Crackdown:
Mexico’s president announces an anti-crime initiative that would dissolve local governments corrupted by gangs.
MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s president announced a nationwide anti-crime plan Thursday that would allow Congress to dissolve local governments infiltrated by drug gangs and give state authorities control over often-corrupt municipal police.
The plan announced by President Enrique Pena Nieto came two months after 43 teachers college students disappeared in the Guerrero city of Iguala, allegedly killed and incinerated by a drug gang working with local police. Huge marches have been held to protest their disappearance.
Pena Nieto suggested his plan was influenced by the Iguala tragedy, noting its “cruelty and barbarity have shocked Mexico.”
“Mexico cannot go on like this,” he said. “After Iguala, Mexico must change.”
As if to underscore the problem, authorities said Thursday that they had found the decapitated, partly burned bodies of 11 men dumped on the side of a road near another Guerrero city.
The president’s plan would also relax the complex divisions governing which offenses are dealt with at federal, state and local levels.
At present, some local police refuse to act to prevent federal crimes like drug trafficking. In addition, the law would seek to establish a national identity number or document, though it is unclear what form it would take.
The plan would focus first on four of Mexico’s most troubled states: Guerrero, Michoacan and Jalisco, all west and south of Mexico City, and Tamaulipas, which borders in part on Texas. More federal police and other security forces would be sent to the “hot land” region overlapping the first two states, where the government has already sent significant contingents of federal police and soldiers.
“My response to the police operation in the ‘hot lands’ is: ‘What? Another one?’” said Mexico City-based security analyst Alejandro Hope, alluding to a string of previous anti-crime initiatives in the area.
The reforms, some of which would require constitutional changes, will be formally presented next week. They would include a single, nationwide emergency tele- phone number, which the president said could be 911, as in the United States.
Dissolving local governments could open the door to political vendettas unless strict prerequisites are set for such actions, Hope said. And centralizing police command has not improved forces in many cases so far
We have unified command of state detective forces, and are they very good?” Hope said.
The focus on corrupt local governments reflects the shocking accusations made about the mayor of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca. Prosecutors say he collaborated with a local drug gang and ordered the detention of the students by local police, who turned them over to gang gunmen.
Municipal governments currently enjoy high levels of autonomy and control their own police forces, something the president is now seeking to weaken. Similar broad, federal anti-crime plans announced in 2004 and 2008 brought some improvements in areas such as vetting of police officers, but failed to prevent some entire municipal police forces from being co-opted by crime gangs. As a result, Mexicans have become skeptical of such announcements.
“More than announcements, the public needs to see concrete actions that make this rhetoric seem believable,” said Pedro Torres, a law professor at the Tecnologico de Monterrey university’s school of government.