Drug War Capitalism (20 page)

US-Backed Police Programs in Mexico

Mainstream nongovernmental groups are categorical in their assessment of the impacts of the war on drugs: “The ‘war on drugs’ launched by [Enrique Peña Nieto’s] predecessor, Felipe Calderón, had produced disastrous results. Not only had it failed to rein in the country’s powerful criminal groups, but it had led to a dramatic increase in grave human rights violations committed by the security forces sent to confront them,” according to a February 2013 report by Human Rights Watch.[5] “Rather than strengthening public security, these abuses had exacerbated a climate of violence, lawlessness, and fear.” The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found that the murder rate in Mexico increased by 50 percent each year from 2008 to 2010.[6] The United States plays an important role through its security programs in Mexico, which are focused on police professionalization and the provision of new equipment, as well as further encouraging militarization. The policing segment of the Mérida Initiative leads not only to better arming of long-time perpetrators of violence against the Mexican people (the police and army), but can also be seen as part of the state’s long-term preparations to help enforce growing inequalities that will arise from the privatization and austerity regimes connected to US-backed initiatives, discussed in the previous chapter. This is connected to one goal of counterinsurgency, which is to deploy army and special forces temporarily so as to return to a framework where state violence is carried out by police forces, not soldiers, and where those who resist are criminalized and jailed or killed by police.

Similar to the way countries that take loans from international institutions like the IMF and the World Bank are required to carry out structural adjustment programs that further impoverish the population, drug war resources come tied to increased US involvement in internal affairs. Though the public doesn’t generally have access to the process through which aid is disbursed, a confidential US State Department cable from Ecuador, which illustrates how political pressure and drug assistance go hand in hand, was leaked to Wikileaks. Rafael Correa’s government wasn’t prepared to accept conditions for anti-drug money, creating a problematic situation for the US government. In the cable, the former US Ambassador to Ecuador described the following situation: “Correa and [Government of Ecuador] officials were prompted into objecting to our polygraphing members of vetted units and were likely opposed to a set-up that ensured significant USG control over the actions of Ecuadorian law enforcement personnel and teams. During subsequent negotiations of agreements with [Department of Homeland Security] and [Drug Enforcement Administration], GoE officials regularly pushed [Narcotics Affairs Section] to give them counter-narcotics funds with few controls.[7]” In the end, the US government got its way, by “refusing to disburse funds until the agreements were signed.”[8]

Police training, which is also called police professionalization, has long been an instrument in the US foreign policy arsenal. “Police assistance can accomplish many of the same U.S. foreign policy objectives as military intervention while appearing less political in the process,” according to Martha Huggins, who has written extensively on US training of Latin American police.[9] “There is no evidence that almost a century of US assistance to foreign police has improved either the security of the people in recipient countries or the democratic practices of their police and security forces.… The outcome of such training may suggest that the training of Latin American police has deliberately been used to increase US control over recipient countries and those governments’ undemocratic control over their populations.” In 1974, after evidence of torture, kidnappings, and murders carried out by US-trained police overwhelmed proponents of foreign police training, Congress outlawed the training and equipping of foreign police. Interestingly, however, “The 1974 congressional ban exempted US police and military assistance for narcotics control.”[10] In 1985, the training and equipping of police forces outside of the US was again made legal by Congress under Ronald Reagan, returning the practice of police training to a central strategy for US control over international security. The FBI began training Mexican border police in 1987, and in 1990, the Department of Defense spent $17 million on “training and equipment” in Mexico. “The equipment provided consisted of UH-1 helicopters and spare parts, ammunition, small arms, riot control equipment, radios and miscellaneous personal gear.”[11] Ongoing programs to fund US police training took place over the following years, but it was with the Mérida Initiative that US police training in Mexico took off.

The
New York Times
reported in August 2011 that “the United States has trained nearly 4,500 new [Mexican] federal police agents and assisted in conducting wiretaps, running informants and interrogating suspects.”[12] Since the beginning of the Mérida Initiative, the US has trained “8,500 federal justice sector personnel; augmented the professionalization of police units by providing training to more than 22,000 federal and state police officers, 4,000 of which are federal investigators; improved the capacity and security of its federal prisons, supporting the expansion of secure federal facilities from five with a capacity of 3,500 to fourteen with a capacity of 20,000; provided civic education and ethics training to more than 700,000 Mexican students; and improved the detection of narcotics, arms, and money at the border, reaching nearly $3.8 billion in illicit goods seized.”[13] In addition to the United States and Canada, police from Israel, Colombia, France, Spain, El Salvador, Holland, and the Czech Republic are all actively training different branches of Mexican police.[14] Regardless of US training and vetting processes, generalized corruption among Mexican police forces has not diminished. “We do not want to overstate this finding: We see no evidence that police corruption is actually falling,” reads a 2011 report prepared by right-wing think tank RAND Corporation.[15] In one high-profile incident in 2012, US-trained Mexican federal police ambushed an armored SUV with diplomatic plates, injuring two Central Intelligence Agency agents.[16] To this day it is not known why the ambush took place or what exactly the CIA agents were doing at Tres Marias, near the city of Cuernavaca.

Police training programs in Mexico are taking place at a time when an already large police force continues to expand and be rearranged.[17] In 2010, there were an estimated 409,536 police in Mexico, according to Insyde, a non-profit organization involved in US-funded police training.[18] All federal police, of which there are more than 30,000, also receive in-country military training, and many of them are, in fact, soldiers in police uniforms.
^[19]
The United States is operating an intelligence Fusion Center in Mexico, but the National Security Agency has refused to disclose further information.[20] A training center dubbed Special Operations Command-North, based at US Northern Command in Colorado Springs, Colorado, plays host to at least 150 Mexican soldiers, police, and intelligence agents per year, who get training in counterterrorism and conducting raids. And if that were not enough, in early 2012, the US government extended its anti-gang training program to police departments in Mexico and Central America.[21]

In May of 2012, Mexico opened the Mérida Initiative-funded General Ignacio Zaragoza National Police Training and Development Academy in Puebla state, southeast of Mexico City. The Mexican government estimates that 6,000 Mexican police will receive training there annually.[22] The new police academy is built of modular housing, snapped together on freshly bulldozed land that was once part of the lightly forested rolling hills of rural Puebla. It includes dorms for men and women, firing ranges, mess halls and entertainment areas, a command and control center, among other facilities. There, Mexican police can receive shooting lessons, tactical fitness and combat technique training, lessons in high-risk prisoner transportation, courses in police investigation and the protection of high-ranking dignitaries, and a class in “Human Rights and the Rational Use of Force.”[23] It must have slipped their minds that in life, the academy’s namesake, Ignacio Zaragoza, fought the United States after the annexation of Texas—certainly not the kind of behavior they’re promoting. A US-funded “tactical village” for police officer training was opened at the police academy in Puebla in late 2013.[24] American police are also training their Mexican counterparts at a similar center in the state of San Luis Potosí, and there are plans to open more US-funded and -staffed policing centers.

The drug war in Colombia provided a model for Mexico, and security officials and police from both nations have worked increasingly closely since 2006. “Colombia and Mexico are more united than ever in the fight against transnational organized crime and are also ready to collaborate with third countries in the region to combat this scourge, particularly with our brother nations in Central America,” President Calderón said in 2011.[25] In 2012, Colombian police trained 12,000 Mexican police in specialized subjects ranging from anti-kidnapping to anti-drugs and civilian security.[26] French and Colombian police will train the 390 commanders of Mexico’s new gendarmerie.[27] Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, appointed Colombian police officer Oscar Naranjo as an advisor during his presidential campaign, and stated that Colombia provided him and the world with a successful model of how to achieve peace and security.[28] Naranjo returned to Colombia in early 2014 after the surge in self-defense groups in Michoacán.

The deployment of over 50,000 soldiers, as well as thousands of federal police and over 2,200 state and local police officers, in the name of combating drug trafficking, has resulted in an increase in violence throughout Mexico. In some states, like Tamaulipas and Veracruz, local police have been completely replaced by soldiers, marines, and military police. According to a 2011 report by Human Rights Watch, Calderón’s militaristic security policy “resulted in a dramatic increase in grave human rights violations, virtually none of which appear to be adequately investigated.”[29] The report documented “39 ‘disappearances’ where evidence strongly suggests the participation of security forces,” and “credible evidence in 24 cases that security forces committed extrajudicial killings, and in most of these cases took steps to conceal their crimes.”[30] It also pointed out that Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission “received 691 complains of human rights abuses committed by soldiers against civilians from 2003–2006; the number increased to 4,803 complaints in the 2007–2010 period [precisely the same period as the Mérida Initiative]. And while the commission issued five recommendations concluding federal authorities had committed torture from 2003–2006, it issued twenty-five from 2007–2010.”[31] These numbers represent but a fraction of the total number of abuses; according to the same report, “National surveys have found that nearly 90 percent of crimes in Mexico go unreported.”[32]

US support to the police and army has not prevented corruption or the collaboration of these organizations with organized crime. Relations between state forces and organized crime groups in this hemisphere go back to earlier days of the narcotics trade. For example, following the Cuban revolution in 1959, anti-Castro drug runners moved their operations to Miami. “On occasion, the capos were protected by the CIA, since they represented an important bulwark in the anti-Castro struggle.”[33] In Mexico, enough books have been written on the subject of government cooperation with cartels to fill a small library. One of the classics is Terrence Poppa’s
Drug Lord
, which shows how the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for seventy years straight, worked with drug runners. Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández’s book,
Narcoland
, takes on the task in another way, using detailed documentation to show how the National Action Party (PAN), which ruled Mexico for twelve years after the break with the PRI in 2000, came to agreements with the Sinaloa Cartel
.
Without getting embroiled in the details, it is easy to demonstrate how small the dichotomy between governments and traffickers really is. Professor William I. Robinson of the University of California–Santa Barbara puts it bluntly: “There’s no Mexican Army and police war against
narcotrafico
.” Rather, he says, what is taking place is a rearrangement of power among groups involved in the drug trade, which includes government officials and members of state forces.

In thinking about the artificiality of this binary, one has to wonder in what other battle situation are as many high-level state, army, and police forces exposed as collaborators working for groups that supposedly belong to the “other side”? In the war on drugs, there is no shortage of examples. “The army is part of the Mexican state, and the police are part of the Mexican state, and PRI and PAN and the political parties are at least in some way articulated to the Mexican state, and a good portion of them are so deeply involved in it themselves that it’s really a war for who will control drug profits,” said Robinson in an interview in Mexico City in 2011. “We know the army and the police actually give protection to the cartels in return for payments, that’s so widespread.” Moves to flush out politicians or police involved in criminal activity are often stopgap strategies to clean up the government’s image. They can also be a way of taking privileges from one group, which are quickly redistributed to others.

In
Narcoland
, Anabel Hernández fingers Genaro García Luna, the head of the Public Security Secretariat during Felipe Calderón’s term, as an active participant in drug trafficking, and it’s not unusual to read of high-level officials being caught participating in the drug trade. In 2012, the Mexican and US governments opened investigations of three governors of Tamaulipas for their alleged money laundering and links with the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas.[34] Or, take for example the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), a political police force responsible for repressing guerrilla movements throughout Mexico in the ’60s and ’70s: “Using their DFS credentials as shields, agents regularly escorted narcotics shipments, frequently even selling seized narcotics to favored organizations.… Later intelligence showed that the DFS embarked on an ambitious project to organize protection on a national scale, bringing as much of the nation as possible under a unified system.”[35] Heads of policing organizations and anti-narcotics groups are routinely suspected of collaborating with organized crime,[36] and anti-kidnapping units of the Mexican police have been outed for running kidnapping rings. In 1990, President Carlos Salinas fired the head of the navy and fifty marines for their links with narcotrafficking.