Tuesday August 5 4:50 PM EDT

Mexico Launches Crackdown on Organized Crime

By Dan Trotta

MEXICO CITY (Reuter) Declaring war on organized crime, Mexican
President Ernesto Zedillo has sent heavily armed police into dangerous
neighborhoods this week to round up suspected criminals by the
hundreds.

Police in Mexico City have arrested nearly 4,000 people since a Zedillo
ordered the crackdown in March, officials said, but the recent campaign
has drawn the most attention because of its brazen strongarm tactics.

Authorities said Zedillo's goal is to clamp down on a crime wave that
has soared since a 1995 economic crisis that put a million Mexicans out
of work.

Crime was a central issue in recent elections that saw Zedillo's
governing party lose control of the capital city for the first time in
68 years on rule.

The massive roundups have scored points with the public. One newspaper
poll showed 77 percent of residents approve of the campaign. Crime shot
up 40 percent in 1995 and grew another 13 percent last year, officials
say.

But critics said the dragnets are poorly thought out and that real crime
kingpins are escaping.

"I think the ringleaders are laughing right now," Pedro Penaloza,
president of the public security commission in the Mexico City
legislature, told Reuters in an interview. "The heads of the bands
aren't out on the street corner."

Only a minority of those arrested 15 percent by one Penaloza's
estimate are ever charged with a crime. The rest are let free.

Penaloza blamed arbritary tactics in which police arrest
suspiciouslooking characters but have no case to present when the
defendants appear before a judge.

The main targets are traffickers of stolen car parts and taxdodging
produce vendors whose criminal enterprises are often protected by
crooked cops.

"In Mexico there is an impressive network of criminal associations, not
just in the police but also among high levels of government," said
Penaloza, a member of the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution
that will govern Mexico City starting in December.

Even more dangerous mafias deal in kidnapping and drugs but so far have
not borne the same brunt of the law.

Police have plenty of easier foils. In three Mexico City neighborhoods
known as the Bermuda Triangle, dozens of hucksters on each street corner
bombard motorists with offers of fast and cheap auto repair service.
Their goods are widely believed to be stolen.

The leader of the National Commission for Human Rights told Reforma
newspaper it has received a wave of complaints about police barging into
homes and jailing innocent people.

One corner auto parts salesman told Reuters that his brother, a cop,
told him about rogue officers who looted the homes they were supposed to
be searching.

"People without any criminal record were taken away and fined 500 pesos
(about about $65), and for what? Just to be investigated? It's not
fair," Oswaldo Caldino said.

Ricardo Garcia Villalobos, chief of the multiagency National System for
Public Safety, pledged to keep up the fight in comments distributed by
the Interior Ministry.

"What I can tell you is that these actions will be permanent and each
time more emphatic, more orderly and more coordinated," he said.