In Mexico's Drug War, Bad Cops Are a Mounting Problem

Time ^ | 11/22/08 | Tim Padgett with Dolly Mascarenas

[nickcarraway]

Few rituals are more futile than the "housecleaning" of Mexico's police forces. So deep, broad and brazen is cop corruption south of the border that removing it makes eradicating rats from landfills look easy. Mexico stages quasi-annual purges of officers high and low — last year it was 284 federal police commanders — and yet every year it seems to find itself with an even more criminal constabulary. This year's scandals, however, are especially appalling.

Over the summer, President Felipe Calderon's anti-drug czar, Noe Ramirez, resigned abruptly. This week, the likely reason became apparent after Ramirez was detained and accused by federal officials of taking $450,000 to keep Mexico's most powerful narco mafia, the Sinaloa Cartel, informed about police anti-drug operations. He is the highest-ranking government official to be nabbed in this year's anti-corruption sweep.

But not the only one. Last month five top officials at the federal organized crime task force were collared for the same crime — after being fingered by an informant who, astonishingly, worked for both the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and the Sinaloa narcos. Days later the federal police chief, Gerardo Garay — whose predecessor, Edgar Millan, was murdered by narco hitmen last May, allegedly with the aid of a federal cop — resigned after being linked to a Sinaloa capo. Mario Velarde, a top boss of the federal police force's anti-drug unit and a former private secretary to Garcia Luna, was also detained this week, for leaking info to the narcos. Ramirez and all the accused deny the charges. But, as one federal security analyst says, it's no longer strange in Mexico's police purges "to see today's butchers become tomorrow's cows."

Mexico's real carnage, meanwhile, gets ghastlier by the day. This year the nation has logged some 4,300 drug-related murders, and analysts fear

[SmallGovRepub]

And they’ve been killing a lot of officials too, so he may very well have had the choice to take the money and help them or die. It would be even harder to pass up $450,000 a month under those circumstances.

[SmallGovRepub]

From another article:

“PRD Deputy and Federal District Legislative Assembly President Víctor Hugo Círigo said organized crime is making $13 billion a year off the drug trade. More than half of that — $8 billion — is derived from the marijuana business, he said.”

Other estimates put the number at over 14 billion a year. That's an incredible amount of money these guys are making. How can we stop something so profitable?

[Nate505]

Unless you legalize pot, you won’t be able to stop something that profitable. Or at least more than half the profits according to that article.

I don’t see these guys smuggling tobacco into the states.

[SmallGovRepub]

I imagine it would be a pretty serious blow to Mexican organized crime to lose more than 60% of their income and the established distribution channels for marijuana that they run most of their other drugs through. I don’t see us legalizing marijuana anytime soon though. It will probably happen eventually and as the years go on after it is legalized we’ll end up kicking ourselves for not having done it a lot sooner.