Mexico City Crime Rate Up Despite Crackdown

In the six months since President Ernesto Zedillo appointed a tough army general to crack down on corruption and incompetence in Mexico City’s civilian police force, crime actually increased 10% over the record levels of the same period last year, official statistics show.

And although the murder rate was down 13.8%, violent crime overall was up 8.8% compared with the same period last year, setting yet another record for a city that already had suffered its largest increase in violent crime in 1995.

Official statistics documenting Mexico City’s rising crime, obtained by The Times last week, confirm what analysts, social critics and citizens suspect: Mexico City is less safe today than it was June 8, when its new police chief, army Gen. Enrique Salgado, took over the 27,000-member department, replaced all top civilian police commanders with military officers and promised a tough new regime to reestablish public security.

Each day in this city of about 20 million, 700 people on average report being victimized by crime, the statistics show. In all, during Salgado’s first six months on the job, 126,944 crimes were reported in this city, compared with 115,725 in the same six months last year--a period when severe economic crisis fueled what experts then called the worst crime wave in Mexico City’s history. And, many residents say, the average cop on their beat is still on the take.

Between June and November, there were 60,553 reports of violent crimes--homicide, rape, armed robbery and assaults--compared with 55,618 in the same period of 1995. And the lower homicide numbers notwithstanding, the entire city was shocked earlier this month when a family of five was bludgeoned to death while asleep in one of Mexico City’s wealthiest and best-patrolled neighborhoods.

Salgado’s defenders insist that the six-month time frame is too short to judge his sweeping structural reforms and long-term strategies, which they say will have a positive impact on crime rates in the months and years ahead. And they cite among the general’s major achievements the city’s popular bicycle police patrols, initiated five months ago.

But the statistics appear to bolster concerns voiced by critics when Zedillo fired the capital’s unpopular former chief because of police brutality and incompetence and replaced him with the general.

“It is not through toughness that you fight crime. These military officers do not understand crime, its causes or how to control it,” said Rafael Ruiz Harrell, one of Mexico’s top criminologists and a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City.

“Gen. Salgado got his training by chasing guerrillas from hillside to hillside. This is the worst possible training to confront urban crime,” he said. “Secondly . . . I am afraid of this general trend to militarize the police.”

Fears of Militarization

For Ruiz and other independent analysts, fears about the militarization of Mexico’s civilian institutions deepened earlier this month when Zedillo again turned to the military’s senior ranks to select a federal anti-drug czar: army Gen. Jose Gutierrez Rebollo, who on Dec. 3 was named commissioner of the attorney general’s National Institute for Combating Drugs.

“Military officers are trained to attack the enemy,” Ruiz said. “But you don’t know if a criminal is an enemy until a judge says he was. We’re being judged by the police.”

Fernando Tenorio Tagle, a criminologist at Mexico City’s Autonomous Metropolitan University, agrees. “I think we’re seeing the same trend we’ve seen in Argentina and Chile. We’re going from an authoritarian system to a totalitarian system. You see the militarization all over Mexico--not just in the capital,” he said.

“It’s a dangerous trend. These military officers are not necessarily saints.”

Salgado’s public affairs office did not respond to repeated requests for an interview. But in discussing the military presence in the Police Department, a spokesman who asked not to be identified noted that all but 10 of the 61 police chiefs the city has had since 1910 were military officers.

Ruiz and others counter by asserting that Salgado is the first active-duty military officer to serve in the post in nearly 40 years. The majority of the police chiefs since 1910, Ruiz said, “severed their ties with the military” before they took office.

Of continuing police corruption--a chief target in Salgado’s operating plan--the spokesman added: “It’s not as if you change the police chief today and the corruption stops tomorrow. It’s a step-by-step process.” New training courses designed to professionalize the police will take years--not months--to show results, he said.

One of Salgado’s initiatives--the bicycle patrols--has met with wide, grass-roots approval. When asked in street interviews, citizens almost universally praise the patrol members’ honesty.

But the patrols have had no apparent immediate impact on the city’s still-surging crime rates. And the statistics tell just part of the story of a continuing crime wave that has affected businesses both small and large, changed daily habits and altered tens of thousands of lives in the capital.

For instance, at a time when most families in the nation remain untouched by this year’s modest economic upturn, Mexico’s rich are bulletproofing their luxury cars and vans in large numbers.

Terrifying Testimonial

At a news conference in Mexico City last week, Enrique Paloma Jr., the vice president of the San Antonio-based Executive Armor Corp., said his clients in Mexico increased exponentially this year after one of his customers provided a widely publicized--although terrifying--testimonial.

In September, businessman Antonio Gutierrez Cortina was on his way to work here in his armored Mercedes-Benz when nearly a dozen gunmen ambushed him, fired dozens of rounds at the car and finally fled when they ran out of ammunition. Gutierrez escaped the attack, horrified but unscathed.

Companies offering home alarms and video surveillance also are doing big business, with waiting lists of up to a month, as middle-class homeowners spend the equivalent of hundreds of hard-earned dollars wiring their windows, doors, ceilings and walls into an ever-expanding web of sophisticated security networks.

Insurance companies are also reimbursing victimized corporations and homeowners at unheard-of rates. Paid bodyguards are at a premium.

And most of the thousands of taxi drivers who are among the city’s most visible--and vulnerable--targets as they ply the dangerous streets continue to work in fear. It’s rare to find a cabdriver who hasn’t been robbed at gunpoint, knifepoint or even pencil-point-to-the-throat this year. It isn’t unusual to find one who has been robbed more than twice.

“The bicycle police help a little, but when the assailants come, they’re never around,” taxi dispatcher Pedro de la Cruz said. “Where are they? Who knows?”

De la Cruz and other cabdrivers also say that police shakedowns--known as mordidas, or bites--have been just as frequent since Salgado took command and announced almost immediately the firing of senior civilian commanders who were part of a high-level system of police corruption called the Brotherhood.

“I’ve been driving here in this city for 43 years, and since forever, they have said they’re going to stop la mordida,” De la Cruz said. “But it’s the same. It never stops. This general [Salgado] is the same as all the others.”

Rafael Macial, the owner of a small tailoring shop in the city’s Colonia del Valle neighborhood who said he has been robbed four times in recent years, agrees.

“When they robbed my cloth . . . the patrolmen came, but I didn’t have any money. They were going to charge a fee to file a complaint, and I also would have to pay two patrolmen to watch my shop while I was gone filing it, so I said, ‘Naw, it isn’t worth it.’ ”

Asked if police corruption has eased in the last six months, he said: “At least the bicycle cops are honest. They don’t ask for a cent.”

Lourdes Roman, the owner of a nearby cafe, was last robbed in late October. She too praised the bicycle officers as more honest but said they were nowhere to be found when the armed gunmen burst into the cafe and robbed her customers.

“To have better security, we just contracted out with a private company,” she said, pointing to a TV camera hanging from the ceiling. “This really works. The private security officers come right away.

“It cost us 5,000 pesos [about $700] to install, and we pay a monthly fee. But it’s worth it, because the thieves see this and go someplace else.”

Violent Reminder

For many in the capital, the starkest reminder of the city’s surging violence--which led the evening news here recently--came when police detectives found prominent writer Yolanda Figueroa, her husband--former police operative Fernando Balderas--and their three children beaten to death in their home in the posh Pedregal district.

The police didn’t even discover the crime until two days after it was committed; they found the bodies after they traced the family’s abandoned car. And a full week after they stumbled onto the grisly scene, police reported that their best lead is lying unconscious in a hospital bed.

Detectives have yet to find hard evidence linking those killings to Mexico’s powerful drug gangs--the topic of a book by Figueroa published in August. Nor have they determined whether the target was, instead, her husband, who had been charged with extortion and rape and was suspected to have had links with the drug trade himself.

The latest news reports indicate that the police are hoping the family’s driver, who was beaten unconscious and found at the crime scene, will emerge from a coma and testify.

Helena Sundman of The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.

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Dangerous Times

Number of crimes reported per every 100,000 Mexico City residents:

1996*: 2,932

* estimated

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A Year of Fear

The crime rate in Mexico City is jumping, according to statistics.

1995 vs. 1996

Total number of crimes reported by month:

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1995 1996 June 18,958 20,191 July 18,288 21,863 August 19,271 21,023 September 19,366 20,998 October 20,329 22,176 November 19,513 20,693 Total 115,725 126,944

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