Reform Efforts Prove Difficult : New Tales of Corruption Tarnish Mexico’s Police

The reputation of Mexico’s police forces, already discredited by tales of corruption and abuse, has been further damaged by continuing disclosures of criminal activity among the ostensible defenders of law and order.

President Miguel de la Madrid, who came to office promising to clean up corruption, is finding the task much more difficult than he expected, according to some officials.

Police corruption and criminal activity are so widespread that the question of political payoffs and protection for this activity has become difficult to ignore. This poses a serious political problem for De la Madrid.

Other Developments

Much of the attention in recent weeks has focused on the involvement of police agents in the abduction and murder of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique S. Camarena in February, but there have been these other developments as well:

--The governor of the state of Morelos, just south of Mexico City, fired the entire state judicial police force in April, along with the state attorney general, because of numerous citizen complaints of abuse and corruption.

--Federal prosecutors recently accused six members of a plainclothes police agency of being part of a gang of thieves that preyed on the luggage of arriving international passengers at the Mexico City airport. The six belonged to the General Directorate of Political and Social Investigation of the Ministry of the Interior. Other members of the gang included members and former members of the Federal Security Directorate.

--De la Madrid announced a “reorganization” of the nation’s police forces that will eliminate a number of agencies that allowed individuals with little training or experience to wear a badge and carry a gun. These include groups such as the “forest police” and the “river police.”

Earlier in the year, Mexicans were titillated by the story of Alfredo Rios Galeana, who for nearly a decade controlled the so-called Radio Car Battalion of the State of Mexico. This police agency, disbanded in 1982, committed crimes and extortion throughout central Mexico with impunity, prosecutors charged afterward, and Rio Galeana himself was formally accused in January of committing 13 bank robberies and holding up a railroad payroll office.

Little to Say

To all of this, Mexican officials express a sort of embarrassed dismay. De la Madrid himself has had little to say in recent months on the topic of police corruption.

Francisco Rojas, the accountant whom De la Madrid named to the Cabinet as the chief of his “moral renovation” program--officially, the controller-general of the federal government--said in a recent interview that he has concentrated on eliminating bureaucratic corruption.

He noted that De la Madrid had never promised to wipe out corruption entirely.

“We are aware that one of the major criticisms of the moral renovation program is that police continue to act as extortionists,” Rojas said. “It’s true. Well, we are going to reduce this activity, make it smaller, but don’t let anyone believe this is going to be a country of saints, because that is not possible in this world.”

Last summer, the undersecretary of the Ministry of the Interior said the government intended to upgrade the nation’s police agencies, to find a higher caliber of recruits and offer improved training.

In a speech at a police academy, the official, Jorge Carrillo Olea, said the government had to concede that Mexican police often “acted outside the law” and were involved in “corruption and arbitrary activity.”

At the time, the speech was considered remarkable because it was one of the most direct and forthright acknowledgments ever made by a ranking Mexican official of the shortcomings of Mexico’s police.

The discrepancy between words and action became evident months later, however, when the investigation of the Camarena case led to accusations of heavy police involvement in narcotics trafficking.

The Camarena disclosures--that police officials in sensitive positions were close to the drug traffickers charged with kidnaping and murdering the U.S. drug agent--have shaken De la Madrid’s government, calling into question the credibility of his “moral renovation” program and raising the specter of political corruption.

“I don’t think they ever realized how serious the problem was, how serious it remains,” said a former official of the Interior Ministry familiar with the operations of Mexico’s security apparatus.

Key Agency Decimated

One key security agency, the Federal Security Directorate, a plainclothes force whose members function as a combination of secret police and political police, has been decimated by the scandals.

At the moment, said the former official, the agency has about 400 vacancies--about 10% of its total manpower--because of resignations and dismissals stemming from the Camarena case.

U.S. Ambassador John Gavin recently told a group of visiting businessmen from Dallas that the arrests that have taken place so far are only “the tip of the iceberg.” Later, he told reporters that that those waiting for the other shoe to fall would have to wait a long time because “this is a centipede.”

But embassy officials said this did not mean the ambassador was privy to specific information, particularly in regard to the possible involvement of persons close to De la Madrid.

At the same time, there is virtually no U.S. or Mexican official who will say in private that he believes that the multi-billion dollar Mexican narcotics business could have been operated without political protection.

U.S. officials say that the two Mexican drug kingpins under arrest in the Camarena case, Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca, do not have the formal education or organizational skills to mastermind such an elaborate scheme. Caro Quintero attended only the first grade in a rural school in the state of Sinaloa and Fonseca dropped out in the fifth grade.