AS MEXICO'S DRUG WAR RAGES, MILITARY TAKES OVER FOR POLICE

Tijuana's Anticorruption Police Chief Was Fired and Replaced With an
Army Officer Monday, Following Three Days of Drug-Related Violence
That Left 37 People Dead.

Mexico City - Even for Mexicans accustomed to ghastly headlines
chronicling the country's drug-related violence, the current level of
killing in Tijuana causes consternation. Some 200 people have been
slain in one month. Last weekend turned into one of the city's
deadliest: nearly 40 were killed, four of whom were children, and nine
of them beheaded.

The immediate answer by city officials was to replace Tijuana's public
security chief with an Army officer, to "ratify the position that it
is with the military ... that security will be restored in Tijuana,"
said Mayor Jorge Ramos.

Putting Army officers, particularly retired ones, in police positions
is nothing new in Mexico. But as President Felipe Calderon has
declared war on drug traffickers, dispatching troops across the
country, the cooperation between the military and local law
enforcement is at new highs. And responses like the one in Tijuana are
a logical -- albeit controversial -- evolution as the military rotates
troops in and out of affected towns and cities across the country.

"Because the military is taking more responsibility for law
enforcement operations ... they have more things to coordinate with
the local police," says a senior Mexican official, who, as standard
policy, spoke on condition of anonymity. "If the military has a
partner in the local police force who speaks their own language, they
can work together better."

It's been nearly two years since Mr. Calderon sent more than 20,000
federal authorities and troops to troubled states: from the mountain
towns of Michoacan that are ripe for drug production to the dicey
border cities along the US-Mexico frontier.

The US formally released on Wednesday the first $197 million of a $400
million aid package to help Mexico in its struggle. The announcement
came as Mexico's No. 2 federal prosecutor was gunned down in the
violent Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez.

The Mexican government maintains that the military is the best
instrument to stem the violence while a strong and uncorrupted police
force -- another cornerstone of the president's initiative -- is being
created across the country. But violence has so far only escalated:
According to local media counts, which keep death tallies in the
absence of government figures, more than 5,000 have been killed in
2008 double the number for 2007.

Nowhere has violence flared more than in Tijuana, and nowhere has the
military had to take on such an active role.

Last month, the government reported that half of police officers who
were given standards tests failed; the failure rate was as high as 9
out of 10 in Baja California, where Tijuana is located. At one point,
the military briefly disarmed the local police force there and asked
residents to report crimes directly to them. Their latest dispatch
came last month, when federal troops fanned the area after 500 cops
were removed and sent and for retraining.

After last weekend's violence, Tijuana's police chief Alberto Capella,
a lawyer and activist appointed 12 months ago to flush the notorious
local forces of corruption, was replaced by Lt. Col. Julian Leyzaola,
who was the seecond in command. The coronel's new No. 2 is also a
military officer.

Over the past several decades, military members have taken on police
roles, especially when retired from the institution. "The difference
is now they are active officers. They are still under the chain of
command of the Army," says Jorge Luis Sierra, an expert on the use of
the Mexican military in anti-narcotics missions and author of "The
Internal Enemy." "It's like the Army taking direct control of police
organizations."

Mr. Sierra says he believes the trend has and will accelerate under
Calderon, particularly in troubled spots.

Today, with the spotlight the military has in the antinarcotics
effort, the cooperation between the military and federal government is
as well-coordinated as ever. "Before, when [military officers] were
retired, they came [to police departments] on their own. Today it is
more of an organized process," says the senior Mexican official. "It
is not a boiler plate solution. [But] in certain specific cases like
in Tijuana it makes sense."

Today, both active and retired members of the military are taking
control of police forces, at the same time that troops are temporarily
taking over police departments while corruption is tackled. "The high
command can control all the operations in terms of public security,"
Sierra says, and he calls that risky.

Mexico's governors and city officials have not responded uniformly to
the plan. At least three governors have asked the military for help
and replaced state public security officials with military leaders,
particularly where violence is at its worst. In other cases, they have
rejected the military presence, fearing that it will lead to more violence.

"If the military comes in, for a lot of governors, it would be the
equivalent of outsourcing security, of admitting you don't have the
capacity to confront the threat," says Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, a
Mexico expert and head of the Washington-based consulting firm
Peschard-Sverdrup & Associates. On the other hand, he says, especially
where the narcotraffickers have control, "it's the safest political
thing to do. The military is highly regarded and the governor is seen
as doing the best he can do."

The government says that one reason the military has been employed is
that the firepower of drug traffickers far exceeds that of the local
police. But the military also has its own deficiencies, which could be
hampering the effort, says Roderic Camp, a Mexican military expert at
Claremont McKenna College. "Their function is not as a police force.
They don't have the kind of vehicles that chase civilian criminals,"
he says.

The military is considered less corruptible than police for a number
of reasons: they undergo constant training in a way that local
enforcement does not. They are also deployed far from their homes, and
often rotated, so that they find less opportunity for collusion.
Because they are often deployed away from their families, they are
also less susceptible to intimidation by drug traffickers. "The
military has been much more immune to corruption and to being
assassinated by drug traffickers," says Mr. Camp.

Perhaps the main reason they have been less corruptible is that
they've been removed from the actual problem. Now that they are on the
front lines, some worry they run the risk of being corrupted by the
very traffickers they are trying to control, and have already been
condemned for a series of human rights violations by Mexico's national
human rights office.

"When the Army is in a state, the local media has a lower opinion of
the Army, and citizens in general have a lower opinion. Strong support
for the Army is where they are not," says Dan Lund, a pollster and
political analyst in Mexico City for the MUND Group.