Latin
America:
Mexico
Allows
State,
Local
Cops
to
Join
Drug
War
12/2/05
Mexico's war on drugs has traditionally been the domain of federal police and, increasingly, the Mexican armed forces. Even street-level drug sales have been handled by the feds. That will now change, thanks to the passage of a package of bills aimed at strengthening the state's response to the powerful and violent drug trafficking organizations who have been engaged in a power struggle for the past year. As of Monday, state and local police will have the authority to enforce federal drug laws aimed at traffickers. Other measures in the package of anti-drug bills include the use of seized drug trafficker assets to fund rewards for the capture of other traffickers and the registration of the bulletproofed cars favored by the traffickers. In a move clearly aimed at destroying the ability of imprisoned traffickers to control their enterprises from behind prison walls, the package also bans the use of cell phones within prisons. The move to bring state and local police into the battle required a change in the Mexican constitution. That change was approved by a majority of state legislatures and by both houses of the Mexican congress and was published Monday in the government gazette, making it official. "We are multiplying our power in an extraordinary way," said Eduardo Medina Mora, the federal secretary of public safety, in remarks reported by the Associated Press. "Local authorities will be able to pursue drug distributors and dealers. They will be able to conduct searches without a federal warrant." The move will vastly increase the number of law enforcement personnel fighting the drug war, Mora said. There are some 20,000 federal police, but more than 380,000 state and local police in Mexico. "Now that states have powers to deal with this, we will have a much more resolute and effective combat against this issue," he said. That may be too optimistic. Mexican drug enforcement efforts have been dogged in the past by systematic corruption, and the Mexican government has had to disband rotten federal anti-drug agencies and start anew on several occasions. The Mexican army has taken a lead role in recent years, leading observers like Dr. Luis Astorga of the National Autonomous University of Mexico's Institute for Social Investigations to warn not only of increasing political power for the military, but also the risk it will be similarly tainted by the lure of easy money.
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