Drug violence in Mexico

Can the army out-gun the drug lords?

Four top police officers, and more than a hundred people, are killed over the course of a single week in drug-related shootings

“FEAR is our chief safeguard,” Pericles declared in his funeral oration, “for it teaches us to obey the magistrates and the laws.” In Mexico, however, fear has become the chief aid not of the state, but of those who are trying to subvert it. On May 8th, Edgar Millán Gómez, Mexico's acting chief of police, was shot nine times as he arrived home late at night. One of his bodyguards, who was also wounded, managed to wrestle the police chief's assailant to the ground and arrest him. Mr Millán was conscious for long enough to ask his killer who was behind the hit, but died before he could get a reply.

The answer to his question, provided later by investigators, helps cast some light on why it is so hard to end drug-related violence in Mexico. They say that his assassin was sent by José Antonio Montes Garfias, another federal police officer. Furthermore, the people who organised Mr Millán's killing were also behind the assassination on May 1st of Roberto Velasco Bravo, head of the federal police's organised crime division.

In addition to Mr Millán's assassination, the past few days have seen the murder of a top official in Mexico City's police force; of the police second-in-command in the border town of Juárez; and of the administrative head of the Estado Mayor, a military body charged with protecting the president. Such targeting of senior law-enforcement officials is unprecedented in Mexican history.

The gangs have not restricted themselves to killing senior policemen, though. According to Guillermo Zepeda of CIDAC, a think-tank in Mexico City, the week leading up to May 12th saw a total of 113 murders in Mexico, including 17 people on a single day. Estimates of the total number of deaths linked to drugs and organised crime so far this year range from 1,100 to 2,500 people. The war on drugs has never seemed less like a metaphor.

The involvement of the police in some of the killings helps to explain the lack of sympathy for dead policemen. “When police die in the line of duty, there is no condemnation of the violence in society,” says Ernesto López Portillo of Insyde, another think-tank. Part of the problem, he says, is that it is impossible to know which police officers lost their lives because they were doing their jobs, and which ones died because they were allied with a drug gang. The lack of public confidence in the police undermines their effectiveness and makes them more open to corruption.

Unable to rely on the police, President Felipe Calderón's habitual response to violence has been to send the army into trouble spots. This week the president dispatched 2,700 federal troops and police to the state of Sinaloa, where much of the violence has taken place. The army is now widely deployed around the country. Some Mexican legislators are even calling for troops to be deployed in Mexico City. Replacing the police by the army while the former were being reformed was meant to be only a temporary measure. But it is fast taking on an air of permanence.

As no figures are available for the volume of drugs being traded, the best way to measure it is to look at what is happening to drug prices north of the border. Mexico used to be one of the world's biggest producers of methamphetamines, and Mexican gangs still control meth distribution in the United States. They also dominate the wholesale distribution of cocaine there, as well as the transit of the drug through Mexico from South America. According to the United States' Drug Enforcement Administration, the average price of methamphetamine jumped 73% between January and September last year (the most recent figures available). The price of cocaine rose by 44% over the same period, despite a decline in purity.

The recent killings are a response to this success. Police officials said the murders of Messrs Millán and Velasco were probably both ordered by Arturo Beltrán Leyva, a capo in the Sinaloa drug cartel. Mr Beltrán Leyva's brother, another Sinaloa leader, was arrested in January. Joaquin Guzmán, the gang's head, escaped from prison in early 2001 under still unexplained circumstances. Government pressure has also prompted infighting among the gangs; Mr Guzmán's son was killed the same day as Mr Millán in a shoot-out thought to have been between his father's faction and a rival group from Juárez.

But setting the army on the drug-traffickers cannot be a permanent solution to the problem. The army was not trained for this job and has come under heavy criticism from human-rights groups. The government has shown little tolerance of this, forcing (according to some accounts) the representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to leave the country for being too critical of the army.

In a speech after the latest killings, the president called for “a transformation in the administration of justice”. Under a controversial new law, due to come into effect soon, the police will be allowed to hold suspected drug-traffickers and other suspected participants in organised crime for up to 80 days without charge. But a real transformation means a greater upheaval of the police, something that Mr Calderón promised when he first deployed the army nearly a year and a half ago, though there is little sign of it yet.

America is partly to blame. Last October the American and Mexican governments announced a plan under which the United States would contribute $500m a year to Mexican law-enforcement, equipment and training. But neither government bothered to consult its legislature. The programme is now stalled in the United States Congress. As its research service dryly noted in March, “there is no legislative vehicle for the funding request”, and that is still true. If the programme does ever materialise, it will almost certainly be a lot smaller in scope.

Thickening the blue line

Furthermore, some say the plan is not particularly well thought through. Geoff Thale of the Washington Office on Latin America, a think-tank, told the United States Congress that the approach to police training, a centrepiece of the initiative, was wrong to focus on creating specialised police units, which could easily be undermined or corrupted, rather than concentrating on institutional reform.

The status quo leaves both the army and the police vulnerable. In a brazen bit of nose-thumbing, the Zetas, a paramilitary wing of the Gulf cartel (the Sinaloa gang's main rivals), recently hung up banners in several border towns inviting current and former soldiers to join them. The Zetas themselves were originally formed by army deserters.

Following this week's murders, Eduardo Medina Mora, Mexico's attorney-general, said that the violence was a sign of “weakness, desperation, and frustration” on the part of organised crime. That is partly true. But as Mr Millán's killing makes clear, the distinction between law-enforcement authorities and organised crime is sometimes blurred. So far Mr Calderón's administration has failed to come up with a solution to an abiding paradox: success in disrupting drug cartels only leads to more violence as gang members fight to fill power vacuums and continue to supply the ever-lucrative drug market.