Mexican Military Winning Respect (From who?)

MEXICO CITY – Army soldiers in fatigues and troop carriers recently invaded the small town of San Luis Tlaxialtemalco on the outskirts of the capital. Armed with stainless-steel scissors, tiny screwdrivers, dentist drills and rabies vaccinations, troops launched a special operation.

The first day's results: 118 haircuts, 38 fixed electrical appliances, 97 dental appointments and 76 dogs vaccinated before the medicine ran out.

Twelve-year-old José Ángel Gregorio Romano, who asked the soldiers to fix his broken cassette player, was one of many residents who applauded the military incursion.

"I would like to be a soldier myself someday," said José Ángel, who wore an olive green T-shirt to the Mexican army's "Social Labor" event, in which the troops help poor communities and present a friendly image of the military.

Long associated with the 1968 student massacre in Mexico City, the "dirty war" against rebels in the 1970s and the squelching of the 1994 Zapatista Indian uprising, the Mexican military has a new look, a new attitude and a growing list of responsibilities.

Just as Mexico is rolling out a new democracy free of the one-party monopoly that controlled all aspects of government for decades, the country is going against conventional wisdom. The role of its armed forces – one of the largest in Latin America – is actually expanding into civilian life, worrying human-rights activists in the process.

But President Vicente Fox, who ended one party's 71-year lock on the presidency is 2000, may have had little choice, analysts said.

Upon taking office, he found crumbling and corrupt justice institutions that had to be quickly replaced. Mr. Fox found a controversial solution in the 240,000-strong military.

While Mexican armed forces are considered less corrupt than police, drug money has reached high-ranking generals, and human-rights groups still accuse the military of rights violations, especially in rural communities.

But those concerns have not been enough to keep soldiers from acquiring new tasks. Today, soldiers are battling drug traffickers, kidnappers, customs violators, gunrunners, insurgents and clandestine tree loggers.

"The Mexican military is like a broad-spectrum antibiotic that's being used now in Mexico to cure a variety of social infections," said Oscar Rocha, head of the Joaquín Amaro Foundation for National Security and former liaison between the Mexican and U.S. militaries.

"Unlike any other Latin American nation today, to see the military on our streets doing police work and cutting hair is not a bad thing."

Although some Mexicans continue to be wary of the army, the military's overall trustworthiness is much higher than that of police and politicians, opinion surveys show.

Lucía Romo Sánchez, 47, weighed the soldiers' dark past with their helpful present as she waited for a dentist in San Luis Tlaxialtemalco.

"They seem calmer than before," said Ms. Romo, who lived in downtown Mexico City in the 1960s – "a terrible time" when the military helped crack down on student demonstrators.

Victims of past military abuses in places such as Atoyac, Guerrero, on the Pacific Coast, cite Mr. Fox's use of the army to supplant civilian government as an example of what they call his failed democracy.

Few places in Mexico are home to as many troops as Guerrero, where for years, the shadowy Popular Revolutionary Army has launched sporadic ambushes against soldiers and police.

"Look at what militarization of the countryside has brought us: prostitution, alcoholism, sexual abuse against Indian women and garbage everywhere," said Hilda Navarrete, a leader of the human-rights group Voice of the People Without a Voice.

Ms. Navarrete warned of future problems as the military moves further into law enforcement.

"Soldiers are trained to kill, not to respect human rights. They have an overly important role in society that is questionable," she said.

Military analysts said Mexico's armed forces reflect civilian bosses in terms of corruption and rights issues; this government, they said, is cleaning up past abuses.

"They keep being asked to perform these tasks that in the United States would be performed by civilian agencies and police forces," said Roderic Camp, a professor and military expert at Claremont McKenna College in California.

"The irony is that Fox said on the campaign trial that he wanted to get the military out of law enforcement, and the military would be more than happy to do so."

When Mr. Fox saw an urgent need for a trustworthy force to help him ratchet up the war on drug traffickers, he called on elite commando units whose leaders are often trained in the United States.

That bust was the crowning moment for the commandos, who've captured many of the most notorious drug criminals in Mexico in the last year. They also discovered a tunnel that had ferried billions of dollars worth of drugs from the Mexican state of Baja California to the United States.

The Arrellano Félix brothers – one of whom was killed in a February shootout with police allegedly on a rival drug lord's payroll – had been Mexico's most wanted criminals since they were linked to a mistaken hit on a Roman Catholic cardinal in 1993.

Likewise, when the federal government needed a new, FBI-like investigative force to slow an unprecedented kidnapping wave, it drew from the army and its intelligence branches.

Army officers on loan from the military now occupy key posts in the federal attorney general's office and its Agency of Federal Investigation.

Separately, the military's "social labor" operations – which offer medical and other services to people who normally could not afford them – are so popular that civilian authorities must line up to get on the list.

The army is proud of its social work, military analysts said, because it helps enlisted men and women help the poor and rural communities that are a source of many military personnel.

In recent months, the military has taken over highway searches for drugs and arms once conducted by the Federal Judicial Police, a notoriously corrupt branch of the attorney general's office.

Trim soldiers now stand guard at federal tollbooths and bolster security at the U.S-Mexico border, although that work has led to allegations of drug-running and high-profile shootings by soldiers.

"The police institutions have collapsed in Mexico from a lack of attention by politicians who never made them a priority," said Sergio Aguayo, a leading political and national security analyst. "The tragedy for Vicente Fox is that he has no institutions to drive his promise of change."

"There's a danger of spreading the military services too thinly so that discipline begins to slip," said Javier Oliva, professor at the National Defense College and an adviser to the Mexican military. "It is important that civilian leaders make the great political effort to clean up police institutions and other ministries so that soldiers can concentrate on military duties."

Despite incidents pointing to scattered, high-profile corruption – such as the 1997 jailing of a corrupt drug czar, Gen. Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo – Mexico's armed forces have responded well.

"What separates institutions from anarchy is a solid chain of command," Mr. Aguayo said. "That's why the army will continue to play a number of roles in Mexican society."

Privately, some U.S. law enforcement officials were skeptical when Mr. Fox named Rafael Macedo de la Concha, at the time the army's chief prosecutor, to be Mexico's attorney general. But the American doubts were soon erased when Mr. Macedo and his team of high-ranking army lawyers and intelligence officers began an immediate overhaul of the department, firing at least 400 agents and demoting dozens more.

Now former army officers control training for the department, while another military officer, Genaro García Luna, is chief of the new Federal Investigative Agency. In recent weeks, that unit has arrested at least 75 suspected kidnappers. In one murky incident, however, a kidnap suspect was tortured and killed while in custody.

The army officers "bring to the table discipline and a sense of order," said one U.S. official, who asked not to be identified.

"The military role makes sense," he added, "because of the extra amount of violence among traffickers. Mexican police are literally outgunned."

The Mexican military, however, has not always enjoyed such a level of respect. Mexicans remain suspicious of the army's role in the 1968 student riot on the Tlatelolco square, where dozens of students were massacred.

Only in recent weeks has the Fox government opened the official files of hundreds of civilians who disappeared during the "dirty war" of the 1970s in the southern state of Guerrero.

"Those were the dark days," said Humberto Toledo, a national security analyst and professor at the Autonomous Technical Institute of Mexico.

"But it is difficult to judge the acts of the military of 30 years ago with the standards we apply today. It was a different set of civilians using the military then. And, it was during the Cold War."

Even in the Zapatista uprising in the 1990s, the army was heavily criticized for human-rights abuses, for arbitrary arrests and for allegedly arming and training paramilitary groups.

But unlike Colombia, Venezuela and other Latin American nations, the military in Mexico has a strong history of loyalty to civilian command and has mostly stayed out of politics.

"In other countries, they are just now bringing issues of professionalism and loyalty to civilian command to the table," said Mr. Oliva, the military adviser. "In Chile, for example, the president is not the military chief. But in Mexico, the military moves in the direction the president directs, regardless of his political leaning. ... Here, the president is the only five-star general."

Even though today's military was born in the fire of the Mexican Revolution, its political aspirations were tamed decades ago.

Until 1958, all of Mexico's defense ministers had fought in the revolution. But it was Gen. Joaquín Amaro, in the 1920s, who professionalized the military and set up the command structure and deployment patterns that exist today.

In the 1940s, Manuel Avila Camacho became Mexico's last military leader-turned-president. He separated the military from the all-powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, which controlled Mexican life until Mr. Fox's election in 2000.

"It was historically the fourth sector of the PRI, and if that were to have continued, the military would be much different and less trustworthy today," said Mr. Toledo, the Mexico City professor.

While most Mexicans support deployment of the military throughout Mexican society, analysts said, there is a fear that it will last too long.

"Drugs have the capacity to corrupt anyone, so it would not be wise to have the army involved for too long in what should be the work of a strong civilian police force," said Mr. Rocha, the military analyst.

Mr. Fox "will be making a mistake if, while he relies heavily on the army, he does not take the drastic necessary measures to tear down and rebuild the nation's police forces from the ground up."

Earlier this year, the commandos surprised Drug Enemy No. 1, Benjamín Arellano Félix. Acting on a U.S. intelligence tip, they swooped down on a middle-class neighborhood in the city of Puebla without alerting local police and federal agents – some allegedly corrupted by the Arellano Félix cartel.

That bust was the crowning moment for the commandos, who've captured many of the most notorious drug criminals in Mexico in the last year. They also discovered a tunnel that had ferried billions of dollars worth of drugs from the Mexican state of Baja California to the United States.

The Arrellano Félix brothers – one of whom was killed in a February shootout with police allegedly on a rival drug lord's payroll – had been Mexico's most wanted criminals since they were linked to a mistaken hit on a Roman Catholic cardinal in 1993.

I bet getting Arellano Félix out of the way cost the Herrera cartel plenty. But they'll make it up from the shipments heading north this year and next, no doubt.

Strange new found respect for the organization that regularly violates our southern frontier. Is this article some sort of PR plant?

Nah. It's by Laurence Iliff and Ricardo Sandoval, of the Dallas morning dishrag. they're sympaticos.

Sympathisers.

-archy-/-

Trim soldiers now stand guard at federal tollbooths and bolster security at the U.S-Mexico border

And the full-dress uniforms are even more impressive!

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