CIUDAD MIGUEL ALEMÁN, MEXICO — Police in five Tamaulipas border cities continued to patrol the streets Monday without service weapons, nearly a week after military forces confiscated them in a series of surprise raids.
But officers in Reynosa, Rio Bravo, Matamoros, Nuevo Laredo and Valle Hermoso have managed to maintain the peace armed only with nightsticks and batons, officials from each city said.
“We don’t know when our weapons will be returned,” Rio Bravo police Chief Adan Nava Correa said in Spanish on Monday. “But until then, we are working normally.”
Weapons permits must be renewed annually according to Antonio Aguilar, deputy director of Public Safety in Nuevo Laredo.
Last week, tanks surrounded local police stations in the border towns and soldiers took away department-issued firearms, searched officers and checked radio communications for signs of cooperation with drug smugglers.
The coordinated raids halted patrols for the day, but officers in most of the affected cities were allowed back on the streets without weapons by that evening, said Miriam Medel Garcia, a spokeswoman for the Mexican consulate in McAllen.
“They were all very cooperative with the military,” she said.
By Monday, only officers in Ciudad Miguel Alemán — across the river from Roma — had their weapons returned, despite the city’s growing reputation as a base for cartel activity.
“We can say that our police are now certified,” Mayor Servando Lopez Moreno said. “Miguel Alemán is a very safe city.”
The raids, which followed the arrests earlier this month of four Nuevo Laredo police officers charged with radioing information of military activity to cartel members, have become a frequent tactic of Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s administration, in his efforts to weed out police corruption across the country.
Last year, the army conducted similar operations in Tijuana, B.C.N., and Monterrey, N.L., as well as towns in the Michoacan, Sinaloa and Sonora states. In each case, confiscating officer’s weapons allowed military officials to check whether weapons held by local police had been used in past drug crimes.
But so far, the Tamaulipas searches have yielded few obvious results.
Although at least 17 officers were detained during the sweeps, none have been officially charged with criminal activity, government officials said. Three officers were taken into military custody in Matamoros and soldiers seized a semiautomatic rifle not officially registered to the police.
In Rio Bravo, the search resulted in the seizure of two unregistered police vehicles and the detainment of 14 officers whose radios were not tuned to official channels. All of the officers were later released, city officials said.
Representatives of the Mexican defense ministry, which controls the army, could not be reached for comment Monday and have yet to publicly acknowledge last week’s operation.
The coordinated searches came after weeks of violence between soldiers and elements of the Gulf Cartel, which controls smuggling routes throughout much of Tamaulipas and into southern Texas. Since taking office in December 2006, Calderón has dispatched thousands of soldiers to the region in an effort to stamp out the group’s influence there.
Part of that effort, government officials said, must address corruption of municipal and state police who are believed to tacitly allow — and in some cases even aid in — smuggling activity through their jurisdictions.
Last week, a federal jury in McAllen convicted former Tamaulipas state police commander Carlos Landin-Martinez, who was once believed to have been second-in-command of the Gulf Cartel’s Reynosa operations.
A former drug trafficker and witness in that case told the court that smugglers routinely rely on police cooperation to move their loads through cities such as Reynosa.
But Lopez, Miguel Alemán’s mayor, is just content his city’s police force appears to have turned up clean. Fighting his nation’s drug war, he said, remains somebody else’s problem.
“(The cartel) is another story,” he said. “Federal authorities have to deal with that.”
Editors Note: The last two comments are the whole problem. Somebodies elses problem!
Little more than a year after President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against Mexico’s powerful drug cartels, the gangsters seem willing and able to strike back with a vengeance.The arrests last week in Mexico City of 11 heavily armed men, whom authorities say were assassins for the Sinaloa Cartel led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, suggest the crackdown is having an impact, officials say.
Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, a top anti-narcotics official in the federal attorney general’s office, told Mexican interviewers that he had been the target of at least two assassination attempts in the past month.
“They plan to generate violence to force a retreat by authorities,” Genaro Garcia Luna, Calderon’s secretary of public security and one of Mexico’s top cops, said last week.
But, Garcia vowed, “There will be no retreat. We are not going to take a step back. The fight against crime is going to to be permanent, systematic.”
Departure from the norm
If both sustained and successful, such resolve may well mark a dramatic departure from the norm in Mexico’s decades-long dance with its criminal empires.Since the country became a major transshipment point for South American cocaine headed for U.S. consumers in the 1980s, Mexico’s politicians and security forces tended to treat the crime of drug trafficking as a nuisance — and too frequently as a source of illicit gain.
Over the years, some gangsters, including cartel bosses, were jailed or killed, and some police officers and soldiers were also slain on anti-narcotics operations.
But the leaders of the cartels rarely targeted senior officials or challenged the state — as they did in Colombia — because high-level government officials never really presented much of a threat to their smuggling business.
The old style might have been best defined in the 1990s when Mexico’s drug czar, an army general praised by U.S. agents for his crackdown on Mexico’s leading trafficking gang, was convicted of working for a rival group.
But if that were once the way of things, some American and Mexican officials insist it’s not anymore. Since taking office 13 months ago, Calderon has made the crackdown on drug cartels the anchor of his administration.
“Our intention is to make it so complicated for them to come through Mexico that they will seek to smuggle through somewhere else,” a senior Mexican official said, speaking on condition he not be identified.
U.S. partnership
More than 40 tons of cocaine have been seized since the crackdown began in December 2006. Top crime bosses have been extradited to face U.S. courts.Soldiers and police have battled cartel gunmen on the streets of border cities. Intelligence-gathering has been enhanced, and more importantly, acted on.
“People who have come here, who have talked to the Mexican government, who have engaged, really see a distinction here, a real expression of political will,” said David Johnson, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for narcotics and law enforcement, who was in Mexico City last week for talks with Mexican officials.
Johnson is helping shepherd the Bush administration’s proposal to give Calderon’s government $1.4 billion worth of law enforcement technology and training in the coming years to aid in the fight.
The plan faces concerns in the U.S. Congress, which is expected to vote on it by this summer.
“We think it’s appropriate that America be a partner to try to work with the (Calderon) administration, to try to push this process forward,” Johnson said.
Daunting challenge
Mexican security forces and senior officials “must be capable of confronting all the costs, all the risks … including in lives offered to achieve the Mexico we desire,” Calderon said Friday in an offhand comment to the Mexico City newspaper El Universal.But even with such unwavering will, and with the proposed U.S. aid, the challenge facing Calderon seems daunting.
With annual earnings estimated at $10 billion, Mexico’s drug gangs are deeply embedded in the country’s economy. That’s especially true along the key cocaine smuggling routes and in areas where marijuana and heroin poppies are grown and where crystal methamphetamine is manufactured.
Cartels have upper hand
Drug gangsters control complete towns and wield influence in wide swaths of entire states. Some local and state police forces, despite periodic purges of personnel, effectively remain in the gangs’ employ.Supplied with weapons smuggled from the United States and elsewhere, the cartel’s foot soldiers are often better armed than the security forces.
Although leading traffickers like Guzman make the headlines, scores, even hundreds of smuggling gangs operated across the country. With such a lucrative return, gang bosses who are jailed or killed are quickly replaced by their ambitious lieutenants.
Mexico’s smugglers grew more powerful and wealthy this decade as Colombia’s cartels splintered into smaller organizations under the weight of that country’s anti-narcotics efforts.
‘Superior’ capabilities
At the same time, the fall of Mexico’s one-party government at the ballot box, accompanied by the growing political power of state and local governments, made it easier for gangsters to gain more political influence here, said John Bailey, a Mexico expert at Georgetown University.”Decentralization and inter-party competition complicates this whole thing,” Bailey said. “The state and local fellows don’t have the firepower or intelligence network to take on these guys. “
Still, Calderon’s senior officials insist they’ll prevail.
“The great challenge in this effort is to prevent them from taking root,” Garcia, the public security minister, said.
“Their logic of trying to generate violence to intimidate authorities is not going to work,” he said. “The capabilities of the Mexican government are superior.”
Families of the officers and civilian employees of the Nuevo Laredo Municpal Police, who were arrested Saturday staged a protest today in front of the military barracks and at the Bridge of the America’s.
Saturday, 4 officers and 7 civilians were detained and accused of passing classified information concerning police and military movements to the cartels.
Read the story in Spanish as reported by El Manana de Nuevo Laredo
I find it interesting to note that El Manana is reporting this protest was organized by family members of those detained by the Federal Forces. That is not surprising.
I made a trip to Reynosa over the weekend. A quick trip, there and back. As always, I took Mexico Hwy 2.
In Camargo, there is a toll bridge where the military had set up a check point north and south. I experienced no problems going to Reynosa. Coming back however, my car was searched. The soldiers were very polite and professional and offered their thanks for my cooperation.
North of Reynosa, the Federal Security Forces of the PFP had another checkpoint in operation. This time, I was waved through in both directions. But these guys appeared serious about interdicting drugs, arms and whatever other contraband they found.
I spoke with a friend of mine the other day who is a Professor in Rio Bravo, the town that has seen a spike in cartel violence in recent weeks. She advised me that soldiers and Federal officers were going house to house, questioning residents and when appropriate, doing searched of the premises.
Returning to Nuevo Laredo on Hwy 85 on the southern edge of NL, there were troop carriers with at least 100 soldiers preparing to set up checks on that highway or perhaps were planning a raid on one of the ranchos in that area.
This area south of town has been the scene of several raids in the past year where evidence of cartel activities have been discovered.
The word on the street and in the news is the people of Mexico are fed up with the violence of the cartels and the corruption associated with them and they are asking the government to use a heavy hand in dealing with the cartels
They crossed the line last week when they murdered not only the Police Commander in Tijuana, but also his wife and two young children and terrorized a nearby school.
And for those who said in the article they can’t have fun anymore, I don’t see why not. This comment was made in response to the Federal troops entering a popular nightclub in Nuevo Laredo Saturday night called the Silverado, a known hangout for bad guys.
Get used to it! Whatever it takes to restore the peace along the border. You can’t have it both ways
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