Mexico’s president is urging approval of a plan to replace local police departments with state forces so the government can better fight unrelenting drug violence that has claimed nearly 23,000 lives.
Part of the goal is to root out corruption by replacing generally low-paid, poorly educated local police, who are seen as more susceptible to bribery and intimidation by the powerful cartels.
It also aims to streamline operations and improve communication between police, Mexican President Felipe Calderon told a public safety commission Thursday before it approved the plan at the end of a three-hour session.
“We want a safe Mexico in which there is no room for the fear, violence and impunity that we suffer today,” Calderon said.
Pending a cost analysis, Calderon intends to present it to Mexican Congress when it resumes session in September.
Mexico’s public safety secretary first floated the idea last year, but it received a lukewarm response because some officials worried that it would be hard to police many of Mexico’s 2,439 municipalities if local departments were eliminated. Only 12 of Mexico’s 31 states even have their own police forces.
Some of the officials who voiced those concerns have since stepped down or been voted out of office. It’s still unclear how it will fare in Congress.
So far, the military and federal police have led the war against drug cartels launched shortly after Calderon took office in December 2006.
Yet some states have already moved to consolidate municipal forces into regional departments — such as Morelos, which has seen dozens of killings as gangs battle for control of a cartel once led by Arturo Beltran Leyva.
The government is also proposing to create a national crime database that would include information on kidnappings, stolen cars and prisoners. A separate database would contain photos of all police officers, their fingerprints and other identifying details.
A recent high-profile campaign to fight extortion and kidnapping by compiling a registry of cellphone users around the country ended up going awry, however, after the users’ personal data turned up for sale on two Web sites.
Prosecutors are investigating, interior department spokesman Luis Estrada said on Thursday.
The mayor of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s deadliest city with 2,601 drug-related killings reported last year, backed Calderon’s proposal and said municipal police are often easy prey in small, close-knit towns. “The more [a police officer] knows, the more he becomes known,” Jose Reyes Ferriz said.
“All this makes him more vulnerable to criminals,” he said.
Nuevo Leon Mayor Rodrigo Medina urged the government to create more jobs and education opportunities if it wants to see a drop in crime.
“There is no public safety model that will resolve the situation we face right now,” he said, a day after two federal police officers were killed and one wounded in the nearby town of Garcia.
Three alleged members of the Zetas cartel have been charged in the attack, said Luis Cardenas Palomino, regional security chief of the federal police.
Nuevo Leon state prosecutors said the officers had stopped a car for a search when gunmen in several SUVs pulled up and opened fire.
Hours later, police found the bodies of a local traffic officer and a trainee inside a car in the nearby town of Santiago.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema