MEXICO POLICE CAUGHT BETWEEN DRUG CRACKDOWN, CARTELS

MEXICO CITY - Poorly trained, badly paid and vulnerable to
corruption, Mexico's legions of local police are increasingly caught
in the crossfire as the Mexican government embarks on a crackdown on
drug smugglers.

Dozens of municipal police have been killed in recent months in
apparent drug hits, and several others, including the intelligence
chief of Mexico City's Police Department, are under investigation,
suspected of links to smugglers.

Last month, the Mexican government announced it was scrutinizing
police commanders nationwide, and the Mexican army said it was
disarming 300 police along the Texas border while prosecutors
investigated them. advertisement

"We are evaluating police chiefs of all three levels of government
(federal, state and local) . . . to purge our police forces of bad
elements and criminals who have infiltrated them," Mexican Public
Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said during a federal
law-enforcement meeting last month.

The arrests and attacks have highlighted both the danger and
temptation faced by Mexico's 317,000 local and state police officers,
said Rep. Juan Francisco Rivera Bedoya, chairman of the public-safety
committee in Mexico's lower house of Congress.

"The ones who are in the eye of the hurricane are the municipal
police," Rivera said. "The gangs threaten to kill their children and
wives if they don't cooperate. Many decide to just quit."

In January alone, at least nine city and state police officers were
gunned down in apparent drug hits. An additional 11 were arrested on
charges of working with drug smugglers, including one charged with
battling fellow police officers during a fierce gunfight in Tijuana on Jan. 17.

The surge in cases involving local police is part of a flurry of
developments in a 1-year-old government offensive against Mexico's
drug cartels.

'They're All Corrupt'

As Mexican troops and federal police rack up victories, the cartels
are lashing out at local police who are easier targets, said Luis de
la Barreda, director of the Citizens' Institute for Studies on
Insecurity, a Mexico City think tank.

"The local police are very unprotected. Sometimes, they don't have
adequate weapons or vehicles to confront these drug traffickers,"
Barreda said. "They're much more vulnerable than the federal police."

Local police in Mexico are also more susceptible to corruption
because of low pay and poor morale, said Luis Villalobos Garcia, a
researcher with the Institute for Security and Democracy in Mexico City.

"The expectations that police have about their professional
development are so limited, that if their family has money problems,
drug-trafficking can become a very attractive way out," Villalobos said.

Among Mexicans, the recent arrests of local police have reinforced a
general distrust of law enforcement.

"It doesn't surprise me at all. They're all corrupt," Hugo Lopez Pina
said as he sipped a beer outside his home in the Barrio del Nino
Jesus, a working-class neighborhood about one mile from the site of
the Jan. 22 raids.

A few streets over, Mexico City police Officer Aurelio Mendez watched
over the neighborhood from an elevated police box.

"The sad thing is, if I were killed tonight, people would say I was
involved in something (criminal) and it was a settling of accounts,"
Mendez said. "There's a lack of confidence that dates from long ago."

Low Pay Doesn't Help

Police officers' low pay makes them susceptible to bribes ranging
from mordidas, or "bites," paid by motorists to get out of traffic
tickets to kickbacks from drug smugglers moving their cargo through
town, said Adalberto Santana, a historian at the National Autonomous
University of Mexico and author of a book about drug-smuggling in
Latin America.

A police officer in the northern city of Chihuahua earns an average
salary of $650 a month, according to the state government.

In Mexico City, a beat cop is paid $700 a month, the city government says.

Many officers are "auxiliary" or "bank and industrial police" whose
main job is to guard high-risk private businesses. Many work
exhausting 24-hour shifts, one day on, one day off.

College degrees are rarely required, and most auxiliary police get
only a few weeks of academy training, Villalobos said.

Updating the System

To professionalize the police, Garcia Luna, the federal public-safety
secretary, has proposed creating a national standard for recruiting
and training officers.

The United States has also pledged millions of dollars for police
training as part of a proposed $1.4 billion anti-drug aid package.

Mexican lawmakers are also working on a bill to reform the court
system, a bureaucracy that is so slow and secretive that many
Mexicans prefer to pay bribes to avoid it. The same bill would set up
a certification system to make sure police are trained in
investigative measures.

The Mexico City government also has launched a new transit law
allowing police to issue more traffic tickets instead of impounding
cars. Avoiding the impound yard is one of the top reasons Mexicans
pay bribes, according to Transparency International.

Still, Barreda said it could take years to weed out bad police
officers, prepare the remaining ones to fight smugglers and improve
the police's reputation among the public.

"We need a good process of selection, adequate salaries and a way to
give them incentives, not just material but also spiritual:
recognizing them when they are good police officers," he said.