MEXICO'S COPS SEEK UPGRADE

Senior Official With a Storied Past Tries to Emulate FBI

MEXICO CITY -- When pressed about why Mexico is struggling in its
battle with illegal-drug cartels, Genaro Garcia Luna, the nation's
top police official, likes to put his inquisitors on the spot with a
question: Would you encourage your child to become a Mexican cop?

The answer, he says, is often no.

The reputation of Mexican police is so poor that even Mr. Garcia
Luna, a stocky, frenetic man with close-cropped hair, would have
given the same answer not long ago. As a young domestic intelligence
officer at Mexico's spy agency in the 1990s, he says, he would have
been "offended" if anyone referred to him as a cop.

Now, it is his job to change all that. Mexican President Felipe
Calderon tapped the 41-year-old to rebuild Mexico's police from
scratch amid a drug war that's claimed at least 13,000 lives since
Mr. Calderon took power nearly three years ago. The centerpiece of
Mr. Garcia Luna's plan: persuading college-educated sons and
daughters of the middle class to become part of a new, professional
police corps.

"We've had a corrupt, uneducated police force, without a budget,
driving stolen vehicles and basically decomposing for 40 years," says
Mr. Garcia Luna, an engineer by training who was known in his younger
days for tailing suspects on his motorcycle and personally leading
raids on kidnapping rings. "I want to break historical inertias."

Mexico's future may depend on it. Unable to rely on the police, Mr.
Calderon has deployed 45,000 soldiers to confront drug gangs by
patrolling hot spots, giving cities such as Ciudad Juarez across the
border from El Paso, Texas, the feel of war zones. But experts say
military occupations are a short-term fix because traffickers
ultimately scurry to set up shop somewhere else. Corralling drug
gangs for the long term requires the kind of deep detective work that
can uncover money transfers, drug shipments and bribe payments.

Mexico is seeking the capability to pull off the kind of operation
announced Thursday by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder: the
near-simultaneous, multi-U.S. city arrests of 300 members of the
Mexican "La Familia" drug cartel, which has trafficked a flood of
methamphetamine into the U.S. while terrorizing Mexico's Michoacan state.

While this week's arrests were a U.S. operation, La Familia is a also
key front in Mr. Garcia Luna's drug war. Responding to the July
arrest of a top La Familia boss in Michoacan, the group captured,
tortured and killed a dozen of Mr. Garcia Luna's federal agents --
some of whom were working with the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration on investigations.

"This is not a one-country problem, and solving it will take more
than a one-country solution," Mr. Holder said Thursday. "La Familia's
attacks against Mexican law enforcement officials only make the
valiant effort of our friends and partners across the border more heroic."

Mr. Garcia Luna has modeled his new Federal Police force after the
U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and other international
agencies, with modern equipment, technology and enhanced
investigative powers like wiretaps. His plan is to gradually replace
the army on the drug war's front lines with this two-and-a-half
year-old force of around 40,000 cops. For now, the army is still in
place, and the government won't give a timeline for pulling the troops out.

The challenge is enormous. The average Mexican cop never made it past
the eighth grade. Some can't read or write. Many Mexicans' only
contact with a beat cop comes when they pay $5 bribes to get out of
traffic stops. In some cities like Tijuana, well over half the local
cops have recently failed lie-detector tests, according to one former
city official familiar with the tests. In 2007, local cops in the
Pacific resort town of Rosarito ambushed a new police chief drafted
to help clean things up. He lived, but his bodyguard didn't.

Mr. Garcia Luna's supporters, including senior officials in the
Calderon government and a group of businessmen he helped when members
of their families were kidnapped over the years, see him as a Mexican
Eliot Ness, the 1930s-era Chicago crime fighter. They say he is
risking his life -- four of his top aides have already been gunned
down -- to keep the nation from disintegrating into a narco-state.
They point out that so far his Federal Police have seized nearly 30
tons of cocaine and arrested more than 300 prominent traffickers.

Critics, including some opposition lawmakers, deride him as a wannabe
J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's first director, and say his efforts are
plagued by incompetence and ethical lapses. Like Mr. Hoover, they
say, he has used strong-arm tactics against critics, trumping up
legal charges against them to compel their silence. In his zeal for
boosting the image of the Federal Police, he admitted to staging a
kidnap rescue for the benefit of television cameras. During a
raucous, eight-hour appearance before congress in September,
opposition lawmakers blasted him for failing to keep Mexico's murder
rate from soaring this year.

A rash of scandals among those close to him hasn't helped Mr. Garcia
Luna build credibility. Though he has never been charged with a
criminal act or implicated in a corruption scandal, some of his
senior aides have. Last year, his top antidrug commander was arrested
and charged with helping a cartel. He is in jail awaiting trial.
Another officer in Mr. Garcia Luna's anti-kidnap squad was arrested
for allegedly organizing phony police checkpoints to abduct victims
on behalf of a kidnapping gang. She is being held for possible trial
by Mexico City authorities.

"Garcia Luna should resign because at this point his credibility has
been so damaged that it is threatening his whole project," says
Alberto Islas, who runs a Mexico City-based consulting firm that has
worked on drug-war issues for the Calderon government. "The debate
has become about him, rather than the police institution he wants to build."

Mr. Garcia Luna says he is clean, and he says the fact that his aides
were arrested shows that corruption is no longer tolerated. He says
all arrests he has made have been on legitimate warrants. He compares
the state of Mexican police to that of 1970s New York, which inspired
movies like "Serpico," where Al Pacino plays a lone clean cop in sea
of corruption. His voice fills with vehemence when his record is
challenged. "There is an end to this film," he says. "We're going to
do this, you'll see. Remember me."
The Bribe or the Bullet

Much of the skepticism about whether Mr. Garcia Luna can succeed is
rooted in the history of Mexican law enforcement. The government has
announced plans to reform its police so many times over the decades
that it is hard for some to take new attempts seriously.

Popular wisdom holds that eventually, law-enforcement officials in
Mexico must choose between plata, the money of a bribe, or plomo, the
lead of an assassin's bullet. In 1997, Mexico's antidrug czar, Jesus
Gutierrez Rebollo, was caught on a drug-gang payroll, and is now behind bars.

"What Gutierrez Rebollo taught us is that you just never know," says
a senior Calderon administration official who supports Mr. Garcia
Luna. "But at the end of the day, you have to trust the guys you've
got, or else you have nothing."

Mr. Garcia Luna's reliability is a concern for U.S. security
officials as the two nations draw closer in the drug fight. The U.S.
has begun transferring $400 million in drug aid for Mexico, by far
the biggest commitment since the Gutierrez Rebollo case shattered
U.S. confidence. Around half of this money will flow to Mr. Garcia
Luna, mainly in the form of Black Hawk helicopters and other equipment.

To give the new federal force a fighting chance, Mr. Garcia Luna has
provided officers with souped-up patrol cars, body armor, AR-15
assault rifles and an array of technology including surveillance
balloons that hover above cities. He guards these assets jealously,
and senior Federal Police officers say he gets particularly upset
when an officer crashes one of the fleet of Dodge Charger squad cars
he acquired.

For the first time, Mexico is putting together a national database of
vehicle registrations, arrest warrants, jail inmates and other data,
a crucial tool for nabbing fugitives.

Of course, all the fancy technology in the world can't take down drug
gangs if the police themselves remain corrupt and inefficient. That
is where Mr. Garcia Luna's plan to recruit middle-class college
graduates comes in. Many in this demographic have a hard time finding
good jobs in a sluggish economy where the highest paying positions
still tend to go to the elites. And though Mexican law enforcement
has always favored brawn over brains, recruiting primarily from the
lower classes, Mr. Garcia Luna says the world's best police agencies
actually have it the other way around: "When I first visited the FBI,
I realized most everyone there had master's degrees. Why can't we do that?"

The experiment began in earnest in June as Mr. Garcia Luna began
recruiting thousands of college grads from top universities to form a
new division of investigative agents at the Federal Police. Around
1,300 have since graduated from two months of course work at a new
police academy in the town of San Luis Potosi and are now receiving
three months of field training. Mr. Garcia Luna says he plans to hire
around 10,000 new investigators.

The rest of the officers will be required to have high-school
diplomas -- a standard that previous national forces haven't imposed
- -- and will go through similar field training.

A Clear Career Path

It is the investigative unit in particular that Mr. Garcia Luna hopes
will spearhead a fundamental change in the way Mexican police
operate. Until now, police have built cases mainly around confessions
of witnesses, a situation ripe for accusations of coercion. Instead,
these new officers will build cases based on collecting evidence,
such as phone records.

To attract them, the base pay of a federal police agent has been
raised by more than 30% to around 16,000 pesos per month, or about
$1,200, more than many white-collar jobs pay. All recruits get access
to cut-rate mortgages, health care and a retirement plan.

That was enough to convince Juan Pablo Viay, a 35-year-old father of
two who was recently laid off from his job at Chrysler's Mexico City
corporate headquarters. Now he is training at the police academy and
hopes to apply his white-collar skills, like analyzing spreadsheets,
to crime fighting. With his wife and parents worried for his safety,
he is pinning his hopes on an analyst job that would keep him largely
out of the line of fire.

The increased pay alone won't be enough to stem the tide of
corruption, says Mr. Garcia Luna, since a drug gang can always offer
more money. That's why new recruits are tested to gauge their
susceptibility to bribes, including a lie-detector test and a
follow-up a visit to the recruit's home. More broadly, by offering an
upward career path, cops have an incentive to stay on the straight
and narrow, says Mr. Garcia Luna.

For Elizabeth Mendoza, a 29-year-old Federal Police recruit, the
decision to sign up was a mix of economic need and a desire to do
something to help her country. She quit her job as an administrator
at a truck manufacturer after seeing a TV advertisement for the
Federal Police that promised merit-driven promotions.

These days, Ms. Mendoza, a married mother of one, gets up before dawn
for a 6 a.m. assembly of recruits in a large courtyard at the Police
Academy. Standing at attention as the sun rises, she and other
recruits sing the national anthem and a new Federal Police hymn --
commissioned by Mr. Garcia Luna in a bid, he says, to build esprit de corps.

Along with hundreds of other aspiring cadets clad in a uniform of
jeans and white shirts, Ms. Mendoza attends classes on conducting
investigations, collecting evidence and giving testimony, as well as
shooting weapons and cuffing suspects. She is surrounded by recruits
with a similar economic and social background. Eighty percent have
never held a weapon before.

More than half of Ms. Mendoza's instructors hail from the U.S.,
Spain, Colombia and other nations where agents often have
university-level educations. The presence of overseas instructors
sends a powerful message for young Mexican recruits who lack
homegrown models of professional police, says Academy Director
Severino Cartagena.

On a recent Thursday along a main highway in Ciudad Juarez, Jose
Menera, a 34-year-old chemical engineer turned Federal Police
officer, nabbed a man driving a load of marijuana in a hidden
compartment in his gas tank. The young officer did it from the
air-conditioned cab of a high-tech roadside scanning machine
purchased under Mr. Garcia Luna's overhaul.
Catching the 'Ear Cutter'

Mr. Garcia Luna took an unlikely path into police work. Raised in a
working-class enclave of Mexico City, he was a 19-year-old mechanical
engineering student when he took a job with a new Mexican spy agency,
the CISEN. He rose fast, and was sent for training exercises with the
FBI and at police agencies in Spain and elsewhere.

Among his first assignments was tracking an urban guerrilla group
that specialized in kidnapping. His defining moment came in 1998,
when he assembled a covert squad that captured Daniel Arizmendi, a
former cop turned leader of a violent kidnapping ring. Mr. Arizmendi
had become a national terror, popularly called the "Ear Cutter" for
his practice of slicing off victims' ears and sending them to
families to pressure them to pay ransom.

In 2001, newly elected President Vicente Fox tapped him to head up
the Federal Judicial Police. Arriving at the Judicial Police
headquarters in a rough Mexico City barrio, he found crumbling
offices reeking of sewage. The few beat-up computers on desks were
not connected by a network. Bullet proof glass separated the chief's
office from the police themselves. Some officers drove stolen cars
and employed freelance thugs called "madrinas" to enforce their will
on the streets.

Mr. Garcia Luna tried to modernize the force, culling nearly half of
the 6,000 officers after they flunked lie-detector tests or other
aptitude measures. But his plans to form a new force, the Federal
Investigative Agency, fell apart after many of the fired police went
to court and won reinstatement. Soon AFI agents were being implicated
in crimes.

He got another chance. In 2006, Mr. Calderon named him to the cabinet
level post of Public Security Secretary. Starting from scratch, Mr.
Garcia Luna took the best men from the AFI and made them the core of
the new Federal Police.

Even if Mr. Garcia Luna proves he is clean, his biggest obstacle may
be time. Mexican politicians are not big on institutional continuity,
meaning the Federal Police could be dismantled and Mr. Garcia Luna
pushed out the door after elections in 2012.