Mexico Under Siege

MARCHING THE POLICE OFF TO JAIL

As Mexico's drug war rages, officials are making an unprecedented
push to clean up the nation's notoriously corrupt law enforcement.

The lie-detector team brought in by Mexico's top cop was supposed to
help clean up the country's long-troubled police. There was just one
problem: Most of its members themselves didn't pass, and a supervisor
was rigging results to make sure others did.

When public safety chief Genaro Garcia Luna found out, he canned the
team, all 50 to 60 members.

"He fired everybody," a senior U.S. law enforcement official said.

But the episode shows how difficult it will be for Mexico to reverse
a legacy of police corruption that has tainted whole departments,
shattered people's faith in law enforcement and compromised one of
society's most basic institutions.

President Felipe Calderon's 3-year-old drug offensive has laid bare
the extent to which crime syndicates have infiltrated police agencies
at virtually every level. By blurring the line between crime fighters
and gangsters, the rampant graft stands as one of the biggest
impediments to the Calderon campaign.

Amid the raging drug war, Mexican officials are trying to fix the
police through a hurried nationwide effort that includes better
screening and training for candidates on a scale never tried here before.

At the heart of the overhaul is a "new police model" that stresses
technical sophistication and trustworthiness and that treats police
work as a professional career, not a fallback job.

In steps that are groundbreaking for Mexico, cadets and veteran cops
are being forced to bare their credit card and bank accounts, submit
to polygraph tests and even reveal their family members to screeners
to prove they have no shady connections.

Across Mexico, hundreds of state and municipal officers have been
purged from their departments and scores more arrested on charges of
colluding with drug gangs.

But Mexico has a habit of trading in one corrupt police agency for
another, and it will be a long, uphill struggle to create a law
enforcement system that can confront crime and gain the trust of
ordinary Mexicans. Until then, crooked cops undermine efforts to
strengthen the rule of law and defeat drug cartels.

"If you don't have a safe environment to conduct investigations, then
it's going to be extremely difficult to capture the narcos," said the
U.S. law enforcement official, who was not authorized to speak
publicly. "If you have state police that are corrupt and constantly
feeding your movements, investigative movements, to the bad guys,
you're not going to get anywhere."

Vigilante Fears

Some people fear that the soaring drug violence and mistrust toward
police could spark the formation of death squads or vigilante groups.
Already there have been suspicions, though no proof, that dozens of
killings have been committed by people taking the law into their own
hands. More than 13,800 people have been slain since Calderon
declared war on the drug cartels, according to unofficial news media tallies.

Although Mexican federal police are in charge of the crackdown
against the cartels, it is at the state and municipal levels where
law enforcement is most vulnerable, officials and analysts say. Drug
gangs exploit hometown ties, dangle bribes and threaten the lives of
officers and their relatives to turn police into a kind of fifth column.

Poorly paid state and municipal officers are often on the payroll of
drug smugglers, passing tips, providing muscle or looking the other
way when illegal drugs are shipped through their turf.

Criminal infiltration of local departments has worsened as the
Mexican political system becomes less centralized and as narcotics
traffickers delve into offshoot enterprises, such as kidnapping,
theft and extortion, that under Mexican law fall within the
jurisdiction of state authorities.

At times, local police have faced off in tense showdowns against
Mexican federal police and soldiers. The mistrust often prompts
federal authorities to keep their state and municipal counterparts in
the dark, aggravating interagency frictions.

"There is a disorganized police fighting against organized crime,"
said Guillermo Zepeda, a police expert at the Center of Research for
Development in Mexico City.

In the western state of Michoacan, 10 municipal officers were
arrested in the slayings of 12 federal agents there in July. In the
Gulf of Mexico port city of Veracruz, authorities investigating the
June disappearance of customs administrator Francisco Serrano
detained nearly 50 municipal officers. The then-chief of municipal
police for the seaport and three traffic officers were later charged
with his kidnapping. Serrano is still missing.

The profound flaws of Mexico's police, who are frequently ill
trained, poorly equipped and unhappy in their work, are the most
visible emblems of how the drug offensive is straining the nation's
broader system of law and order.

An opaque and creaky court system groans under the weight of
thousands of new drug war cases, and a number of prosecutors, defense
lawyers and judges have been slain. Meanwhile, prison officials
scramble to make room for the surge of detainees, many of them violent.

President's Plan

Calderon's administration has laid out a strategy to expand and
revamp the federal police and to force states, cities and towns to
modernize and clean up their forces through such tools as polygraphs
and drug tests. Standing in the way are many years of graft, turf
jealousies, budget constraints and a drug underworld that has greeted
every government move with greater viciousness.

Garcia Luna, the public safety chief, has seized the moment to hire
thousands of federal cadets, who under the strict new standards must
hold at least a university degree. Despite the stiff requirements,
the federal force has grown to 32,264 officers, from about 25,000 a year ago.

At a sleek federal campus here in the north-central state of San Luis
Potosi, Mexican officials are rushing to turn 9,000 college graduates
into federal investigators. The school boasts state-of-the-art
lecture halls, computer rooms, workout facilities, a driver-training
track and shooting range.

The U.S. government supports the push to expand and professionalize
Mexico's federal forces, lending dozens of police instructors as part
of a $1.4-billion aid package for Mexico known as the Merida Initiative.

Federal cadets, dressed in white polo shirts and smart bluejeans,
study criminal procedure, interview techniques, criminology and
intelligence. The school has graduated 2,234 investigators since
June; more than 1,000 fresh recruits began the six-week course last month.

An even more daunting challenge waits in states and cities, which are
home to the vast majority of police in Mexico -- more than 370,000
officers. In the last two years, the federal government has relied on
budget incentives to prod local departments to vet officer candidates
and boost salaries, now often as low as $90 a week.

Garcia Luna has gone so far as to call for eliminating the country's
2,022 municipal agencies, widely seen as the weakest link in Mexican
law enforcement, and folding them into police departments of the 31
states and Mexico City, which is formally a federal district.

The proposal is controversial, probably requiring a change in the
Mexican Constitution and facing opposition from municipal officials
from across the political spectrum who are reluctant to yield parts
of their fiefdoms.

Some analysts warn that such a plan could make it easier for criminal
groups to bribe police.

"Concentrating power at the state level runs the risk of creating a
more hierarchical, 'one-stop-shopping' system of high-level
corruption," said David Shirk, a University of San Diego professor
and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

States and municipalities have moved inconsistently to clean up their
forces. In some places, such as the northern city of Chihuahua,
police are gradually adopting U.S.-style law enforcement standards,
such as those promoted by the private Commission on Accreditation for
Law Enforcement Agencies.

Many analysts are encouraged to see local agencies spending more to
improve training, equipment and wages, but see scant improvement on corruption.

"You can train police all day long, but if they're still corrupt,
then it doesn't really help," said Daniel Sabet, who teaches at
Georgetown University and studies Mexican law enforcement. "The
corruption and organized-crime infiltration has not changed."

Pay-Based Strategy

Here in San Luis Potosi state, whose police operation is praised by
the U.S. as among a handful in Mexico that are sound, officials
raised minimum pay to about $700 a month and now offer bonuses of
nearly two months' pay to officers who perform well and pass
twice-yearly vetting.

Cesareo Carvajal, public safety director until the state government
changed hands in September, said he fired about 150 of 3,000 officers
during his two-year term.

The agency also bought radio equipment, new weaponry and police
vehicles, and outfitted officers with redesigned uniforms to create
an updated image.

At a state-run police academy where San Luis Potosi's next generation
of police is being molded, the rhythmic thump-thump of boots on
pavement echoed on a recent morning as officers-in-training practiced marching.

Cadets here say a new, trustworthy breed of Mexican police is
possible -- but that it will take time to build.

As part of a stricter selection process, recruit Hiram Vinas was
hooked to a lie detector and asked about any past scrapes with the
law. Screeners peeked into his bank account and rummaged in his
family's background.

Vinas, 24, wearing a blue windbreaker and buzz cut, said the rigorous
scrutiny could help win over Mexican society.

"They are applying tests and evaluations now that had never been done
in our country," he said. "I think over time, people will learn to
trust the police again."