Monday,
October 19, 2009
Ever More Military Officers Head Mexican Police Agencies
Frontera NorteSur Special Report
A retired
Mexican Air Force major, who served as a police commander in the embattled border city of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, has assumed
the top police job in the violence-torn southern state of Guerrero. Major Valentin Diaz, commander of the Delicias precinct
for the Ciudad Juarez municipal police from March to September of this year, was named director of the Guerrero State Ministerial
Police (PIM) on October 7.
The air force pilot and military lawyer replaced Erit Montufar Mendoza, who directed the
PIM during the last six years and oversaw its transformation from the old judicial police force to an ostensibly modernized
organization capable of imparting justice.
But Montufar's tenure was punctuated by numerous controversies, including
the arrest of the late environmental activist Felipe Arreaga, an unprecedented upsurge in narco-violence, and the unsolved
assassinations of numerous politicians, most notably Armando Chavarria, president of the Guerrero State Congress, last August.
Earlier
this year Montufar was drawn into a polemic of sorts with the media-savvy Comandante Ramiro, of the Revolutionary Army of
the Insurgent People (ERPI), a leftist guerrilla organization with a long history in Guerrero. The revolutionary outlaw and
Montufar accused one another of responsibility for violent acts in rural communities of Guerrero.
Montufar's dismissal
was preceded by an October 1 incident in which PIM personnel were accused of assaulting leaders of the center-left Party of
the Democratic Revolution (PRD), including Chavarria's son, during a public demonstration in the state capital of Chilpancingo.
In
a chat with the Mexican press, Diaz declined to comment on the legal turmoil in Guerrero. He told journalists that time was
needed to travel the state and learn its problems. A native of Veracruz, Diaz was a resident of Zapopan, Jalisco, before
going to Ciudad Juarez earlier this year as part of a campaign to clean up the local police.
Diaz's service in Ciudad
Juarez coincided with a purge of the police force and the enlistment of new officers, who were dispatched to receive military
training at an army base in Santa Gertrudris, Chihuahua, before taking on their new duties. According to Ciudad Juarez Mayor
Jose Reyes Ferriz, the new graduates will hit the border city's streets trained in urban combat and armed with German-made
assault rifles.
To complete the makeover, Reyes has been lobbying the Obama administration for more than $4.5 million
in funds from the Merida Initiative to equip the police with encrypted digital radios and improved surveillance cameras.
The
appointment of Air Force veteran Diaz to direct a civilian police force in Guerrero, a state with a long history of human
rights violations by soldiers, prompted ample commentary. The former ruling and re-ascendant PRI party said it was willing
to give Diaz the benefit of the doubt. Juan Alarcon, president of the Guerrero State Human Rights Commission, had a similar
posture.
Governor Zeferino Torreblanca, who was elected with the support of the PRD in 2005 but has since fallen out
of favor with the party rank-and-file and much of its local leadership, denied that Diaz was appointed at the behest of the
Mexican Defense Ministry.
"We selected the person who we believed was the best fit for the job," Torreblanca quipped
to reporters. "We had already talked with him, and it seemed to me that (Diaz) would be able to help in the task of restructuring
this agency, which is not easy."
In his application that landed the Guerrero job, Diaz wrote that he left his job in
Ciudad Juarez to pursue a job in a more "tranquil" location.
Guerrero, however, is anything but tranquil these days.
In terms of gore, Mexico's premier [sic] international tourist destination now seems to be competing with Ciudad Juarez.
A
sampling of recent events include the murder of journalist Juan Daniel Martinez Gil, the slaying of a former treasurer of
the Guerrero State Ranchers Union, multiple decapitations of presumed criminals, the murders of two army officers whose bodies
were found floating in the polluted Tres Palos Lagoon outside Acapulco, the shooting deaths of five women in Petatlan on the
Pacific Coast, and, for good measure, occasional grenade attacks.
In Zihuatanejo, six taxi cab drivers are missing
after mysteriously vanishing in recent weeks. A cabbie and his passenger from the tourist town were gunned down on October
12 in Petatlan, in one of countless murky incidents which are typically linked to a multi-layered war for control of the dope-rich
state.
Over a three-day span from October 8 to 11, at least 21 people were slain in different sections of the state.
In the village of Izoctepec, a pitched battle with automatic weapons erupted after residents resisted gunmen reportedly attempting
to kidnap a teenager.
Clearly, Diaz has his hands more than full.
More
Militarization?
Diaz's appointment buttresses a steady trend of placing active duty or retired military personnel
in charge of civilian policing in Mexico. In Guerrero, for instance, another military man, General Juan Heriberto Salinas
Altes, has run the state's public safety agency during the Torreblanca administration.
In another key development,
this month the new mayor of Leon, Guanajuato, Ricardo Sheffield Padilla of the National Action Party (PAN), named army Major
Maria Guadalupe Anguiano Sanchez as the city's new public safety director. To head the municipal police, Sheffield appointed
army Lt. Francisco Javier Martinez Espinosa.
Like Chihuahua and Guerrero, Guanajuato and its state capital of Leon
have become a strategic front in the war between competing drug cartels.
Leon's municipal police department was the
object of a national scandal after a video was aired last year that showed new recruits undergoing torture, apparently to
familiarize them with aggressive interrogation techniques.
In 2009, scandal surfaced again in Leon when state police
officer Humberto Puga was accused of raping a woman undergoing questioning at the state attorney general's office.
In
announcing Anguiano's appointment, Sheffield said that the new official would have the "sensibility" to manage with a human
rights perspective. The new mayor contended that having two military veterans in charge of the local police would "stamp discipline"
on the more than one thousand cops who police the city of 1.5 million people.
As a military prosecutor, Maj. Anguiano
was involved in prosecuting the case against the late General Francisco Quiroz Hermosillo and General Mario Arturo Acosta
Chaparro for allegedly aiding the Juarez cartel in the early part of the decade and in the 1990s. In 2007, Acosta Chaparro
was absolved of the charges after spending nearly seven years in military confinement.
In Guerrero, Acosta Chaparro
was a central figure in the so-called dirty war of the 1970s, when hundreds of people were forcibly disappeared during anti-guerrilla
campaigns. Despite numerous testimonies linking the officer and other members of the security forces to the disappearances,
no one has been convicted of crimes and the fate of the disappeared has never been fully clarified.
In a move that
provoked outrage from human rights groups, Acosta Chaparro retired from the armed forces with full honors last year.
Ties that Bind
The violence raging in Chihuahua, Guerrero and Guanajuato takes
place amid a stormy economic context. All three states suffer from the downturn or collapse of industries tied to the
United States and world economies that once provided employment opportunities, however limited and low-paid, to the new generations.
Now even the lowliest of jobs are growing scarce.
Mexico's vanguard state for border assembly plants known as maquiladoras,
Chihuahua has seen tens of thousands of jobs in the sector evaporate since late 2007. Dependent on tourism, Guerrero and its
world famous resorts of Acapulco and Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo is less and less the choice affluent, foreign tourists.
Perhaps
not surprisingly, the decline of legal economic activities has been accompanied by the rise of illegal ones, including small
scale drug dealing, product piracy, petty and mass extortion of small merchants, and the kidnapping of anyone who might have
money.
The cradle of conservatism and President Felipe Calderon's PAN party, Leon has undergone a transformation similar
to Chihuahua and Guerrero. In Leon's case, shoe-making was the local industry that was swept up and blown away in the global
economic hurricane. Increasingly, Mexico's historic shoe capital has been hard-pressed by cheaper imports, especially from
China.
In 2008 an estimated 54.7 million pairs of 286.2 million shoes purchased in Mexico, or approximately 20 percent
of the national market share, were manufactured abroad. As many as 10,000 jobs may have been lost in Leon's shoe industry
since last year.
Clouding
a dismal economic landscape, Mayor Sheffield declared that he arrived in office only to discover that the municipal coffers
could be down by about US$3 million because of a bad investment scheme connected to the Metrofinanciera company.
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Sources:
El Sur, October 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 2009. Articles by Brenda Escobar, Francisco Magana, Zacarias Cervantes, Aurora Harrison,
and Agencia Reforma. Despertar de la Costa, October 8 and 13, 2009. Articles by Yamilet Villa Arreola, Marco Antonio Villegas
and ANG. La Jornada (Guerrero edition), September 25, 2009; October 8, 9, 12, and 14, 2009. Articles by Rodolfo Valadez Luviano,
Margena de la O, Sergio Ocampo, Laura Reyes Maciel, and editorial staff. Lapolaka.com, October 5, 2009. Proceso/Apro,
July 29, 2009; September 24, 2009; October 8, 2009. El Universal, June 2 and October 11, 2009. Articles by Xochitl Alvarez
and EFE. La Jornada, April 25, 2008 August 3, 2009; October 7, 10 and 13, 2009. Articles by Carlos Garcia, Sergio Ocampo,
and editorial staff. Narconews.com, July 4, 2008. Article by Kristin Becker. La Cronica de Hoy, June 30, 2007.
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Frontera NorteSur (FNS)
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico
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Reprinted
with authorization from Frontera NorteSur, a free, on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news source; translation FNS
