Those who would trade liberty for security…

… you know the rest.  There is a legislative battle right now between PAN and the Calderon Administration on one side, and PRI, PRD and the legislative left on the other over police reforms.  The Calderonistas are pushing for a single national police force under the control of the Federal Executive and the opposition parties, for varying reasons, agrees that better police coordination is needed, but rejects a consolidated police.

In this case, it’s the leftist parties that are fighting the consolidation, and — if you read the rightist, or pro-PAN publications — is to maintain local government control (read “patronage”) where opposition parties have the upper hand.  For the lefties, it’s also a matter of civil liberties.  Police answerable only to the Federal Executive could be used to quash legitimate dissent.  Of course, local coppers are used to put down dissenting movements now… but when they do, they risk their own electorial advantage if the movement is indeed popular with the locals, and — if they are unable to control the movement — then they need to compromise with the dissenters or open themselves to federal control (and risk removal from office for “inability to govern”).  I tend to prefer a few pockets of anarchy and the risk of some violence to a police-state, but that’s a personal thing.

A more conservative argument against federalizing the police is also a basic capitalist one.  If I were in the gangster biz, I’d rather only have to bribe one or two key officials, than handle the bribes for local police chiefs, state police inspector generals, federal police commanders — any one of whom might, in a fit of honest pique, undo my dirty work.  A unitary police force would make bribery and corruption a much simpler task.

For the honest coppers, and those of us who support them, the less unified the police, the better.  If there are corrupt forces, it’s easier to replace, say, the transitos of Fulanatitlan, than to pick out the bad apples buried omewhere in a huge police apparatus “controlling” a country of 120,000,000

I don’t like to just post full articles, but unfortunately The (Mexico City) News doesn’t seem to have an on-line archival system that works.   Michel Marizco’s “The more things change …?” in today’s The (Mexico City) News (09-December 2008 ) is copyright ©2008, Editorial Qwertyuiop S.A. de C.V. and used with… trepidation.

Crusty old Border Patrol agents have a saying up here, “The only difference between the U.S. and Mexico is that in Mexico, the money’s on the table.”

I’ve been thinking about that a lot this past week, watching the United States carry on with its modus operandi of throwing enough money at a problem to make it go away.

I worry about the gringos, I really do. Until I start thinking that maybe they really do know what they’re doing. And when I start thinking like that, I get worried because whatever they see, I am not seeing it yet.

Last week, the United States forked over the first payment of a $400 million pledge to Mexico’s security. It’s replete in helicopters, scanners, training and something disturbingly vague called an Anti-Gang Strategy. U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza called it “the most significant effort ever undertaken” by the Americans and the Mexicans.

What do they see? What am I not seeing?

From my vantage point on the Sonora border, Arturo Beltrán Leyva’s boys in the federal government are going to be getting some shiny new helicopters and semi-truck scanners to make sure their loads are going through.

What else can we expect? What else does anybody expect?

The case against high-ranking officials in the Special Investigations of Organized Crime unit, SIEDO, was just beginning to be get interesting in late October. You may remember the case, two high ranking officials within the SIEDO had been arrested and accused of taking $400,000 salaries dropped off in a suitcase every month by Beltrán’s people.

The news was clouded, it nearly disappeared, and in the media it seemed to completely disappear when that plane carrying Juan Mouriño and José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos went down. The case against Santiago Vasconcelos’ former subordinates had just barely begun when the man died.

For years, I’d been hearing what a remarkable man he was; how the SIEDO was going to function like an island of law enforcement, isolated from the silken strands of Sinaloan narco-dollars. How under the Fox administration, the SIEDO was going to be a new type of law enforcement. It wasn’t and that fact is not changed by the demise of the agency’s former director.

Two weeks ago, another top official went down; Rodolfo Gutiérrez, AFI’s top voice in Interpol, also working for the Beltrán family.

Now, the answer we’ll hear – and I hear it from the gringos every time a renegade Border Patrol agent gets arrested – is that their arrests are indicative of a fabulously working system. That they’ve fallen into the leaching fields of a perfect biosphere and were surfaced on the outside; the system is clean.

Sure.

And War is Peace and Ignorance is Strength, yadda yadda.

I was astonished, I don’t know why, last year, when the U.S. State Department sold a bid to a U.S. technology company on behalf of the Mexicans. They wanted a system that would monitor every cell, landline, fax, chat message, e-mail and Internet posting coming in and out of the country.

For whom? Who was going to be listening on those calls?

The Americans seem to think, just about every time, that this time is going to be different.

Now I’ve had the same hope in Las Vegas and it usually ended with trouble and an emergency call to the bank in the middle of the night.

Is this what we’re seeing? The gringos hitting and hitting, when they should be staying? Topping 21 every time and cursing their luck then throwing down another stack of chips?

Or do they understand something I’m not seeing in Mexico’s narco-woes?