El Centro

Mexico’s Police: Many Reforms, Little Progress

8 May 2014

The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) has released a new, comprehensive report, titled Mexico’s Police: Many Reforms, Little Progress, which provides an overview of Mexican police reform efforts over the past two decades.  The report examines police corruption, human rights abuses and the flawed history of police reform. The importance of policing in light of Mexico's on-going security crisis is highlighted. An analysis of police abuses and human rights violations and US security assistance is provided.

Mexico Is Not Colombia: Alternative Historical Analogies for Responding to the Challenge of Violent Drug-Trafficking Organizations by Christopher Paul, Colin P. Clarke, Chad C. Serena, RAND Corporation

Abstract: Drug-related violence has become a very serious problem in Mexico. Of particular concern to U.S. policymakers, violent drug-trafficking organizations produce, transship, and deliver tens of billions of dollars' worth of narcotics into the United States annually. The activities of these organizations are not confined to drug trafficking; they extend to such criminal enterprises as human trafficking, weapon trafficking, kidnapping, money laundering, extortion, bribery, and racketeering. Then, there is the violence: Recent incidents have included assassinations of politicians and judges; attacks against rival organizations, associated civilians, and the police and other security forces; and seemingly random violence against innocent bystanders. Despite the scope of the threat to Mexico's security, these groups are not well understood, and optimal strategies to combat them have not been identified. Comparison between Mexico and Colombia is a tempting and frequently made analogy and source for policy recommendations. A review of these approaches, combined with a series of historical case studies, offers a more thorough comparative assessment. Regions around the world have faced similar challenges and may hold lessons for Mexico. One point is clear, however: Mexico is not Colombia. In fact, Mexico is not particularly like any other historical case characterized by "warlordism," resource insurgency, ungoverned spaces, and organized crime. Despite the lack of a perfectly analogous case, Mexico stands to benefit from historical lessons and efforts that were correlated with the greatest improvements in countries facing similar challenges. A companion volume, Mexico Is Not Colombia: Alternative Historical Analogies for Responding to the Challenge of Violent Drug-Trafficking Organizations — Supporting Case Studies, presents in-depth profiles of each of these conflicts.

Read the key findings, recommendations, and download the entire research report here.

Mexican Drug Cartel Enforcers Torture Local Men by Paul McEnroe, Star Tribune

Three enforcers hired by Mexico’s biggest drug cartel flew from Los Angeles to Minnesota last month, kidnapped two local teenagers, and then tortured them for hours at a house in St. Paul in an effort to recover stolen drugs, according to court documents reviewed by the Star Tribune.

Acting under orders from the Sinaloa cartel, the three kidnappers were trying to determine who had stolen 30 pounds of methamphetamine and $200,000 from a stash house on Palace Avenue in St. Paul. Before the episode was over, they had issued death threats against the Minnesota pair and their families, demanding that they find the missing drugs or come up with $300,000 to compensate the cartel…

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Human Rights Abuse in Mexico: Widespread Torture in Mexico Confirmed by UN Special Rapporteur by Verónica Calderón (EL PAÍS)

This article was first published in El Pais on 2 May 2014. It has been translated without permission for the Mexican Journalism Translation Project (MxJTP).

The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment spent 12 days in Mexico, and confirms that almost “every Mexican police force” abuses detainees.

Torture in Mexico is a widespread practice throughout almost all of the country’s police forces. Cases exist where a Mexican man or woman has been arrested by a plainclothes officer. Without a warrant. Officers have entered homes without a judge’s order, and relatives have been threatened. Then, they have been carried away. They have been blindfolded and insulted. They have been beaten. With fists, with feet. Kicked. They have bee prodded with a cowpoke, an instrument used to administer electric shocks on the genitals. It’s also possible they have suffered some type of sexual violence. In some cases they have been paraded before the media as criminals, even without judicial proceedings. And sometimes they have not even been allowed to speak with their defense attorney. That’s the substance of complaints gathered by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, preliminary conclusions delivered in Mexico City this Friday as he finishes an almost two-week visit to the country…

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Beyond Cocaine Cowboys: Looking at Security in Latin America from a Different Perspective by Maj. Gen. Frederick S. Rudesheim, U.S. Army and Maj. Michael L. Burgoyne, U.S. Army, Military Review

… If the United States is to pursue a more robust policy toward increasing our economic partnerships with Latin American countries, the security of their citizens will be a prerequisite. One need only look to Colombia to see the importance of security in economic development. A decade of successful security policies under presidents Alvaro Uribe and Juan Manuel Santos have reduced the number of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia members by half. Colombia’s focus on “democratic security” has delivered positive results in virtually every measure of citizen security: kidnappings declined 89 percent, homicides 49 percent, and terrorist attacks 66 percent. As a result, Colombia’s gross domestic product averaged a 4.54 percent growth rate from 2002 to 2012, increasing by $244 billion. The U.S. role in Colombia’s success was driven mainly by Plan Colombia counterdrug funding. However, not all destabilizing forces in the region fit into the drug trafficking mold.

Powerful criminal gangs are a serious problem throughout the region and especially in Central America. The most dangerous criminal gangs, often referred to as “third-generation gangs,” are militarized criminal groups that use guerrilla or rudimentary light-infantry tactics against the state. These groups often engage in retail drug sales but do not reach the transnational level that would invite significant U.S. counterdrug interventions; yet, their impact on citizen security is tremendous. It is estimated that crime costs almost eight percent of Central America’s gross domestic product, some $20 billion.13 Perhaps worse is the loss of untold amounts of foreign direct investment that goes to safer locales…

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In Latin America, Lines Between Crime and War Begin to Blur by Janine Davidson, Defense in Depth

While attention was focused last week on President Obama’s trip to Asia, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was on a separate mission to boost military-to-military relations in another important part of the world: Latin America. Hagel’s trip to Mexico and Guatemala, two countries plagued by spiraling drug violence, highlights the increasingly blurred line between military activities and law enforcement.

Where drug traffickers have proven too much for local police to handle, as has been the case in Mexico and Guatemala, governments have called in their military. To assist in this fight, the U.S. is negotiating a deal to sell $680 million in Black Hawk helicopters and is considering providing drones as well. U.S. advisers have also helped set up anti-drug and anti-trafficking interagency task forces in the region to coordinate efforts among military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies. In this expanding mission, U.S. military advisory activities stretch conventional boundaries…

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The Evolution of Los Zetas in Mexico and Central America: Sadism as an Instrument of Cartel Warfare

By Dr. George W. Grayson.

Monograph, 104 pages

25 April 2014

Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College 

Los Zetas, which appeared on the scene in the late- 1990s, have raised the bar for cruelty among Mexican Mafiosi. Traditionally, the country’s narcotics cartels maximized earnings by working hand-in-glove with police, military officers, intelligence agencies, union leaders, and office holders affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which dominated the political landscape from 1929 to 2000…

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The Political Capital of Crime Groups in Mexico and the Politics of Anti-crime Measures

SWJ Editors' Note: Vanda Felbab-Brown is also a Small Wars Journal El Centro Fellow.

On April 16, Senior Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown participated in a Woodrow Wilson Center panel discussion commenting on Professor John Bailey’s new book, The Politics of Crime in Mexico: Democratic Governance in a Security Trap. In addition to Bailey, Felbab-Brown was joined on the panel by Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue; Clare Seelke, Latin America specialist with the Congressional Research Service; and Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Felbab-Brown endorsed the book’s emphasis on a structural analysis of crime in Mexico and its focus on larger issues of rule of law, governance and state-building in the context of tackling organized crime.

Picking up on the themes of the book, Felbab-Brown argued that organized-crime groups often have political effects as well as political capital. In countries with little or no social mobility, inadequate social services and insufficient provision of public goods by the state, a crime group’s ability to provide access to jobs—even in an illicit economy—and other social opportunities increases its legitimacy. Felbab-Brown argued that in such parts of the world there is often a disjuncture between legality and legitimacy: while the participation in illicit activities might be illegal, parts of the population might not regard them as illegitimate as a result of a lack of other opportunities. Criminality subsequently is not simply an aberrant social behavior to be suppressed by the state, but should instead be conceptualized as a competition in state-making between the state and non-state actors, such as criminal groups, over the allegiance of the population.

While law enforcement remains a critical tool in addressing crime in such settings, socioeconomic factors also play a significant role. Yet the current Mexican administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto has underemphasized the need to develop a robust law enforcement strategy, focusing too narrowly on socioeconomic factors, Felbab-Brown argued. But even in this second realm, the strategy remains under-operationalized and its implementation is thus also questionable.

In addition, Felbab-Brown argued that Mexico’s struggle against organized crime can be understood as a three part rebalancing: First, the rebalancing among organized crime groups themselves, accounting to a large extent for the recent decrease in violence in northern Mexico; second, the rebalancing between the Mexican state and criminal groups, a restructuring involving Mexico’s law enforcement and justice institutions, which is still very much in flux and unfinished; and third, the rebalancing of the triangular relationship among the state, society and organized crime over the allegiance of the population and internalization of the rule of law. This last aspect of the rebalancing is a long term process, and the verdict on how it will transpire is still out.

Watch the full event video here.

DPS Releases Annual Texas Gang Threat Assessment

AUSTIN – The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) has released the updated Texas Gang Threat Assessment, which was developed to provide a broad overview of gang activity in the state of Texas.

Gang violence and crime are a chief threat to public safety in Texas, and protecting our communities from these criminals remains a top priority, said DPS Director Steven McCraw. This assessment provides detailed information about the gangs operating in our state, which will enhance the ability of law enforcement to combat these dangerous organizations and their associates.

Read on.