Mexican officials outline ambitious plan to fight crime
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Aug. 22, 2008, 8:33PM MEXICO CITY — Mexico's top criminal prosecutors met in Chihuahua state Friday to begin wrestling with the devilish details of an ambitious new national anti-crime crusade.

"The only thing that can't happen is losing the battle against organized crime," Eduardo Medina Mora, the federal attorney general, told top prosecutors from Mexico's 32 states at the conclave. "Society demands results."

Prodded into action by public outrage over crime and the violence it brings, federal and state officials and leaders of the judiciary agreed Thursday to a 75-point plan to overhaul the country's police and justice systems within three years.

Among other things, the officials agreed to clean up all police forces and give better training to prosecutors and judges. The officials also agreed to create new anti-kidnapping squads in every state, stiffen penalties for abductors; and cooperate rather than compete in the pursuit of criminals.

As President Felipe Calderon put it Friday, they had promised to make Mexico a country of laws at last.

"This is the hour to join forces," he said. "United, we Mexicans have the capability of resolving our problems one by one."

But now as authorities at every level of government work to meet the goals and deadlines set by the accord, they face a wall of ineptitude and corruption by officials and a deep pool of doubt harbored by many crime-weary Mexicans.

Who can fault the cynicism? As often as not, police don't police. Prosecutors don't prosecute. Judges don't judge. Legislators don't legislate.

Those signing Thursday's pact vowed to show tangible results in 100 days and to set everything right within three years. That's quick for the wheels of justice to rotate in any society. It amounts to a nano-second in Mexico.

"It's like they're saying, now we're going to do our jobs," said Ana Maria Salazar, a former Clinton-administration defense official who has become an anti-crime expert in Mexico.

"This meeting," she said, "should have taken place on the first day Calderon too office."

"Most of the stuff they could have done already — like coordinating their efforts," she said. "How dare they make that a proposal. They should have been doing that already."

Calderon has made the crackdown on Mexico's powerful drug trafficking organizations a cornerstone of his administration. He has sent 30,000 soldiers and federal police into areas plagued by crime, including along the Texas border, and pledged to do whatever it takes to win the war.

About 60 tons of cocaine have been seized, thousands of accused mobsters arrested. But the bloodshed has persisted. Nearly 5,000 people have been killed since Calderon took office, including more than 450 policemen — and kidnappings and other violent crimes seem to go unchecked.

Many of the policemen who have been killed in recent months — especially those from municipal and state forces — were targeted for their links to one criminal gang or the other, officials say.

"The operational lag of the Mexican state has been taken advantage of by the criminals," said Genaro Garcia Luna, Mexico's secretary of public security and its top cop. "The levels of violence in the country have increased."

A nationwide opinion poll taken last month by the newspaper El Universal reported that 81 percent of respondents said crime had grown worse in the past year, and 65 percent blamed inefficient or corrupt police, prosecutors and judges.

"Mexico today is in a security crisis," millionaire businessman Alejandro Marti said in an unscripted speech at the ceremony announcing the agreement. The kidnapping and killing of his 14-year-old son had fed the public outrage that pressured Mexico's leaders to negotiate the National Accord on Justice, Security and Legality. The wave of crime, he said, "is the product of many years of inaction, of irresponsibility, of letting things go — of corruption."

"We have achieved a frightening word in this country," Marti said. "It's name is impunity."

Marti's son, Fernando, was abducted on his way to school in June. His body was found two months later, stuffed into the trunk of an abandoned car. Two police detectives have been arrested in connection with the crime. No other members of the kidnapping gang, which has operated in Mexico City for the past several years, have yet been caught.

During the sleepless nights through the long weeks when his son's fate was unknown, Marti said, he often pondered who was to blame for the crime.

Was it the police, the politicians, the judges? Or was it "all of us who with the passing of the years, with our irresponsibility and our blindness have created what we are now living?"

Nationwide protests are planned for the end of this month. The marchers will demand an end to the violence, and end to crime, and end to inaction.

A similar protest — some 250,000 people strong — clogged central Mexico City's streets in 2004 following a similar wave of crimes that were not prosecuted. Still another march was held in the late 1990s, after two sons of another businessman were abducted and killed.

"What did we do?" Marti asked.

"Nothing."

dudley.althaus@chron.com


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