Mexico rallies against kidnappings, cartel violence, police corruption

In Mexico, a popular political backlash may be swelling thanks to the rising tide of drug cartel-related killings and the lawlessness left in its wake, at least to judge by reports of a rally in Mexico City Saturday drawing more than 200,000 people in the capital as well as simultaneous rallies in all 32 Mexican states.

Kidnappings more than corrupt cops or even narco-homicides appear to be driving the most public anger, at least in the capital, reported the LA Times:

The abduction anxieties run across a surprisingly wide swath of society. There have been cases in which working-class families were ordered to pay as little as $500 to get a relative back.

A report by the daily Milenio newspaper said a review of federal statistics showed that only 1 in 8 kidnapping victims was a business executive. About half were in the middle class or below, the newspaper reported.

"They call it an elitist crime because only the rich get kidnapped, but that's not true. They'll kidnap you for $1,000 or $2,000," said Alfredo Neme Martinez, who heads a national association of wholesale merchants.

The kidnapping furor has gripped the country since the death early last month of 14-year-old Fernando Marti. The youth was found dead in Mexico City after his wealthy family, founders of a chain of sporting goods stores, reportedly paid kidnappers millions of dollars for his release.

The case has provoked public outrage by seeming to crystallize the nation's broader problems of crime and corruption, and the failure of successive governments to deal with them. Worse, the abduction may have involved police, stoking a long-held suspicion here that law enforcement officers are more a problem than a cure.

Whether police were involved in abducting Marti, clearly Mexico must dramatically reduce police corruption to have a prayer of ever defeating deep-pocketed drug cartels. While the United States has its own serious corruption problem, for the most part the public still trusts the cops. In Mexico, police impotence in the face of cartel violence has left them utterly discredited. The New York Times reports that "A big debate circulates over police checkpoints. Should one stop and risk that the people dressed as police officers really are on the side of the law?"

The old offer to police on the border now applies everywhere in Mexico - plata o plomo, silver or lead. Police who don't comply pay the price, as evidenced by the recent murder of a police chief in Chihuahua State on his first day at the job after he'd replaced another murdered police chief. Nationwide, more than 500 police have been murdered during the recent bout of violence.

There was a time not long ago when serious crime, even by drug runners, was mostly limited to the border region and to seedier regions of the capital. Today the violence has spread to every corner of Mexico.

Thankfully for the United States, so far most of the violence has stopped at the border. The El Paso Times reports that:

With more than four months remaining in 2008, there have been almost 900 homicides in Juárez.

To date in 2008, El Paso has had 12 homicides -- none believed to be related to Mexican drug violence.

Still, there was a time when the violence stopped at the borders of Colombia, but that didn't stop drug traffickers influence from steadily creeping north over time. The rallies across Mexico come during the same week that a new US intelligence report predicted cartel-related violence will increase in the near term until one group of traffickers becomes dominant. Again from the El Paso Times:

"Once a dominant cartel is established in the El Paso-Juárez plaza, stability will return to the area and the flow of drugs most likely will increase," states an annual analysis of the West Texas High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, or HIDTA, released in May by the National Drug Intelligence Center. ...

The National Drug Intelligence Center analysis says six major Mexican drug organizations plus 120 multistate groups and 606 local drug trafficking rings are operating in West Texas. The groups range in size from five to dozens of members.

The Mexican cartels also have distribution cells in dozens of cities across the United States, and have formed alliances with prison gangs, street gangs and outlaw motorcycle gangs, stated a Congressional Research Service report issued in February, titled "Mexico's Drug Cartels."

There's a good chance the main foreign policy debates in the presidential race this fall will mostly be about Iraq, the war on terror and American policy in the Middle East. But Americans, particularly those of us in border states, have a much greater interest in learning what the candidates would do about ascending violence on our own continent than half a planet away.