Latin America

(It should be remembered it was immediately after the Initiative was completed that extreme violence in Mexico exploded, and we started seeing reports of beheadings, and people being hung from bridges, and worse, some apparently designed to shock the public)


By James C. McKinley Jr.
Oct. 23, 2007

MEXICO CITY, Oct. 22 — President Bush asked Congress on Monday to approve a $1.4 billion aid package over the next three years to help the Mexican government fight narcotics traffickers, who have unleashed a bloody underworld war that has left more than 4,000 dead across Mexico in the last two years.

The plan calls for the United States to give Mexico $500 million over the next 12 months to provide training for the police and tools to dismantle drug cartels, including helicopters, surveillance planes, drug-sniffing dogs and software to track cases. An additional $50 million would go to Central American countries for the same purposes. The United States would also provide advisers to help vet police recruits, establish a witness protection program and set up citizen-complaint offices to cut down on the endemic corruption in Mexican police forces, State Department officials said.

. . .

Billed as a “security cooperation initiative,” the agreement grew out of talks Mr. Bush held with Mr. Calderón last March in Mérida, Mexico. Before and after the meeting, the Mexican president said the United States did too little to reduce demand for drugs and to stop the flow of arms and cash southward into Mexico. Under the agreement, the United States has pledged to continue its efforts on both fronts.

But the bulk of the agreement is aid for Mexico, in the form of training for the police and military as well as aircraft and advanced technology at border crossings. If approved by Congress, the program will last at least two years but opens the door for a long-term, yearly transfer of money and training to Mexico to combat drug trafficking, as the United States currently does with Colombia.

Experts on the Mexican police say that money from the United States alone cannot change the underlying problems that allow the drug trade to flourish. Most Mexican police forces lack the means to investigate corrupt officers or evaluate police performance. That, coupled with low pay, has led to a system rife with officers on the payroll of criminal gangs.

“The problem will arise if these resources do not come with new controls on the police,” said Ernesto López Portillo, the executive director of the Institute for Security and Democracy. “More resources without internal and external controls are very dangerous.”

More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/world/americas/23mexico.html