. . .
Mexican president Felipe Calderón must have felt thoroughly thwarted once again by the events in Juárez. He was scheduled to arrive in the city on Monday, March 16, to follow up the Todos Somos Juárez efforts, which had now been underway for a month. Calderón had expended great effort to make Todos Somos Juárez a success. The consulate executions of necessity changed the president’s agenda. Rather than coming to Juárez to assess the progress of his government’s most important initiative, Calderón was arriving amid another political furor; he was stepping into an international crisis that had already elicited comments from President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. When Calderón stepped off of the presidential plane, the focus was not on the Mexican federal government’s efforts to rebuild the city and reignite its hope; instead, the focus was on the consulate executions and what they portended for the future, not only for Juárez but also for Mexico and U.S.-Mexico relations. Indeed, this may have been an additional motive behind the execution of the three individuals associated with the consulate.
The timing of the U.S. State Department’s updated Mexico Travel Warning and war-zone directives regarding consular dependents in six border cities coincided with Calderón’s arrival in Juárez. That reality no doubt propelled the Mexican president into an atypically aggressive stance toward the United States. When asked for his reaction, Calderón said pointedly and forcefully that “this is a binational problem and therefore the fight against drug trafficking is a responsibility of both governments.”
However, there were other considerations also weighing heavily on the president’s mind. With local, regional, and national elections just three months off, the timing of the consulate murders could not have been worse for a president whose poll numbers continued to drop and whose party, therefore, was at risk for losing substantial influence. Calderón himself was not up for reelection. By law, Mexican presidents serve a single six-year term, and the next presidential contest would not be until July 2012. But the stakes in the coming elections were high. In addition to federal congressional seats, mayorships and governorships were up for grabs all over the country, and a weakened president spelled problems for the president’s party, the PAN. That, in turn, potentially spelled problems for the United States, who had found in Felipe Calderón a unique and strong ally.
Notes
1. Ortiz Arellano had been appointed by Mayor Reyes Ferriz in October 2009 to run the municipal prison. He was subsequently removed from that post in May 2010. In November 2010, he and his twenty-eight-year-old son were executed in Juárez.
2. Vicente Fox, Calderón’s predecessor, had opened the doors to extradition of Mexican citizens to the United States. Under Calderón, extraditions of narco-traffickers had more than doubled.
CHAPTER 28
The Federal Police
In every interview I conducted with Mexican federal officials they were consistent about one fact: from the beginning of Felipe Calderón’s administration, the strategy had been to deploy the Mexican Army as a stopgap measure until the federal and local police forces were strong enough to continue the war against the drug cartels. On April 8, 2010, five thousand additional federal police arrived in Juárez to relieve the army of its law enforcement duties. The army would continue patrolling the countryside around the city, as well as the highways, the Juárez airport, and the international bridges, but they would no longer conduct policing activities in Juárez. Since February 2008, when Patricio Patiño had promised José Reyes Ferriz two hundred reinforcements, the federal police had gradually increased its presence in the city to about 2,500. But it was the army that had taken over the city’s policing duties when the municipal police was disbanded in March of 2009, and until April 2010 the army had been the most important player in the city’s security operations, even as the federal police had gradually increased their profile.
The Juárez municipal police remained, at best, sputtering and inefficient, if not under the same level of cartel influence as in the past; their operations became, in effect, supervised by the federal police as of April 8, 2010. Gustavo de la Rosa, for one, welcomed the change. The army had generated some 1,500 human rights complaints before de la Rosa’s Human Rights Commission, far more than the federal police, although those against the federal police were in some ways more severe. There were complaints against the army that included torture and murder, but the preponderance was for abuse of power, forced entry, those sorts of things. Though significantly fewer in number, the complaints against the federal police included extortion and kidnapping. For de la Rosa, a major advantage of having the federal police patrolling the streets was that civilian courts handled the human rights complaints against them, whereas closed military courts handled complaints against the army. This meant that it was more difficult to cover up complaints against the federal police.
The federal police expanded Juárez’s historic six zones or precincts to nine sectors, permitting a more even deployment of resources across the city. They also broke the city down further into a grid consisting of 156 quadrants, with twenty-four-hour response teams, and they assumed control of the city’s Emergency Response Center, upgrading the equipment with computerized work stations that helped them identify the GPS-equipped units that were nearest the locations where incidents were taking place. Finally, the federal police built a new command center. The question that remained was whether the investment of forces and upgraded technology would have an impact on what was taking place in the streets.
Federal police arrive in Juárez in force, April 2010. Photo copyright © Raymundo Ruiz.
. . .
Genaro García Luna had been in Mexican law enforcement for twenty-two years, and for almost half of that time he had been heading efforts to clean up the nation’s notoriously corrupt police forces by professionalizing them, raising salaries, and increasing training. During Calderón’s tenure, the federal police had gone from roughly 6,500 officers (it had been called the Federal Preventive Police at the time) to its present 35,000 officers. Eight thousand of the agents had university degrees, and the level of training, including coursework with American and European law enforcement services, was unprecedented. The force could not be said to be beyond reproach—numerous officers had been caught participating in organized crime activities, including collaboration with the cartels—but it was far and above better and cleaner than any police force Mexico had ever seen.
Along the way, García Luna had incurred many enemies and found himself at the center of allegations that he was in the pay of El Chapo Guzmán, who, it was alleged, was using the federal police to support the Sinaloa cartel’s activities. Proceso, a left-of-center magazine with a penchant for publishing grisly, full-color images of the narco horrors, once ran a story claiming that in October 2008 El Chapo had intercepted García Luna’s security convoy on a lonely road near Cuernavaca, Morelos. The story claimed that El Chapo’s men had disarmed and blindfolded García Luna’s twenty-seven bodyguards before escorting him to a four-hour meeting with the Sinaloa cartel’s top capo, after which El Chapo purportedly told Mexico’s top law enforcement officer, sternly and within earshot of his bodyguards, “This is your first and last warning so that you understand that we can get to you if you don’t live up to the agreements.”
The account was improbable. García Luna travels with a minimum of ten highly armed men in vehicles with armor that can withstand a bomb blast; it is unlikely that they would have simply pulled over and allowed El Chapo’s men to disarm them. Also, people like El Chapo Guzmán worked by way of intermediaries; they didn’t suddenly show up in the middle of the night at roadblocks, as the story depicted. The purported source was an unnamed, disgruntled García Luna bodyguard who’d supposedly come forth because he felt “humiliated” at having to surrender his weapon to one of El Chapo’s sicarios. The story had the ring of fantasy, but it was reported as fact in Proceso, without so much as a caveat that it could not be independently verified.
&
nbsp; But the allegations were persistent and part of a larger thesis that argued that the federal forces in Juárez, both the army and the federal police, were acting as proxies for the Sinaloa cartel, in an attempt to wrest the plaza from the hands of the Juárez cartel. The fact that arrests and seizures appeared to be lopsided, with the Juárez cartel taking a disproportionate percentage of the hits, lent further credence to this allegation.1 However, it was also true that Juárez was the home base of the Juárez cartel, whereas El Chapo’s cartel was based in the state of Sinaloa and its presence in Juárez consisted of what might be termed an expeditionary force. In addition, on a national scale, the federal government had taken down many significant Sinaloa cartel capos and captured a great deal of their weapons and product, including tons of cocaine. The numbers simply did not support the allegations. According to official federal police documents, between December of 2006 (the start of the drug war) and November 2010, 1,919 cartel members had been arrested nationally. Of these, 365 belonged to the Sinaloa cartel and 178 to the Juárez cartel. The Gulf cartel had sustained the greatest number of arrests, at 703, with La Familia running second, with 570.
In a country where for decades the daily bread had been a social order governed by corruption, where almost every citizen had suffered the demands and indignities of predatory officials, from street corner cops to petty bureaucrats, and where citizens had seen the people at the top, including presidents and their cabinet ministers, enriched by insider deals and theft of the national patrimony, it was nearly impossible to view an official like García Luna as not made of the same cloth. The rumors of his narcoalliance with El Chapo were easy enough to believe and, in fact, impossible to discard outright, because the counterexamples were almost nonexistent. And, in any event, Mexico is a country that thrives on such rumors, where the disease of cynicism has sunk deep into the country’s innermost tissues. When a magazine like Proceso ran front-cover headlines like “García Luna’s Farce,” well, what else was one to believe? In Mexico, it was difficult to develop a conviction that any politician and, certainly, anyone associated with law enforcement, was clean and had the best interest of the country foremost in his or her heart.
In addition to the fact that many Sinaloa cartel people had been taken down, my hesitation in accepting the otherwise widely accepted premise that federal forces were in the pocket of the Sinaloa cartel stemmed from personal observation: in the two years I’d been traveling to Juárez I had, on numerous occasions, spent time with some of the federal police. Having grown up in Mexico, I had the same instinctive mistrust of police that most Mexicans do. However, in Juárez, whenever possible, I approached federal police at crime scenes and tried to engage them in conversation. I typically found them polite but reserved, especially when they saw that I had a camera and a notebook. At one point, attending an all-day dog-and-pony show (which had not been particularly impressive or revelatory to me), I had found the commander in charge of the day, a man named José Galdino Menera Molina, a veteran, congenial enough. A couple of days before the official tour, twelve federal police officers (eleven men and one woman) had been found brutally tortured and murdered in Michoacán, their bodies dumped on a desolate road. A significant part of the Juárez federal police contingent was being redeployed to Michoacán, where, in ten separate attacks, members of the La Familia cartel had also ambushed patrols and shot up hotels where federal agents were bivouacked. I spent a couple of hours on the tarmac talking to the officers waiting to board the airplanes that would ferry them to Michoacán. They did not impress me as thugs; most were young men who planned careers in law enforcement and believed in what they were doing. They were outraged at what had happened to their comrades and aware that they were heading straight into harm’s way. No doubt there were thieves, extortionists, and brutal men among them, but most were simply law enforcement officers doing their jobs.
One officer who I encountered at a narco-lab, where the federal police had found twenty kilos of cocaine, had initially been standoffish and even brusque, but over the course of the four hours that I was there (a rumor had circulated that they were going to permit a tour of the lab once they had secured its contents), he eventually warmed up. He was a young man, only on the force for two years. “The girls here won’t even look at us,” he lamented. “They all want narco-boyfriends, not men like us who are trying to do something for our country.” It was a moment of candor from a man far away from home on what was an increasingly thankless mission.
I also spent time on three different occasions with a federal police intelligence inspector (the man who’d hosted the meeting at the Intelligence Center where I’d seen the videotaped executions). He was a career officer who was disenchanted with the force and nearing retirement. He’d taken me under his wing, twice inviting me to lunch with him and his troops at one of the hotels temporarily housing deployed federal police (the hotel obviously catered to by-the-hour clientele when there wasn’t a narco-war going on in town). I’d seen the respect with which his people treated him, and he them. He’d talked candidly about his views regarding the expensive security cameras that had gone up all over the city. (“They’re useless,” he said. “They haven’t helped us solve a single crime.”) He’d given me books about Juárez and shown me books he was reading, one about unorthodox European approaches to rehabilitating prisoners and the concept of prisons without walls, and one about the history of drug use that argued that every civilization had used drugs and that they should be legalized. “That would put an end to most of this insanity,” he’d said. The man was humble, and of humble origins; he was one of the older generation, the generation that had not gone to college, although his children were now at university.
I was aware of the fact that there were allegations that some of the federal police were extorting individuals and shopkeepers, competing with the local gangs for the cuota. Indeed, subsequently, in August of 2010, a group of 250 federal police officers mutinied in Juárez, accusing their commander, Salomón Alarcón Olvera, and his lieutenants of planting drugs and guns on people in order to extort them, while pressing the officers of their unit, the Third Group, to participate in their activities under penalty of losing their jobs. Those who did not comply were accused of crimes and arrested. In fact, the mutiny had been sparked by the arrest of an officer named Víctor Manuel Desid, who, his fellow officers maintained, had had drugs planted on him for not going along with Commander Alarcón Olvera’s schemes. The mutineers had called the Juárez media after Desid’s arrest, and when they arrived, the officers kicked in the door to the commander’s quarters, where they found drugs and confiscated weapons that the officers said the commander and his people planted on innocent victims.
Alarcón Olvera and three of his lieutenants were immediately relieved of their duties.2 Later that same month, Facundo Rosas, the director of the federal police and Genaro García Luna’s right-hand man, announced that 3,200 officers had been relieved of their duties in recent months in a housecleaning effort that had been underway since May of 2010. That represented nearly 10 percent of the federal police force. Of these, 465 had been charged with breaking the law, while another 1,020 faced disciplinary actions after failing portions of the Confidence Test.
I asked José Reyes Ferriz about his views regarding the federal police. “Some of them came to Juárez to do their jobs,” he told me. “Others saw it as a ‘business opportunity.’” He was well aware that there were federal police who were of the Alarcón Olvera mold, corrupt and, through that corruption, contributing to the losing battle for hearts and minds in Juárez. But in his view these were the exception. He said the federal police rotated through the city for three-month stints, after which the units were sent elsewhere, precisely in an effort to make it more difficult for them to be corrupted or engage in criminal activity. He also said that there had been several occasions on which he had asked Facundo Rosas to remove a unit because of allegations against it, and that Rosas had obliged every time he’d made such a request.
The mayor liked Genaro García Luna; he described him as strong, a man on a mission to leave his mark on Mexican law enforcement. “That’s been his goal for years, everything he’s trained for, aimed for, pushed for,” Reyes Ferriz said. He also described him as a man with a strong need for control, which had led to skirmishes within Calderón’s security cabinet, skirmishes that García Luna invariably won.
The fact that the federal police were taking over in Juárez was an example of that influence. Reyes Ferriz recalled arriving at the military garrison for a security meeting in January of 2010. “It was the top dogs,” he said, given that the meeting included Guillermo Valdés, the head of the CISEN; Jorge Tello Peón, Calderón’s national security advisor; Facundo Rosas, the director of the federal police; General Felipe de Jesús Espitia, commander of the 5th Military Zone; Governor Reyes Baeza; and the state prosecutor, Patricia González, among others. The surprise, however, was the presence of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual, as well as representatives from the DEA and the FBI.3 It was the mayor’s impression that the Americans were pushing for the federal police to take over the Juárez operations, which is what was announced at the meeting. The shift was news to the army, which apparently did not take it well. General Espitia was furious, according to the mayor. “I thought it was a mistake,” Reyes Ferriz said. “The army was becoming more and more effective.” Reyes Ferriz suspected that the shift had not been implemented until April precisely because of the tensions it had created with the army. “WikiLeaks later confirmed it,” the mayor added. “The U.S. was backing the federal police over the army.”4 Reyes Ferriz’s point was that Genaro García Luna had won; “He clearly had the ear of the president,” he observed.
The Fight to Save Juárez Page 35