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Police corruption in Mexico is currently one of the greatest challenges facing Mexican law enforcement agencies, politicians, and citizens. Over decades, corrupt practices have embedded themselves into the judiciary system, businesses, government, the police force, and every day life. In 2016, the Corruption Perceptions Index placed Mexico at 123 out of the 176 countries surveyed, indicating higher than average levels of corruption relative to other nations. While high ranking officials and the federal government are widely perceived as corrupt, policemen are seen as even more corrupt as they operate at a more local level and personal basis with Mexican communities and individuals.

In Mexico, the police are often called upon last at the site of a crime, for fear that they will exacerbate the incident, indicating the low level of trust they receive from Mexican civilians. It is the consequence of a long history of authoritarian rule and the one-party system that held power uninterruptedly between 1929 and 2000, instilling bureaucratic practices that continue to permeate Mexican society and its relation to the law. For decades, the Mexican government has been battling its problem of police corruption by introducing reforms, anti-corruption agencies, and new policies. These policies and changes, though, have lacked proper implementation and proved challenging to successfully integrate, thus they produced little change in society and within the police force. As a result, the police continues to be involved in cases of extortion, kidnappings, bribery, organized crime, and drug trafficking.

The weak state and institutions are significant perpetrators of this cyclical corruption that permeates Mexico, as many officials have been captured by drug lords and cartels, leaving them powerless to mitigate change. Police units suffer from minimal funding, officers have low salaries, and they fear reporting crime or bribery as it could actually lead to further endangerment. This leads the police to seek corruption as a form of maintaining a substantial income as well as safety from other officers or members of organized crime systems.

Effects of Corruption
There are several resulting effects of police corruption. About 88% of all crimes go unreported in Mexico and of those that do, 57% of those who reported claimed they were scared to do so. Many Mexican citizens do not feel protected by the police, as 70% of Mexicans have reported a distrust of police officers. Many people have reported bribing the police, even for minor incidents such as illegal parking and other traffic violations. Furthermore, 62% of journalists murdered in Mexico since 1992 had been investigating cases of corruption and politics, and 86% of these homicides have gone unpunished. Mexico's business officials have noted that police corruption has had a severely negative influence on business and economic progress. The Mexican Institute for Competitiveness has calculated that each year corruption costs the country between 2%-10% of its GDP and reduces foreign investment by 5%. As a result, about 480,000 jobs have been wiped out from small and medium-sized businesses, causing Mexicans to leave the country in search of better opportunities, leading to a brain drain effect. Ultimately, Mexico has suffered from the cyclical problem of income distribution, poverty and social rigidity which have acted as catalysts for police corruption as well as exacerbated consequences of it. Additionally, while the past administrations have implemented reforms and policies to combat the problem of corruption, the drastic and consistent changes have in fact caused inconsistency in the system, increased distrust due to lack of understanding of all the changes, and a lack of standardization and normalization in police governing.

Historical Roots of Police Corruption in Mexico
Corruption in the police force can be traced back to the establishment of the Mexican state in the early 19th century. In determining and consolidating power, rival groups depended on arming the forces most capable of securing and maintaining the power and rule of the elite and leadership in the state. Benito Juarez, president of Mexico from 1861-1872, founded a police force known as the Rurales. In order to fill his ranks, he mobilized bandits and recruited them as his forces. As a result, the police prioritized loyalty to the government rather than to the law and the civilians, protecting the state instead of its people. This further fostered a close relationship between the state and the police, which benefited the ruling class. In this relationship, the state would grant the police significant levels of impunity and relative autonomy in exchange for political loyalty, pardoning the police of any wrongdoing against the public.

Causes of Corruption
Low government funding has lead to many instances in which individual police officers have had to obtain their own life insurance, working tools, uniforms, bullet proof vests and other necessities. Exacerbating the problems already caused by low wages and a lack of basic equipment, these conditions have led many police officers to justify engaging corrupt practices, such as pocketing bribes. Furthermore, the persistence of corruption in police culture has led to the common belief that the only way to achieve wealth as a police officer is to engage in corrupt behavior. As a result, it is common for people to enter the Mexican police force with little knowledge of their salary, expecting corruption and bribery to be their main source of income.

The historical roots influence the widespread police corruption seen in Mexico today, to the extent that is has effected democratization. An indicator of this struggle is seen in the 1997 election of Cuauhtémoc Cardenas, the first democratically elected mayor of Mexico City. Cardenas sought to eradicate corruption in the police force by holding the police more accountable to communities through measures such as lie detector tests. These measures were met with backlash, however, when the police went on strike, which caused a spike in crime, effectively making it impossible for Cardenas to fulfill the promises and the goals he had set out to meet. Police began to see democratically elected authorities as encroaching on the influence they had accumulated during the previous authoritarian government. Therefore, corruption has been aggravated as the police and government actors collude to maintain control. Mexico has a long history of police officials receiving special treatment from the elite and government officials in order to consolidate power. As Mexico developed and democratized starting in 2000 with the defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the police and enforcement institutions lagged behind.

Zedillo
Ernesto Zedillo was president of Mexico from 1994-2000, as a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. His investment in public security was minimal, at an estimated 0.008% of Mexico’s GDP, and his focus within public security was to strengthen the federal police force. At the time there were only 41 police academies that were responsible for training police going into the 20,000 police departments spanning Mexico, indicating that the majority of police officers were never properly trained. Out of those 41 police academies, only 14 of them required a 9th grade education whereas the majority had only obtained primary school education, if any at all. Upon Zedillo’s election, his administration created the Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Pública (SNSP), as a means to set a national policy and unify the police force across Mexico. His administration also chose to focus on the development of a new federal police, again focusing on the national level rather than municipal and state levels. This new police force was named the Policía Federal Preventiva (PFP) and its responsibility was to maintain order, prevent crimes and administrative violation, and provide security in federal areas such as highways, railways, and ports. It was also meant to maintain strong relationships and work alongside the local authorities. It’s differentiation from other police forces was that it would also engage in investigations and intelligence.

Due to neglect of underlying problems within the police force such as poor officer training programs or lack of equipment amongst state and municipal forces, Zedillo’s tactic proved insufficient to battling corruption. Furthermore, a lack in tech capacity as well as infrastructure negatively affected how the Zedillo administration was able to track information and progress, hindering the program’s effectiveness. He had also fired over 700 officers of the original Federal Judicial Police, consequentially losing trust amongst the officers themselves as well as civilians.

Fox
In the late 20th Century, Mexico began implementing democratic elections with multi-party systems. Vicente Fox was the first president of Mexico to be elected from the opposition, a significant win for the nation that had been ruled uninterrupted by one party for 71 years. Fox was president of Mexico from 2000-2006 and he recognized the need to professionalize the municipal police. He chose to maintain the SNSP and the PFP and continued Zedillo’s mission in building the federal government’s policing capacity, while rearranging and developing new agencies himself. Fox chose to move the PFP to a newly created Secretariat of Public Security (SSP) and completely dissolve the PJF, which had been corrupt and scandal ridden for decades. He further created the Federal Investigations Agency (AFI) which would require agents to have college degrees. It would also be a merit-based recruitment, emphasizing education and training, boast better salaries, equipment and facilities, technology development and unified databases through the newly created AFInet. Fox placed emphasis on developing better accountability mechanisms as well as creating even more offices to conduct officer vetting and officer investigations.

Fox’s reforms represented advances for Mexican policing, but corruption levels remained high and the context for Mexican police officers remained unchanged. One of the main hindrances was due to the Public Security Support Fund (FASP). The federal government would transfer up to $5 billion pesos annually to each state as long as those states matched a certain percentage and met standard reporting requirements. This money was meant to be dispersed to municipality security forces, specifically police departments to strengthen them, train officers, and provide better equipment and facilities. Many states actually used the funds for themselves, barely improving the condition of police departments and corruption at the local level.

Calderón
Felipe Calderón was president from 2006-2012. He was a proponent of eradicating the municipal and state police departments and creating one unified police force across Mexico, following the successes of Colombia and Chile. He failed to obtain enough votes in legislature to move forward with the reform and instead decided to unify the investigative forces with the preventative forces, unifying the federal police. In 2009, he chose to replace the AFI and the PFP with the Federal Ministerial Police and the Federal Police, respectively, eradicating investigative capacity that had been in progress. Consequentially, people quit, resources were lost, and infrastructure was weakened, especially at the high cost of the continuing changes and mergers. As a result, the culmination of changes in the past decade left Mexicans skeptical towards the government and the police forces.

In 2008, Calderón’s administration decided to target the most dangerous and corrupt cities of Mexico by an intensive version of the FASP, called the Municipal Public Security Subsidy. For municipalities to obtain the funds, they had to match 30% of the funds and channel them to police remuneration, focusing specifically on communication technology, equipment purchases and infrastructure improvements, police professionalization, and connecting to Platform Mexico, a standardized database system where units report crime and police registry. Moreover, the funds would go towards developing “confidence control” testing and vetting, involving psychological and intelligence testing, drug testing, medical exams, background checks, and basic police knowledge exams.

Police Reform Under Peña Nieto
Police corruption has permeated all levels of the Mexican government, most extensively at the municipal level. Enrique Peña Nieto, the current president of Mexico, hopes to consolidate the police force at the state level, an approach similar to that of Calderon’s attempts. His most significant challenge would be the implementation of “Mando Unico”, a unified state command which Peña Nieto hopes to realize across all of Mexico’s 31 states. Under “Mando Unico”, the police would be screened, trained, and paid, becoming more professional, as well as standardized across the nation.

Involvement in Organized Crime
Other than bribery, one of the main problems afflicting reform within the police force is the police force’s collusion with organized crime groups. In 2008, the ranking military officer in Baja California, General Sergio Aponte Polito, revealed to the public a letter that described corrupt allegations regarding all of the state’s police forces. The letter disclosed cases of the head of the state’s anti-kidnapping unit partaking in a kidnapping ring, municipal police accused of attempting to kill their police chief, collusion between a binational car theft ring and the state’s vehicle theft unit, and police officers catching their counter parts in these actions yet setting them free. Many officers were discovered to be on the payroll of gangs, such as Fernando Rivera Hernandez in 2009, who led the operations of the Federal Attorney General’s organized crime investigations. Municipal police officers from Torreon, Coahuila were being paid $200-$2,000 a week to support activities of the Gulf organization. In Villahermosa, Tabasco, a USB drive that was discovered in a police raid brought to light that Los Zetas, an organized criminal group, had been paying over $400,000 a month to municipal, state, and federal police.

The Guerrero Kidnapping
One of the more recent cases of police corruption in Mexico occurred in 2014 in the city of Iguala. 43 students were shot at and kidnapped by the local police which had later been traced back to a powerful drug gang. The group of undergraduate students had been riding a school bus at night when the policemen forced them into police cars and drove away. In the aftermath, Mexican citizens rallied together and protested the corruption of the government. However, despite these efforts no information has come forward regarding what happened to the victims. Since the kidnapping, 130 people have been arrested including the police officers involved, drug cartel members, the ex-mayor of Iguala and his wife. Many have accused the government of misrepresenting the situation by suggesting the students were involved in street violence and then handed over by the police to a drug gang. Students and other Mexicans have long berated this theory as a “historic lie” used to put the story to rest rather than solve the mystery of those missing. After further investigation it was also found that not only local officials were involved in the incident, but perhaps federal officials were involved in the crime or had knowledge of its on-goings.

Efforts to Combat Corruption
Efforts to stop police corruption in Mexico have become increasingly important. Some steps have included increasing the budget and funding for local police units and supplying necessary equipment in order to combat crime. Another recent development introduced by the PRD Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has been the creation of Community Police forces, who operate solely in one neighborhood. One of the first communities to implement this system was Tepito, a neighborhood with a history of police corruption. In addition to creating a positive environment, community police are paid better, have access to mental healthcare, and must complete rigorous training exercises in order to be appointed. Also, the greater recognition of Mexico City as a potential global center for finance and tourism has prompted major initiatives to combat crime and corruption.

Corruption has been increasing consistently over the years in Mexico. While there have been many efforts to stop the pervasive corruption within the police system, it is very deeply imbedded in Mexican culture, and thus deeply difficult to eradicate it. This being said, changes have been made. There has been an increased view in the importance and use of vetting, especially through polygraph tests. The SSP conducted 54,536 trust evaluations over the course of one year which encompassed 24,971 applicants, 3,878 federal personnel, and 25,687 state and municipal police. Presidents have recognized the strength that institutional mechanisms could hold in battling corruption, such as the National Public Security Council and communication and database tools such as Platform Mexico have become crucial for national coordination. Unfortunately, though, collusion and tolerance have diverted these efforts and made reform nearly impossible. The challenges of building accountability mechanisms and the cyclical nature of police corruption in Mexico are challenges in the integration of anti-corruption reforms.