MEXICO CITY — The Mexican government warned Monday it would not accept conditions that the U.S. Congress has imposed on an aid package to combat drug trafficking.
The Merida Initiative would provide $1.4 billion over several years to help Mexico, Central America, the Dominican Republic and Haiti combat drug trafficking.
But the U.S. House and Senate have imposed several conditions on the aid, including guarantees of civilian investigations into human rights abuses by the Mexican military.
Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mourino said the conditions were “counterproductive and profoundly contrary to the object and spirit” of the initiative announced by U.S. and Mexican officials last year.
“The initiatives approved by both chambers of the U.S. Congress incorporate some aspects that, in their current versions, are unacceptable for our country,” Mourino said.
The House and Senate approved different amounts for the first installment of the aid, and the two versions must be reconciled. Both bills fell well short of the $500 million sought by the Bush administration.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon has earned strong support from Washington for his crackdown against drug cartels, carried out by more than 25,000 troops nationwide.
Drug violence has surged as cartels fight back with increasingly brazen attacks against security forces. Last week, a senior police officer appealed for more powerful weapons after seven federal officers were killed in a shootout with members of the Sinaloa cartel.
Give them the money without preconditions or conditions and let them do what they do best.
Mexico’s besieged police put to the test
Calderon vows to press war on cartels despite the body count
MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s security forces have been swept into the eye of the storm since President Felipe Calderon decided to get tough on the country’s drug-smuggling gangs.
Once-untouchable federal officials have been assassinated in the streets. Out-gunned soldiers and police have battled gangsters armed with grenades and bazookas. Local police chiefs have resigned, a few fleeing to the United States for safety. Hundreds of police and soldiers have been sent early to their graves.
Amid a fierce counteroffensive by the drug cartels, the question becomes: How long can, or will, Mexico’s thin police line hold?
Calderon and his top assistants say the security forces are up to the task. The gunfights and killings, including the assassinations this month of four top police officials, are signs of success rather than defeat, they say.
“This reaction is precisely a desperate act to weaken the federal police,” Calderon said, defending his policies and trying to rally the public to support them. “The effectiveness of a new, cleaned-up police force was hitting the criminals. We’re going to continue this frontal attack.”
But Bush administration officials, pushing Congress to approve a $1.4 billion, three-year package of equipment and training for Mexico’s security forces, warn that Calderon’s campaign will founder without the aid.
Analysts on both sides of the border worry that Mexico’s underequipped and poorly trained police forces — with long histories of ineffectiveness and corruption — will come up short.
“There comes a moment when the imbalance in resources reverses the relationship between government and cartels,” George Friedman, founder of Strategic Forecasting, an Austin political risk firm, wrote in a report on Mexico’s drug war this week.
“Government officials, seeing the futility of resistance, effectively become tools of the cartels.”
A relatively new twist
Other analysts point out that many Mexican policemen and officials have long been at the cartels’ service. They argue that much of today’s sustained violence against police — a relatively new twist in the country’s decades-long dance with the drug trade — arises from a fragmentation of a protection system that existed for decades.
Hundreds of dedicated police and soldiers have been killed over the years in the line of duty. But for much of the past, authorities and gangsters preferred their relationships to be defined by business rather than bloodshed.
Officials were killed if they welched on a deal with the criminals. They rarely were targeted for simply doing their jobs.
“They didn’t have to kill the police before, because the agreements were clear, and the limits were well defined,” said Ernesto Lopez Portillo, president of a Mexico City think tank that studies police and public security.
That has changed since the presidential elections of 2000 ended seven decades of one-party rule and shook the protection that it afforded the country’s gangsters, Lopez Portillo said.
Political power, and the cover it can provide drug traffickers, has splintered among the federal, state and local governments.
At the same time, a reorganization of the federal security forces, including the replacement of the notoriously corrupt Federal Judicial Police with a quasi-military force, has made enforcement more effective. Narcotics use has ballooned in Mexico, while smuggling organizations grew more powerful and more competitive with one another.
Now, each cartel has its own protection system, often based on the guns of local and state police. Many crime bosses also employ gunmen who until recently were active-duty soldiers.
Gangs’ firepower and vendettas have multiplied. Police have been caught in the crossfire. Chaos reigns.
“All the old alliances have broken down,” said Bruce Bagley, a University of Miami political scientist who specializes in the Latin American drug trade. “And they are striking back against cops, many of whom are dirty. The whole process has been thrown into flux.”
Calderon has ordered nearly 30,000 soldiers and quasi-military police into the fight against the cartels. The offensive has proved ineffective in stopping the trafficking of cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin to American consumers. But more than 3,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in the 18 months since Calderon became president.
The dead include about 300 federal, state and local police. Some have been killed by rivals of the gangsters who employed them. Many others were slain doing their jobs.
“There have been, obviously, very lamentable losses on our side,” Calderon told reporters this week. “But fortunately Mexico has many patriots like them.”
Calderon insists he is determined to press the crackdown, regardless of the body count. He has asked Congress for a five-fold increase in the budget of the federal police, to be used in large part to build new regional bases across the country.
“We will continue building a better federal police, which this country has severely needed,” Calderon said. “We’re not going to add to the abandonment, the cowardice or the complicity that allowed Mexico to arrive at this situation.”
Read more in the Houston Chronicle
By Héctor Tobar, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
February 7, 2008
MEXICO CITY — President Felipe Calderon said Wednesday that a shifting political climate in the U.S. could improve the chances that a new administration in Washington will help bring a comprehensive reform law that would legalize the status of Mexican immigrants.
In a wide-ranging conversation with The Times, Calderon, scheduled to visit California next week, also addressed the decline of the government-owned oil fields and the war against drug traffickers that has claimed thousands of lives.
“My hope is that whoever the next president is, and whoever is in the new [U.S.] Congress, will have a broader and more comprehensive view” of the immigration problem, Calderon said. Speaking at the presidential residence Los Pinos on the morning after the Super Tuesday presidential primaries in the U.S., Calderon said he took heart from the results, though he did not mention specific candidates.
“It seems to me that the most radical and anti-immigrant candidates have been left behind and have been put in their place by their own electorate,” Calderon said.
He arrives in Sacramento on Feb. 13 on the final leg of a five-day U.S. trip that will also take him to Chicago, Boston and New York to visit local officials and representatives of Mexican immigrant communities.
In Sacramento, he is scheduled to meet with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Latino legislators. In Los Angeles the following day, he is to meet Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and migrant groups’ representatives assembled by the nine Mexican consulates in California.
He will tell fellow Mexican citizens “that we are actively working to defend their human rights,” Calderon said. “No matter their immigration status, they are human beings with dignity and rights that should be respected. We are working, with the full effort of the government, to bring a halt to the campaigns that harass migrants.”
Calderon said one goal of his trip, which will include a talk Monday at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, was to build public support for an immigration reform law that would allow millions of Mexicans to work in the U.S.
He said Americans would recognize “sooner or later” that the health of the U.S. economy is linked to integration with its neighbor and “the increased flow of goods, services, investment” between the two countries “and also greater freedom in labor markets.”
Such liberal economic orthodoxy also informs Calderon’s beliefs about the policies that can best create jobs in Mexico and slow the annual flight of thousands of his countrymen northward.
Despite criticisms from farmers that the North American Free Trade Agreement is ruining Mexican agriculture and spurring migration to the U.S., Calderon said he remained a firm believer in the power of free markets to improve the lot of Mexico’s rural poor.
“The truth is that exports from the Mexican countryside have increased fourfold since NAFTA” was implemented, Calderon said.
Still, the federal government will continue to provide $20 billion in annual farm subsidies. And to ameliorate the effect of the U.S. economic slowdown on the Mexican economy, Calderon is proposing a massive series of public works projects and other measures.
On Wednesday, Calderon announced the creation of a $25-billion fund to build highways, bridges and other infrastructure projects so that “we don’t have to depend on the external motor of the U.S. economy” to keep Mexico growing.
Calderon also warned that the Mexican people faced difficult decisions related to the declining production of the country’s oil fields, the government’s main source of foreign revenue.
With reserves in its aging offshore Cantarell field diminishing, the state-owned oil company Pemex needs funds to pay for exploration in the deeper waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
The money, Calderon said, could come only from two sources: reducing government spending for public services or looking to the example of China, Norway and Brazil, where the state-owned oil companies benefit from private investment.
Private investment in Pemex has been a political poison pill in Mexico, where the publicly owned natural resource is considered by many a pillar of national sovereignty.
“This is a problem we should resolve now so as not to place future generations in danger,” Calderon said. “I’ve always worked from the assumption that Pemex will not be privatized. But I am sure there will be a more understanding environment to objectively evaluate what’s best for Pemex.”
Whereas declining oil revenue is a long-term challenge, the most immediate threat Calderon faces is organized crime. Violence linked to drug trafficking has claimed more than 2,000 lives since Calderon took office in December 2006.
Despite progress, including the arrest of more than 20,000 organized-crime suspects and huge hauls of illicit drugs and cash, much work remains to be done, Calderon said.
Drug traffickers are a dominant presence in several border cities and many rural towns.
“Victory will be achieved when the authorities have complete control over their own territory . . . when the authorities have total command over and complete faith in the police forces,” he said.
U.S. legislators are debating a $550-million proposal by the Bush administration to assist Mexico and Central America in the battle against traffickers.
“This is a battle in which Mexico obviously needs the help of the United States to win,” Calderon said.
Aeromóvil Special Forces Group (GAFES) deployed from Matamoros to Nuevo Laredo
Arriving on board military transport at Nuevo Laredo International Airport, 250 members of Aeromóvil Special Forces Group (GAFES), Mexico’s equivalent of the US Army’s elite Ranger’s, boarded a convoy of 32 military vehicles to be dispersed at various points around the city. The troops will be garrisoned with the cities 1st Motorized Cavalry Regiment here in Nuevo Laredo.
The arrival occurred at the same time that the mayors of the border cities of Tamaulipas met privately in Ciudad Victoria with Governor Eugenio Hernandez Flores and authorities of the Federal Security Service.
The Federal Security Service is a division of the PFP.
Elements of GAFES were quickly dispersed to various locations around the city, from Blvd. Colon to the western colonias of the city.
The troopers were also stationed at both bridges in Nuevo Laredo to assist IFA or Mexican Customs in searching vehicles entering Mexico for prohibited items such as weapons and other contraband.
The seizure of weapons and ammunition smuggled in from the United States is a priority in President Calderons initiative against the cartels.
In addition to troops in Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa received 600 troops, Matamoros 400 with assistance of Naval Marines from their bases east of Matamoros on the coast.
All highways at this point have manned checkpoints to check vehicles going in both directions.
NUEVO LAREDO – The federal government is taking no chances on seeing a recurrence of the drug-fueled violence that once plagued this major land port, sending additional military troops and federal police to the area.
After the deadly confrontation earlier this week among police, soldiers and para-military criminal squads in the Rio Bravo Valley cities of Río Bravo and Reynosa, federal authorities dispatched an unspecified number of extra soldiers and federal agents to cities all along the Tamaulipas-Texas border, including Matamoros, across from Brownsville; Reynosa, near McAllen; Río Bravo, across from Donna; Miguel Alemán, across from Roma; and Nuevo Laredo.
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