Posted on 04/17/2007 4:02:45 PM PDT by SwinneySwitch
MONTERREY, Mexico — In what might be the country's single biggest slap against organized crime in years, 112 police officers were arrested Monday in the border state of Nuevo León.
The arrested law enforcers include beat cops from a dozen municipal districts and state police detectives and officers, according to a brief statement released by the state's press office.
The sweep was the first phase of an ongoing state government effort to purge criminals from police agencies, Luís Carlos Treviño, the state attorney general, later told reporters.
Treviño answered, "Probably," when asked if the arrested officers were linked to organized crime, then cautioned that he didn't want to pre-empt the investigation's outcome.
The state has not pressed charges but is holding the officers under a court order that permits arrest for 30 days without charge on suspicion of criminal involvement.
Ironically, the officers reportedly are being held where many began their careers — at the state police academy in a suburb of the state capital, Monterrey.
News photos showed the academy, which bears the words "loyalty" and "service," surrounded by soldiers Monday.
The spring cleaning of its police comes as the Nuevo León state deals with an identity crisis over its inability to quell escalating drug gang violence.
At least 50 people have been killed in suspected organized crime hits in the state this year, including 18 police officers. Warring drug cartels have left hundreds of bodies across the country's 31 states this year and Nuevo León is one of the hardest hit.
"It's a war," said Oscar Martínez, 41, a medical doctor, as he walked by a wall in Monterrey's tourist zone bearing a half-dozen freshly repaired bullet holes from a shooting that killed one person last week.
"The state was originally created to provide security and justice," he said. "If the state's not providing it, then what is it doing?"
Not one of the state's narco-executions this year has been solved by authorities. Authorities and business leaders had touted the professionalism of Nuevo León's police and criminal intelligence services before the wave of violence began.
Most of the violence has been centered in Monterrey, an industrial city of more than 3.5 million inhabitants, but none of Monday's arrests appeared to involved officers based in the city or its suburbs.
Some arrests were made in Marín, a town about 25 miles northeast of Monterrey, where soldiers and suspected drug traffickers exchanged gunfire last Wednesday, leaving one suspect dead.
The simultaneous arrests of the officers were a fresh reminder of the extent to which organized crime has infiltrated law enforcement agencies.
In March, hundreds of police in the southern state of Tabasco were disarmed in wake of the shooting of a top state official. Also this year, the Tijuana police force was temporarily disarmed by federal police due to suspected involvement with drug gangs.
Authorities might believe that "it's better, before going after drug traffickers, to investigate the police first," said Jorge Chabat, a Mexico City academic specializing in the drug cartels and their billion-dollar trade.
"This speaks of the magnitude of the problem," he said.
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mattson.sean@gmail.com
A “p” in the pool.
What a great country. The federales = the banditos. No wonder
people want to leave.
Policía Ping!
If you want on, or off this S. Texas/Mexico ping list, please FReepMail me.
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