Feral Jundi

     This stuff always sucks to hear about, but is the reality of this drug war.  In the market of force, the police are every bit a part of that mechanism.  If the states or government cannot pay more than the cartels, or at least provide a living wage to their police force, well then the decision for poorly paid cops is pretty simple.

     Couple that with this Plomo O Plata concept.  The cartels do pose a threat to these officers and their families, and I am sure the cartel’s intelligence apparatus is able to find out where the cops live no problem. And when they get a hold of them, the cartels usually torture them, kill them, and mutilate the body to send a message. Some message, huh?

     I will say this again, the way to deal with these cartels is to create an industry out of capturing or killing them (preferably capture them, so you can find more of the scum and their loot through interrogations).  The government could start issuing Letters of Marque (LoM) to companies and individuals world wide (or just North America) who could profit off the destruction of cartels.  They would allow these companies and individuals to capture folks for the bounty (Mexico would fund this and possibly tap into Rewards For Justice) , and take their assets through a Prize Court system.

     The state would also get their cut, and if any of the companies and individuals who were issued an LoM steps out of line based on the terms of that LoM, you put them on the list of most wanted and turn the industry on them. lol With any luck the industry would dry up within a couple of years, and LoM’s would then reach their expiration date, just like how it worked for hundreds of years pre-Declaration of Paris. –Matt

—————————————————————–

Aug. 7: Federal police officers beat fellow police inspector Salomón Alarcón Olvera, aka “El Chaman” after accusing him of being linked to drug cartels and having participated in kidnappings, executions and extortions in Ciudad Juarez, northern Mexico.

4 Mexican federal police commanders suspended following complaints of corruption, drug links

August 07, 2010

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Four federal police commanders have been suspended from their posts in a violent Mexican border city following allegations from subordinates that they have links to drug traffickers.

The action by the Public Safety Department comes just hours after 200 federal police officers detained one of their superiors at gunpoint, alleging that he had connections to drug cartels and had participated in kidnappings, killings and extortion.

The Department said in a statement late Saturday that the commander held by officers earlier in the day was transferred to Mexico City along with three other officials. All will be investigated for “possible irregular conduct.”

The four worked in Ciudad Juarez, a city across from El Paso, Texas, plagued by drug-related violence.

Story here.

——————————————————————

Mexico: Cartels Pay Corrupt Cops $100 Million a Month

August 9, 2010

PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexico – Mexican authorities said at a forum that drug-trafficking gangs pay around 1.27 billion pesos (some $100 million) a month in bribes to municipal police officers nationwide

Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said that figure was calculated based on perceptions of municipal officers themselves and an analysis of a list of cops recruited by the cartels that was found during a police operation.

“Organized crime pays some 1.27 billion pesos a month to municipal police, because that’s the portion of the salary the government does not pay the officers so they can live with dignity,” the high-ranking official said Friday.

Speaking on the final day of a meeting of the Association of Mexican Municipalities, or Ammac, held in the western port city of Puerto Vallarta, Garcia Luna said that of the country’s 165,510 municipal officers nationwide, just over 20 percent earns less than 1,000 pesos ($79) a month, while 60.9 percent earns no more than 4,000 pesos ($317) monthly.

The secretary, who backs President’s Felipe Calderon’s proposal for a single police force per state, said municipal officers currently account for 38.73 percent of all police in the country, adding that rather than combat crime they merely comply with the guidelines of their jurisdictions.

Among those attending the gathering, titled “Toward a police model for the Mexico of the 21st century,” were public-safety experts from Spain and Chile and Mexican authorities from the different branches of government.

Attendees concurred that the country’s safety problems do not lie in the police forces themselves but rather in the law-enforcement personnel who make up those departments and who are in need of training and strict oversight.

“This situation makes it necessary to implement (a single police force) in each of the 32 administrative divisions,” Garcia Luna said, adding that that proposal is not some stubborn idea on his part but rather something that is for the good of the country.

Nevertheless, no consensus was reached at the end of the forum on the idea of a single police command.

During the two-day Ammac meeting, the mayors argued for the need to maintain the local police forces as the foundation for combating crime, while state and federal authorities insisted that a single police force was the only solution.

The mayor of Mexico’s second city, Guadalajara, and vice president of Ammac’s west region, Aristoteles Sandoval, said the creation of a single police command per state will not solve the country’s public safety problems and said the problem is a lack of resources, infrastructure and weapons.

Nearly 30,000 people have died in incidents blamed on organized-crime groups, mainly drug traffickers, in Mexico since late 2006, when newly inaugurated President Felipe Calderon deployed tens of thousands of soldiers and federal police to nearly a dozen states in a bid to stem the violence and root-out corruption in local law-enforcement agencies.

State and local police in Mexico are poorly paid and are often confronted with the choice known here as “plomo o plata” (lead or silver): accept a bribe for looking the other way or get killed for refusing.

During Calderon’s tenure, a total of 915 municipal police, 698 state police and 463 federal agents have been killed at the hands of criminal gangs, according to Public Safety Secretariat figures.

Story here.