Once Superheroes, Mexico’s Elite Police Fall From Grace

Look, up in the sky! It’s the federales, rappelling down tall buildings to thwart the criminales.

At least that was the portrayal in slick television spots touting Mexico’s Federal Preventive Police force and its Spiderman-like skills. Conceived six years ago as an elite corps of college-educated, highly paid young officers, it boasted of being insulated from corruption and committed to an ideal: “Intelligence and Discipline Against Delinquency.”

That self-promotional image went up in flames last month. A mob surrounded and disarmed three of the force’s undercover agents, apparently mistaking them for kidnappers, and then burned two of them to death as TV news cameras rolled. Backup squads didn’t arrive for 3 1/2 hours -- the reality of a police force incapable of protecting even its own.

The gray-uniformed force, known by its Spanish initials, PFP, is now under federal investigation, the latest problem child of Mexico’s beleaguered law enforcement system. Mexicans say rampant crime and weak rule of law have undermined faith in the democratic transition underway since President Vicente Fox’s election in 2000 ended seven decades of single-party domination.

Calling crime fighting “the most difficult battle” of his term, Fox fired the commissioner and seven other top officials of the force last week and ordered its restructuring. “We will not stop until we have completely cleaned up the police forces,” Fox said.

Mexicans say they have seen numerous such “cleanups” in recent years but little sustained headway against violent crime, official corruption and impunity.

“The system is so rotten that it no longer matters whom they put in as the maximum chief,” said Tania Lara Ortiz, a 27-year-old accountant who was assaulted and robbed on a Mexico City bus this month.

The PFP started with high hopes of gaining the respect of the crime-weary citizenry. Most Mexicans live at the mercy of municipal police officers, who are generally corrupt and poorly trained. The last decade has seen the steady growth of seven separate federal police agencies with limited powers and specialized tasks.

The largest is the PFP. Its officers guard oil fields, ports and other federal installations, and enforce federal laws such as those against drug trafficking and illegal weapons. They are empowered to step in for local crime prevention when invited by local authorities, and demand for those services has risen sharply in recent years.

But that pressure, veterans of the force said, undermined its effectiveness and clean-cop identity. In interviews and testimony before the inquiry into the Nov. 23 lynching, officers and former officers said political imperatives to produce quick anti-crime victories had obliged the force to draw more and more of its 14,000 members from other police agencies and the Mexican military.

The fusion created factionalism and operational disarray within the force, these critics said, while its military leaders promoted a culture of secrecy that fostered corruption and made the force less accountable to civilian monitoring and authority.

The mob violence that exposed the flaws of the force was only the latest in a series of outrages this year, fostering an impression that Mexico is mired in lawlessness.

In Ciudad Juarez, for example, a group of local and state police officers is under investigation in the killings of scores of women. The entire criminal investigations force in Morelos state was suspended over suspicion that officers served as escorts for planeloads of cocaine into Cuernavaca, a weekend getaway for Mexico City’s rich. At least 31 members of an army intelligence and paratroop battalion, enlisted to fight drug cartels along the Texas border, have deserted and formed their own violent drug-smuggling gang.

In Cancun this month, the state representatives of the federal attorney general’s office and Mexico’s FBI counterpart were arrested on suspicion of protecting or working for rival drug gangs blamed for nine recent slayings in the Caribbean resort.

Fox argues that such scandals have come to light because he is fighting corruption rather than ignoring it as his predecessors were wont to do. More than 32,000 people involved in the drug trade have been arrested since 2000, he says, and 51 kidnapping rings have been broken.

“We have managed to contain the growth of overall crime and to reduce slightly the incidence of federal crimes,” Fox said last week.

But raw numbers mean little to victims.

Studies indicate that about 80% of all crime in Mexico goes unreported, largely because people have little faith in the justice system and, in many cases, know or suspect that police themselves are the culprits. After a wave of killings and kidnappings, about 250,000 people marched in June into downtown Mexico City demanding more accountability from law enforcement officials.

“The state has not learned how to modernize its institutions and gain the trust of its citizens,” said Ernesto Lopez Portillo, director of the Institute for Security and Democracy, one of many private organizations that sponsored the march. “It spends its resources on more force, more repression, more weapons, more technology, but this does not make anyone feel more protected.”

The PFP was supposed to be different, and at first it was.

It required recruits to be university-educated and put them through four months of rigorous physical, psychological and classroom training. Hundreds of idealistic young men and women, believing that a law enforcement career could be respectable, signed up. They earn better pay -- nearly $800 a month -- than local police, plus bonuses for good performance and clean records.

Impressed by the results, governors and mayors began requesting PFP officers to handle law enforcement in some communities, replacing corrupt local cops. Soon the academy could not turn out cadets fast enough.

Omar Fayad, the force’s first commander, said it changed radically after his departure in 2000. Eager to expand the ranks and show swift results against crime, the government brought in officers on loan from the army, navy and federal highway police, including many without college degrees. A navy officer took charge, replacing Fayad, a lawyer who is now a member of Congress.

Academy graduates today number 1,785, just 12% of the force.

“Many of the original ideals got lost,” Fayad said. “The PFP became an imitation of a paramilitary body, with regulations that more resemble those of the army than that of a citizen police force.”

Corruption and secrecy have taken root. Several officers are under investigation for alleged kidnapping, extortion, trafficking of illegal immigrants and acceptance of kickbacks on the purchase of vehicles and bulletproof vests. Army and navy personnel on loan to the force remain subject to military hierarchy and justice, making any crimes they commit off-limits to civilian review.

A bigger problem, say Fayad and other PFP veterans, is a dysfunctional command structure that may have contributed to the delay in responding to last month’s mob violence. They say the force has become a coalition of factions with rival chains of command reflecting its diverse makeup.

Tensions among factions spilled into the open after the killings of the undercover agents in a poor neighborhood on the edge of Mexico City. Hundreds of officers, mostly academy graduates, staged street demonstrations and made strike threats until Fox removed their superiors from the navy, who they said were unsuited for leadership on land.

Citizens groups lobbying for better law enforcement insist that Fox go a step further and reverse a trend toward relying on the military to police Mexico.

But Fox has been hamstrung by an opposition-dominated Congress and unable to push through most of his promised reforms.

The citizen groups say he could act on his own to institute accountability procedures that would open police agencies’ budgets, operations, promotions, crime statistics and abuse-of-authority cases to civilian review.

“Civil society does not know anything about what goes on inside the police until a scandal becomes too big to hide,” anti-crime crusader Lopez Portillo said. “Until last month, we knew little about the PFP except for the propaganda the PFP put on TV about its own mystique.”