Some Mexican Towns Choose to Go It Alone
from the town.”
Social services have faltered. Though the new order is popular, it offers few avenues for appeal or dissent. Families whose sons or brothers are expelled have little recourse.
Rather than ejecting institutions, Monterrey’s business elite quietly took them over — all with the blessing of their friends and golf partners in public office.
But their once-remarkable progress is now collapsing.
“I’m telling you, I have a long career in these matters, and the project I am more proud of than anything is this one in Monterrey,” said Jorge Tello, a security consultant and former head of the national intelligence agency.
“It’s very easy to lose it,” he warned, adding it may be too late.
Monterrey’s experiment began with corporate executives who call themselves the Group of 10, offering to help fund and reform the state’s kidnapping police. The governor agreed.
They hired a consultant and replaced nearly half the officers. They hired lawyers to rewrite laws and began to coordinate between the police and the families of victims.
When the governor later announced an ambitious plan for a new police force, he again invited business leaders in. They hired more consultants and supplied special housing and high salaries for officers.
Crime dropped citywide. Community leaders in poorer areas reported safer streets and more public trust.
But a new governor let reforms lapse. Now crime and reports of police brutality are resurging.
“Things got better, people felt comfortable, and then they destroyed the whole thing,” Mr. Tello said.
Adrián de la Garza, who is mayor of Monterrey’s municipal core, said the city could do only so much to insulate itself. “This isn’t an island,” he said.
Any Mexican city, he said, is policed by multiple forces. Some report to the mayor, some to the governor and some to the federal government. And any one of those political actors can derail progress through corruption, cronyism or simple neglect.
Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a sprawl outside Mexico City, was once known for poverty, gang violence and police corruption so widespread that officers sometimes mugged citizens.
Today, it is far safer. The police chief who has overseen this change, a former academic named Jorge Amador, has treated Neza as his personal laboratory, trying a mix of hard- nosed reforms, harebrained schemes and fanciful experiments. Mr. Amador was free to experiment because Neza’s government has seceded from Mexico’s party system.
Neza inverted Monterrey’s model: Rather than establishing an independent police force and co- opting the political system, Neza established an independent political system and co- opted the police.
Neza, run by a third party, the leftwing P.R.D., has gutted local institu- tions and cut out the state authorities.
Mr. Amador fired one in eight police officers and changed every commanding officer. He shuffled assignments to disrupt patronage networks. Those who remain are under constant scrutiny. Every car is equipped with a GPS unit, tracked by dozens of internal affairs officers.
Corruption and crime would always pay more than he could, Mr. Amador knew. So he would offer something more valuable: a proud civic identity. Essay contests, sports leagues and scholarships cultivate a culture that can feel cultlike. “We have to convince the police officer that they can be a different kind of police officer, but also the citizen that they have a different kind of officer,” he said.
But Neza’s gains could evaporate, Mr. Amador said, if crime in neighboring areas continued to rise or if the mayor’s office changed party.
“The question is,” he said, “how long we can hold this?”