real Magallanes, is an active-duty general.

Last month, Calderon dispatched an additional 5,000 troops to the border city of Ciudad Juarez, and the army took control of the police department after traffickers forced the resignation of the police chief by threatening to kill one of his officers every 48 hours.

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U.S. and Mexican officials familiar with Calderon's thinking said a confluence of events pushed him to declare war on the traffickers. During the presidential campaign, U.S. and Mexican officials independently received a tip that the powerful Gulf cartel had taken out a contract on Calderon's life, according to a source with direct knowledge. Although the tip was never verified, it was taken seriously because of the cartel's links to the Zetas - feared Mexican Special Forces veterans who served as assassins for the organization. U.S. authorities believe that the Zetas have broken off to form their own cartel in recent months.

The U.S. and Mexican governments also received information that drug money - one American official estimated $5 million to $10 million - made its way into the 2006 mayoral and parliamentary races. Calderon and his advisers viewed the influence of such money as a serious threat to democracy in the country, which had been governed for decades by a single political party - the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI - until Calderon's predecessor, Vicente Fox, was elected in 2000.

"It was a factor that was considered, especially the municipal elections, because from there they could gain control of the local police forces," said Eduardo Medina Mora, Mexico's attorney general. "This was why we couldn't wait. The threat was assessed from many different factors, this one being a relevant one, but not the only one."

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On a sparkling half-moon bay on Guerrero's coast lays the resort city of Zihuatanejo. Just before dawn Feb. 20, the army swept into the gritty neighborhoods that surround the city's white-sand beaches and luxury hotels and arrested nine men it identified as members of the Beltran Leyva cartel.

The next day, a few minutes before the 9 a.m. shift change, a gray Jeep Cherokee pulled up in front of the Zihuatanejo police station, and someone fired a grenade into the car park. The explosion injured five bystanders and sent a storm of metal fragments into the building's facade.

Four days later, in broad daylight, gunmen attacked four Zihuatanejo policemen with grenades as they patrolled the city's outskirts in a Ford pickup. The officers burned to death in the vehicle. A week later, another Zihuatanejo policeman was shot to death in front of his home; the assailants left a sign that read in part, "I am going to kill every single cop, an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth." The message also contained a threat to kill the chief of police, "who nobody can get rid of."

"Of course I'm afraid. I'm filled with fear," the 34-year-old police chief, Pablo Rodriguez Roman, said at the shrapnel-pocked police station, now protected by sandbags piled five feet high. "But I can't show it to my men. If I do, the entire force will collapse."

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