‘Corrupt’ police in Acapulco are relieved of duty by federal agents
ACAPULCO was once a magnet for the stars, where millionaires would rub shoulders with Hollywood actresses and former US presidents under the palm trees of its horseshoe bay.
But yesterday, the military had swept in to take over the city as the entire police force of one of Mexico’s most famous resorts was accused of being in the pay of drug cartels.
Federal agents from Mexico’s police and army took over public security in the troubled beach resort, disarming the local police force over suspicions that it was being controlled by the drug trafficking gangs behind a spiralling murder rate.
Acapulco – which between the Fifties and the Eighties was a glamorous sunspot favoured by movie stars – now ranks as one of the most violent cities in the world, with a murder rate of 103 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack were regulars there, and John and Jaqueline Kennedy honeymooned at the resort. Now dozens of criminal groups are vying for power across Guerrero, the state upon whose coast Acapulco sits, which is one of the country’s poorest and most violent areas.
Although hotels fill near to capacity during high season, the violence in Acapulco has reached epidemic levels, with killings happening on the seafront and beaches as well as in its backstreets. The mountains of Guerrero are considered Mexico’s heroin heartlands. Impoverished peasants tend to fields of poppies that are processed into heroin and shipped north to the United States to feed a booming appetite for the drug, a result of the ongoing opioid addiction crisis north of the border.
Some 100 Mexican marines, soldiers and federal police agents moved into local public security areas on Tuesday in response to what they said was a lack of police action against crime, murders and drug-related violence in the area.
Federal police agents and the military have had a presence in the city for years, but the latest move shifts the coordination and decision making around public security away from local authorities. Federal police will now also be in charge of criminal investigations.
Mexico has launched similar operations numerous times in recent years when a police force is suspected of being infiltrated by organised crime, but it is unusual in a city the size of Acapulco whose population is 700,000.
The state security board said that all of Acapulco’s police would now be “evaluated and submitted to trust tests, as protocol dictates”.
Alejandro Hope, an independent security analyst, told The Daily Telegraph: “The new forces that emerge from these processes tend to be no better than the ones they replace.”