HONEST COP IN MEXICO UNBELIEVABLE

Whatever other reasons the Academy had for giving Benicio Del Toro an Oscar
last month for his role in the anti-drug movie "Traffic," I thought he
deserved the best supporting actor honor simply for managing to convince
his audiences that a Mexican cop could be honest.

Without giving too much of the film away - in case you want to rent it -
Del Toro, playing the role of Tijuana police officer Javier Rodriguez,
cooperates with U.S. law enforcement officers to nail a drug kingpin who
thinks he has bought off Rodriguez.

If you've ever had a bad experience with a police officer south of the
border, or if you accept the stereotype of them, you may be thinking
"Traffic" was pure fantasy.

Not that all Mexican cops are corrupt, not that they should all be painted
with a broad brush stroke. But the fact is, there are enough bad apples
among them to paint a not-so-pretty picture of them as a whole: On one
hand, they have shaken tourists down for the slightest traffic violation,
while on the other, crooks literally have gotten away with murder if they
had enough money to buy them off.

Of late, every newly-elected public official in Mexico, from the president
on down to the mayor of smallest municipality, pledges to "professionalize"
the police agencies that answer to them. That's a euphemism for getting rid
of the cops on the take. The fact that each succeeding administrations make
that same promise would suggest that the previous one didn't keep it.

Most recently, a high-ranking officer of the Mexican army, which fights
drug trafficking as one of its responsibilities, was sacked for being on
the payroll of the very traffickers he was supposed to be putting away. And
Mexican customs officers along the border who were thought to be dirty were
relieved of duty.

Mexico's new president, Vicente Fox, has vowed to press the war on
corruption with renewed vigor. But making high-profile arrests of corrupt
officialdom doesn't solve the problem, at least not over the long-term. Up
to now, arrests have only created vacuums - filled by new corrupted officials.

The dilemma could not have been demonstrated to me any more clearly than
that day more than a decade ago when I was invited over to a Mexican police
officer's home for the afternoon meal. Having been covering the Mexico beat
for The Yuma Daily Sun, I had bumped into this cop from time to time. I
guess he took a liking to me, since he had me over for dinner at his house
- - a dirt-floor, three-room shack made of scraps of lumber hammered together.

As a municipal police officer, he was paid barely enough to sustain
himself, his wife and his two children. But he had a badge and a gun, and
with those come power and authority. I won't say he took payoffs, because I
don't know. But the fact is, he had a license to steal, if ever he chose to
use it.

Underpaid officers are susceptible to drug traffickers who have more than
enough money to buy them. Boosting salaries would help bring
professionalism to police ranks, but that is only part of the equation.

La mordida, meaning "the bite" - another euphemism, this one meaning bribe
paid - is a fact of life in Mexico, one that is miraculous in its power to
unravel red tape. It doesn't just persuade the police to look the other
way. La mordida can help merchants expedite the permits they need from
government to do business. Builders pay it to eliminate the hassles that
might otherwise deny them permits they need for construction.

La mordida has become a tradition, dating back not just decades, not
generations, but literally centuries. It is entrenched. In "Distant
Neighbors," his classic book about Mexico, Alan Riding describes la mordida
as the goop that greases the machinery of the system. If la mordida were to
disappear suddenly, he writes, the machine would come to a screeching halt.
The reform-minded Fox can take initial steps to modernize the system, but
his six-year, non-renewable term doesn't give him enough time to correct it
altogether. It will be up to his successors to pick up where he left off.

If that happens, years from now, the thought of Javier Rodriguez collaring
crooks won't be such an outlandish idea.