Troops to stay in streets until police improve, Mexican official says

The army will continue to be involved in public safety operations across Mexico until municipal police departments do a better job, Defense Secretary Salvador Cienfuegos said in an interview published Monday.

“Until the police departments are trained and ready to deal with crime, we’ll have to be in the streets,” Cienfuegos told the Milenio newspaper.

The defense secretary said that in the 10 years since former President Felipe Calderon launched the “war on drugs,” soldiers had learned some important lessons “for fighting crime.”

Cienfuegos acknowledged that the army had been the “subject of criticism” and not just because of the video posted on social networks last month showing security forces members holding a woman, who is being held at a prison, at gunpoint and putting a bag over her head.

The defense secretary had to make a public apology after the video’s release.

“We should not and cannot deal with illegality with more illegality,” Cienfuegos said, adding that criticism of the military comes “every day.”

The defense secretary, however, defended the work of soldiers, who have played a role in “80, 90, 98 percent of everything that has been done against crime.”

Complaints and human rights charges against the army have fallen “in an extraordinary way,” totaling “just a little over 500” in 2015, Cienfuegos said.

The army has cooperated in the investigation into the disappearance of 43 education students on Sept. 26, 2014, at the hands of corrupt police officers working for drug traffickers in the southern state of Guerrero, the defense secretary said.

The InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights, or IACHR, Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, whose mandate to help investigate the case ended last Saturday, were unable to interview soldiers from the 27th Battalion stationed in Iguala, a city in Guerrero, where the students disappeared.

“At no time have we failed to attend all the meetings set up by the AG’s office. What didn’t happen was having foreigners question Mexican soldiers,” Cienfuegos said, adding that the law was followed in the case.

“All the soldiers who may have been identified and cited in this matter” met with federal prosecutors, and “up to 40 soldiers have gone up to four times to give statements,” the defense secretary said.