No quick fix for Mexico’s war on drugs
Enrique Peña Nieto, who took office on Dec 1, assured the country this month that the army and the navy will be pulled out as soon as civilian police — including a new federal quasi-military force — are capable of taking on the gangs.
His predecessor, Felipe Calderón, said much the same thing through his six years in power.
Now, the effort many critics labelled “Calderón’s War” belongs squarely to Peña Nieto and he has few immediate alternatives to the military campaign.
He has moved to dismantle the controversial public security ministry and transfer its 36,000-member federal police force to the interior ministry, a bulwark of his Institutional Revolutionary Party’s 71-year hold on power.
Mexico’s once-feared intelligence service, gutted in the dozen years of rule by Calderón’s conservative National Action Party, is returning to the interior ministry too.
Yet a new militarised national police force proposed by Peña Nieto is likely to take months, if not years, to set up. That leaves the navy’s marines as the most trusted force in the fight against organised crime.
Until its dramatic build-up during the crackdown on drug cartels by Calderón, Mexico’s navy had been long been in the shadow of the far larger, and more insular, army.
Once tasked with little more than guarding tourist beaches and navy bases, the ranks of the marines have swelled by 80% to 18,000 during Calderón’s presidency. They have been deployed along the southern and northern borders, both coasts, and deep into the interior.
“Sadly, many public security institutions, above all at the municipal and state level, have been penetrated by organised crime,” said Vice Admiral Fernando Castanon, commander of the naval zone on the Caribbean coast and the border with Belize.
“It doesn’t interest us to be operating in Zacatecas or Coahuila,” said Castanon, referring to two states where the marines have waged full-scale combat against the notorious Zetas cartel in the past few years. “But at this moment the country needs it. The navy is trying to fill that void.”
Under Calderón, Mexico built a tighter alliance with US military and law enforcement agencies to take on the gangs.
Boasting one of Mexico’s most respected intelligence agencies, a small but effective commando force and less insular culture, the navy proved a good fit for the tie-up.
The navy’s special forces, anchored within the 1,800-strong 7th Infantry Battalion in Mexico City, have worked closely with US intelligence and military operatives to catch or kill many top drug lords.
“That’s what should be given priority,” Mariano Saynez, the just departed navy secretary, told reporters recently. “It’s about having less violence, avoiding perhaps the massive use of the armed forces. They have to be more select groups.”
Still, the navy’s close ties with Washington apparently has caused tension with the army and other security forces.
The friction was underlined by an attack by plainclothed federal police on two CIA operatives and a Mexican navy captain riding in a clearly marked US embassy car near Mexico City in August. Suspected of acting on behalf of drug lords, 14 federal police, including a senior commander, were charged with attempted murder.
Both the navy and the army have struggled with corruption, abuse of power and heavy-handed law enforcement.
During Calderón’s term, the National Human Rights Commission has received nearly 9,000 complaints of abuse at the hands of the armed forces — from torture and robbery to murder and forced disappearances — including more than 1,100 by the navy.
Still, the navy is trusted more than most.
A national survey by the GCE polling firm published in late November showed the navy was the only arm of public security that a majority of Mexicans did not think had been at least partly tainted by drug gangs.
Some Mexicans fear the worst if the navy is pulled out.
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