MEXICO'S WAR AGAINST DRUGS KILLS ITS POLICE

Attacks Erode Efforts to Cut Corruption

MEXICO CITY -- The assassination was an inside job. The federal
police commander kept his schedule secret and slept in a different
place each night, yet the killer had the keys to the official's
apartment and was waiting for him when he arrived after midnight.

When the commander, Commissioner Edgar Millan Gomez, the acting chief
of the federal police, died with eight bullets in his chest on May 8,
it sent chills through a force that had increasingly found itself a target.

The police say the gunman had been hired by a disgruntled federal
police officer who worked for a drug cartel in Sinaloa State, and the
inside nature of the killing underscored just how difficult it is for
President Felipe Calderon to keep his vow to clean up police
corruption and end the drug-related violence racking Mexico.

Since coming to office in December 2006, Mr. Calderon has sought to
revamp and professionalize the federal police force, using it, with
the army, to mount huge interventions in cities and states once
controlled by drug traffickers.

The result has been mayhem: a street war in which no target has been
too big, no attack too brazen for the gangs.

Opposition politicians and even some police officials have begun to
question whether the president's ambition has exceeded his grasp,
with dangerous and destabilizing consequences for a country that
shares a 2,000-mile border with the United States. Bush
administration officials have said Mr. Calderon's efforts might
founder unless the United States Congress approves a $1.4 billion
package of equipment and training over three years for Mexico's police.

Top security officials who were once thought untouchable have been
gunned down in Mexico City, four in the last month alone. Drug
dealers killed another seven federal agents this year in retaliation
for drug busts in border towns. Others have died in shootouts.

Drug traffickers have killed at least 170 local police officers as
well, among them at least a score of municipal police commanders,
since Mr. Calderon took office. Some were believed to have been
corrupt officers who had sold out to drug gangs and were killed by
rival gangsters, investigators say. Others were killed for doing their jobs.

The president has vowed to stay the course, portraying the violence
among gangs and attacks on the police as a sign of success rather
than failure. The government has smashed the cartels, he says,
forcing a war among the splinter groups. The killing of Commissioner
Millan, he has said, was "a desperate act to weaken the federal police."

"What it signifies is a strategy of some criminal organizations who
seek to terrorize society and paralyze the government," he said last
week. "The question is, should we persevere and go forward or simply
hide in our offices and duck our heads. No way is the Mexican
government going to back down in such a fight."

The violence between drug cartels that Mr. Calderon has sought to end
has only worsened over the past year and a half. The death toll has
jumped 47 percent to 1,378 this year, prosecutors say. All told,
4,125 people have been killed in drug violence since Mr. Calderon took office.

But the steady drumbeat of police killings has caused more shock
here. On Wednesday, for instance, the second in command of the police
in Morelos State and his driver were found dead in the trunk of a
car. A placard on the bodies warned against joining the Sinaloa Cartel.

Several terrified local police chiefs have resigned, the most recent
being Guillermo Prieto, the chief in Ciudad Juarez, who stepped down
last week after his second in command was killed a few days earlier.

"It is not just happening in Ciudad Juarez," Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz,
said at the funeral for the deputy commander, Juan Antonio Roman
Garcia. "It's happening in Nuevo Laredo, in Tijuana, in this entire
region. They are attacking top commanders to destabilize the police."

One reason for the surge in violence is that Mr. Calderon and his
public security minister, Genaro Garcia Luna, have upset longstanding
arrangements between the police and drug traffickers at every level
of government, several experts on crime in Mexico said.

Last year, Mr. Garcia Luna removed 284 federal police commanders
across the country, replacing them with his own handpicked officers,
many from outside the force, who had been trained at a new academy
and who had been closely vetted for signs of corruption.

He has also restructured the department, demoting dozens of career
officers and putting in command people he trusts -- a small circle of
highly educated outsiders, most with a background in the military or
in Mexico's espionage service.

Most of these commanders also served under Mr. Garcia Luna in the
previous administration of President Vicente Fox as part of the
Federal Investigation Agency, or A.F.I., an elite force modeled on the F.B.I.

The agency showed results. President Fox's government arrested
several of the country's most notorious drug kingpins, among them
Osiel Cardenas, leader of the Gulf Cartel, and Benjamin Arellano
Felix, who controlled Tijuana. The arrests caused turmoil inside the
cartels and turf wars among them.

When he took office, President Calderon merged the investigative
agency with the existing federal police force and put Mr. Garcia Luna
in charge. Over the past 18 months, the new force has recruited
heavily among college students and former soldiers. The government
has raised the starting pay for officers and greatly improved training.

But even with about 3,000 new recruits, the Calderon administration
has yet to purge the force of thousands of career officers with roots
in the old force, which was rife with corruption. Many of these
officers have dubious loyalties and made money from graft, especially
those assigned to highways, ports and airports, according to
criminologists and police officials.

"To train these people and get them out on the streets is going to
take at least a couple of years," said Bruce Bagley, a professor at
Miami University who has studied drug trafficking throughout Latin
America. "That leaves much of the rotten core of the police still in place."

At the same time, Mr. Calderon and his predecessor have largely
dismantled the state security apparatus that kept an iron grip on
Mexico for decades when it was ruled by a single party, the
Institutional Revolutionary Party. The Intelligence Agency and the
Interior Ministry have been stripped of their extensive networks of informants.

As a result, some critics say, the new federal police force not only
lacks the intelligence it once had, but is full of disgruntled
officers and commanders who have lost their positions or, in some
cases, their sources of graft.

One of those officers was Jose Antonio Martin Montes Garfias, the man
whom investigators accuse of hiring an assassin to kill Commissioner
Millan. Officer Montes Garfias had long worked at Mexico City's
international airport, one of the main entry points for cocaine and
chemicals used to make methamphetamine, and he was suspected of
protecting shipments for the Sinaloa Cartel. Commissioner Millan had
him transferred.

The police also say Mr. Montes Garfias had a hand in the killing of
Roberto Velasco Bravo, the chief of the organized crime division in
the public security department, on May 1. When he was arrested, Mr.
Montes Garfias had documents from several cars used by other
top-ranking federal police officials, showing names, license plates and models.

Prosecutors say corrupt officers also tipped off gunmen who killed
Omar Ramirez, a high-ranking A.F.I. commander, last September as he
drove on a busy street in downtown Mexico City. Mr. Ramirez had left
his office for an urgent meeting at an unusual hour, yet the gunmen
knew his route. Prosecutors say he was killed for making too much
progress in investigating the Gulf Cartel.

Yet some police commanders say corrupt officers are less of a problem
than the lack of information about drug dealers. They also complain
that the intelligence arms of the military and the police do not
share information until they are on the point of making a raid, for
fear of leaks.

Commissioner Javier Herrera Valles oversaw President Calderon's
efforts to restore order in various states for 10 months until he was
demoted last February after openly criticizing the operations in a
letter to the president.

Mr. Herrera maintains that the federal police are acting on wisps of
information, like tips from anonymous callers. They have very little
hard evidence from undercover officers, wiretaps or surveillance. The
operations consist mostly of stopping trucks at checkpoints and
endless patrols through neighborhoods, he said.

"They don't have any good intelligence gathering," he said in an
interview. "We were patrolling without any direction. Going in
circles, nothing else."

Mr. Calderon and his top security officials disagree. They point out
that the government has made record seizures of cocaine, marijuana
and caches of arms over the last year and a half. They have also
arrested scores of people alleged to be hired guns for the cartels,
along with a handful of high-level drug dealers.

Antonio Guzman, who commands the 640 federal agents sent in recent
weeks to Sinaloa to hunt the gang leaders believed to have been
behind Commissioner Millan's killing, denied that the killings of
police officials had dampened his officers' spirits.

"It hasn't affected morale," Mr. Guzman said as he patrolled the
streets at the head of a column of four pickups full of heavily armed
officers in black garb with machine guns and flak jackets. "We know
what we are getting into here. If anything we have more desire to
win, because we cannot permit this to continue."

He acknowledged the leaders of the Sinaloa gangs were probably long
gone, having fled to the mountains or to other states. He said the
real reason his force had been sent in was to instill confidence in
residents that the government could protect them.

Yet residents said the patrols and checkpoints only helped as long as
they were there. Several said that the drug dealers in the
neighborhood were well known, but that no one dares name them to the
police. "We don't mess with them," said Wilfredo Valenzuela, 35, a mechanic.

Alma Rosa Camacho Lopez, 42, the janitor at a local grade school,
said that as soon as the federal officers leave, the drug dealers
come out of hiding. "We need the government to be on top of these
people all the time," she said. "When they leave the same problem
will come back and we will be in the same fix as before."