HIST 361: The Mexican Revolution: Birth, Life, Death

The Latin Americanist, Nov. 28, 2008

For a country that’s trying to tackle rampant crime the results of a recent report are a black eye for law enforcement.

According to a recently released report, 49.4% of nearly 56,000 Mexican police officers have failed background and security exams. The number of policemen cited in the report represents roughly one in five of the country’s total number of cops, and were tested by using tests like psychological profiles and polygraph machines.

The report should raise eyebrows north of the border since it cited several northern Mexican states as embarrassingly unskilled:

In Baja California, home to the border city of Tijuana, some 89 percent of police tested failed, and only 4 percent were judged “recommendable.” Officers there have been periodically disarmed, detained and investigated by federal investigators and army troops on suspicion of aiding drug traffickers.

The shocking report comes at a time when Mexican forces have their backs to the wall in trying to stem the tide of drug-fueled violence. Small strides have been made to combat corruption in Mexico’s police including the arrest yesterday of an officer accused of being involved in a September massacre near Mexico City.

Image- ABC News (“Police investigators work at a crime scene where seven bodies were found gunned down in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, northern Mexico, November 25, 2008.”)
Sources- The Latin Americanist, Toronto Star, AP, La Plaza, IHT

As drug cartels battle the government, Mexico descends into chaos

GUY LAWSON, Rolling Stone – Nov. 13, 2008

• VIDEO: Guy Lawson on the bloody war next door, plus a guide to Mexico’s drug lords

The dead policeman is found propped against a tree off a dirt road on the outskirts of the city. He is dressed like a cartoon version of a Mexican cowboy, wearing a sombrero and wrapped in a heavy woolen blanket. The murder and symbolic mutilation of policía has become almost routine in Culiacán, capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa: Pablo Aispuro Ramírez is one of 90 cops to be killed here this year. There is a note pinned to the body, a warning to anyone who dares to oppose the powerful drug lord who ordered the execution.

“I’m a cop-cowboy!” the note reads. “Ahoo-ya! There are going to be more soon!”

In the United States, the War on Drugs is a political slogan for a policy disaster that has cost taxpayers at least $500 billion over the past 35 years. In Mexico, it is a brutal and bewildering conflict — a multisided civil war that has taken 3,000 lives this year alone and brought the federal government to a state of near-collapse. Narcotics are now one of the largest sectors of the Mexican economy, twice the size of tourism. Most of the country’s drug trade involves transporting contraband from other sources — especially cocaine from Colombia — to satisfy the nearly insatiable demand in the U.S. But Mexico’s narcotraficante cartels have also gotten into the production side of the industry, manufacturing 80 percent of the crystal meth sold in America, 14 percent of the heroin and most of the marijuana. What Mexico offers the global narcotics industry is proximity to the largest market on earth. (more…)

The Latin Americanist, 5 November 2008

Mexicans across the country are expressing outrage at what may become the symbolic last straw in its losing battle against rampant criminality. Javier Morena, the five-year old son of fruit vendors in a poor barrio of Mexico City and who disappeared on October 26, was found to have been murdered by kidnappers who injected his heart with acid — as the AP reports, “a new low even for this country’s brutal gangs.”

Many reports suggest that popular reaction to Morena’s murder recalls similar emotions stirred after the death of 14 year-old Fernando Marti in August, during which over 100,000 people marched across Mexico City in solidarity against the rising tide of crime in the country.

According to published estimates, the number of kidnappings through September 2008 has already eclipsed the record high from all of last year.

Sources: AP, New York Times, Univision, El Economista, the Latin Americanist