Dark Side of Police Reform in Mexico

8/10/2019 Dark Side of Police Reform in Mexico

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Undermining the Rule of Lawemocratization and the ark Side of

Police Reform in M exicoDiane E Davis

ABSTIJACT

This article asks whether democratization, under certain historicalconditions, may relate to the deteriorating nile of law. Focusing onMexico City, where police corruption is significant, this study arguesthat the institutionalized legacies of police power inherited fromMexico s one-party system have severely constrained its newlydemocratic state s efforts to reform the police. Mexico s democratictransition has created an environment of partisan competition that,coiVibined with decentralization of the state and fragmentation of itscoercive and administrative apparatus, exacerbates intrastate andbureaucratic conflicts. These factors prevent the government fromreforming the police sufficiently to guarantee public security and

earn citizen trust, even as the same factors reduce capacity, legiti-macy, and citizen confidence in both the police and the democrat-ically elected state. This article suggests that when democracyserves to undermine rather than strengthen the rule of law, moredemocracy can actually diminish democracy and its quality.

I n recent years, Latin American countries have made progress on thedemocratic front by ushering in more competitive political party sys-tems and ousting longstanding authoritarian rulers. Yet a good number

also have suffered through explosions of violence, rising public insecu-rity, and deteriorating rule of law, much of it fueled by police corrup-tion and impunity. In response, democratically elected leaders havestruggled to enact police or judicial reforms aimed at strengthening therule of law and eliminating corruption among officers in the adminis-tration of justice system. The intensity and range of these efforts havebeen especially noteworthy in Mexico, where an unprecedentednumber of reforms, many of them directed toward the police, have beenintroduced in the several years since the Institutional Revolutionary

Party lost its grip on national power.Despite the clear resolve by Mexico s leaders to undertake police


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56 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 48: 1

that together undermine the rule of law. This creates an environment inwhich criminality flourishes, even among the police themselves; citizenshave little confidence in the rule of law or the officials entrusted with

guaranteeing order; and public insecurity seems to be worsening day byday (Inzunza 2003; NI en Linea 2005c),At no time was this more evident than in late November 2004, when

an angry m ob of residents in a neighborhood of Mexico City called SanJuan Ixtayopan (in Tlahuac) lynched two police officers, beating andburning them alive while hundreds of other officers surrounded thearea, unable to quell the revolt .El Universal 2004; New York Times2004a), Residents in this neighborhood on the southern outskirts of thecapital claimed that the murdered victims were responsible for kidnap-ping two children leaving a local school. The officers, in plain clothesand sitting in an unmarked car outside the school at the moment of theattack, were members of the Coordinacion General de Inteligencia parala Prevencion del Delito, a special intelligence-gathering unit of the Fed-eral Preventive Police (PFP),

Neither riot police nor a local elected official intervening on the offi-cers' behalf succeeded in dispersing the mob or calming citizens, who,armed with sticks and knives, dragged the officers from their car and

pummeled them lifeless New York Times 2004a). Reporters, however,were able to get close enough to the scene to capture the killings oncamera, and leaders of the angry mob allowed them to interview thetwo police officers. As the officers tried to identify themselves as under-cover agents investigating drug dealing in the area, not as kidnappers,the mob remained irate and filming continued. Few in the crowd wereconvinced of their innocence because most saw only a fine line sepa-rating the police from criminals. These attitudes had been cemented byrecurrent stories in the press exposing high levels of drug corruptionand impunity in the Mexican police and military.

The lynching was neither the first nor the last in the Mexico Citymetropolitan area reported by the press in the six months surroundingthe event (CM en Linea 2005a), In the days and weeks that followed,citizens and the government reacted strongly to the deteriorating secu-rity situation. Those w ho sought a larger meaning felt a great temptationto highlight the postmodernity of the events, in that news outlets wereable to record and shape an event that neither the state's elected offi-

cials nor its coercive forces were able to control and in which the linesbetween participant and observer were blurred. For most Mexicans,however it was the premodern character of the violence that was


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DAVIS: MEXICO'S POLICE REFORM 57

law, a legitimate and functioning judicial system, and democratic or con-sensual forms of governance. This view was reflected in the daily newsmedia, in which citizens, politicians, and leading public intellectuals

lamented that tbe longstanding problems of criminality and corruptionin the justice system would generate such a barbaric response.To be sure, observers did not always agree on the fundamental roots

of the problem, Yacobo Zabludovsky, a popular and high-profile broad-cast journalist, publicly traced the response to police corruption and abureaucratic estrangement between officials and citizens, suggesting that police commanders 'have not realized what most citizens already know,that we are afraid to approach the police' {New York Times 2004a),Carlos Monsivais, one of Mexico's leading public intellectuals, looked

more to culture and the transformation of community in a city wrackedby violence and fear, a condition that has become endemic in many ofthe large cities of Latin America (Rotker 2002). For Monsivais, the eventsshowed that it has become possible [for some citizens] to justify lynch-ing in the name of the disappearance of justice, a turn of events thatshocked him into adding, one cannot believe that a community, at thislate datethat a mob, a lynch mob, of so many peoplewould love amoment like this as if it were a carnival .New York Times 2004a),

Although they represented two very different ideological tendenciesin Mexican politics (the conservative and tradition-bound versus theprogressive and oppositional, respectively), both observers concurredthat the system of justiceand the state's capacity to mount a legitimateand effective police force that was also trusted by the peoplewas fun-damentally flawed. This unusual consensus among those of oppositepolitical leanings may explain why, as a result of the San Juan Ixtayopanincident, Mexican police officials and politicians were forced toacknowledge publicly that anarchy exists in parts of Mexico, a view

closely matched by citizens who lamented that there is no security here[in Mexico City]; there is no control New York Times 2004a),

F R O M D E M O C R A C Y TO U N R U L E OF LAW

Can the disturbing security conditions brought into relief by the lynch-ings be traced to Mexico's fragile new democratic regime or the coun-try's failure sufficiently to deepen and strengthen the quality of its

democracy? Or are other factors responsible for the violence and thedeteriorating rule of law? Scholars such as Charles Call have suggested


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Further clues as to whether there might be a correlation betweendemocracy and unrule of law can be also found in recent writings onthe quality of democracy (O'Donnell et al, 2004) and the attendantfocus on civil rights (Conaghan 2004) and human rights (Whitehead2004) as much as citizenship and political rights (O'Donnell 2004; Lech-ner 2004), On the basis of standards and criteria used in this literature,one would rate the quality of Mexico's democracy as relatively low, ormixed at best, precisely because of the human and civil rights abusesassociated with state and citizen violence as well as unrule of law. Butthe question still remains as to whether there is any causal relationshipbetween democracy or democratic qualitywhether high or lowandthe type of violence and disorder seen in Mexico,

The answer is not inherently obvious, because positing such rela-tionships has not been the aim of most recent scholarship on demo-cratic quality or democratic deepening. Instead of examining theimpact of democratization on rule of law, whether positive or nega-tive, for example, many scholars have preferred to examine the deep-ening and the quality of democracy in postauthoritarian regimes in thecontext of a larger theory of democratic transition in Latin America(Hite and Cesarini 2004), Others have been more concerned withestablishing the appropriate measurement dimensions for identifyinghigh- or low-quality democracies (such as O'Donnell and his collabo-rators) than with asking how and whether there is anything intrinsicto a particular democratic regime type or democratic transition thatmight either produce or reverse conditions of extreme public insecu-rity or other problems, which place countries like Mexico in the cate-gory of low-quality democracy. But there also is a new, albeit small,body of alternative literature suggesting that certain features of a dem-ocratic transition, ranging from the breakdown of patronage networks

to the unanticipated costs of military demobilization, can contribute topublic insecurity. Such arguments have been advanced in recentresearch on Mexico (Villareal 2002), Brazil (Caldeira, and Holston2002), and El Salvador (Call 2003),^

If one were to look carefully at how Mexico's democratically electedstate officials responded to the an Juan Ixtapoyan affair, such a propo-sition might be worth exploring further. Preliminary evidence suggeststhat newly democratic actors, institutions, and practices in Mexico mayhave been partly responsible for the failure to guarantee a rule of lawand the increase in public insecurity. Specifically, democratization of thestate through decentralization and power sharing along with the


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DAVIS: MEX ICO S POLICE REFORM 59

civil society, and an overall situation of public insecurity in which every-day citizens feel compelled to take the law into their own hands.

Such a dynamic was partly evident within days of the lynching, when

it became clear that the local riot police, who answered to Mexico City andnot federal authorities, had not intervened to save the attacked officers.Shortly thereafter, different cadres of police started pointing fingers at eachother, creating even less public trust in the system of policing while alsoexposing vertical cracks in the principal coercive organizations of th state.The police also took advantage of their newly acquired civil and politicalrights to express their dissatisfaction with their superiors handling of thesituation. Hundreds of federal security police took to the streets to protestagainst their own commanders as well as those of the Mexico City riotpolice iNew York imes 2004b). These events further reduced public con-fidence in police institutions and individual officers, both of which wereseen as more concerned with enhancing their organizational or personalpower than figuring out why the public had lost trust in them.

An overheated electoral climate, fueled by the strengthening ofcompetitive party politics, also contributed to the deteriorating situation.Mexico s two most important democratically elected politicians. Presi-dent Vicente Fox and Mexico City mayor Andres Manuel Lopez

Obrador, turned the lynching into a prepresidential dogfight. Instead ofuniting in the common search for a policy solution to the problems ofpolice conflict and citizen vigilantism, these two bitter rivalsfrom twocompeting political parties, controlling the two most significant levels ofthe state, and struggling to win the support of Mexico City s residentsand the national electoratesought to use the situation to humiliateeach other sufficiently so as to score points at the ballot box, as theyhad tried with many other high-profile incidents of violence, police cor-ruption, and impunity (CNI en Linea 2004a, b).

For his part. President Fox used the lynching as the pretext for forc-ing the resignation of Mexico City s very popular police chief MarceloEbrarci, a key ally of Mayor Lopez Obrador. Lopez Obrador retaliated bycharging Fox with playing dirty politics, even as he set out on his ownindependent search for a new round of police reforms and alternativesecurity policies to show that he, as mayor, was better able to gain con-trol of the situation than the president {CNI en Linea 2004a). LopezObrador, however, had publicly repudiated a two-hundred-thousand-strong citizens march for public security barely six months earlier. Hisstance therefore brought skepticism about how seriously committed hewas to police reform and security matters Reforma 2004) even as it


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tisan bickering enough to convince Mexico City s citizens that the prob-lems of fighting police impunity and public insecurity were more impor-tant than winning seats in the next round of elections. Such partisan

conflict and competition not only motivated some citizens to bypass thestate and take matters into their own hands; it also exposed the weak-nesses and divisions in the state itself, as the public saw a highly frag-mented bureaucracy unable to monopolize the means of coercion, abasic tenet of modern state formation and the foundation for any viabledemocracy or rule of law.

E M P I R I C L O B J E C T I V E S Aj>fD M E T H O D O LO G Y

In exploring the relationship between Mexico s democratization and itsdeteriorating rule of law, this article focuses on Mexico City, where theproblems of police corruption have been among the most widespreadand insidious in the nation. It argues that the institutionalized legaciesof police power inherited from a system of one-party rule have placedsevere constraints on the newly democratic state s efforts to reform thepolice, perverting even positive gains. It further argues that Mexico sdeepening democracy has overly complicated the difficult task of police

reform by creating an environment of obsessive partisan competition,which, combined with a democratization-led decentralization of thestate and an attendant fragmentation of its coercive and administrativeapparatus, exacerbates intrastate and bureaucratic conflicts so as to pre-vent the government from reforming the police sufficiently to guaranteepublic security and citizen trust. Together these changes have reducedstate capacity, state legitimacy, and citizen confidence in both the policeand in the democratically elected state s management of public security.

Stated in sociological terms, this article argues that strategies ofpolice reform in newly democratizing Mexico, failed and otherwise,have enabled several new and disturbing transformations in the state,society, and their relationship to each other in ways that are starting toundermine the commitment to democratic governance and the rule oflaw. Stated in terms more consistent with the literature on the deepen-ing or quality of democracy, this article suggests that when democracyserves to undermine rather than strengthen the rule of law, moredemocracy can actually diminish democracy, if not its quality.

These arguments build on the premise that current problems ofinsecurity in Mexico owe their existence less to the dearth of police


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DAVIS MEXICO'S POLICE REFORM 6l

they produce bureaucratic infighting leading to paralysis (Call 2003), orthat police reform often reinforces more centralized police or militaryauthority, thereby leading to further abuses of power and the return of

a nondemocratic ethos (Ungar 2002), In contrast to those studies, how-ever, this analysis is not confined to top-down, state- and party-ledefforts at police reform and their consequences; it also examines policereform measures coming from below, including those generated bysocial movements, NGOs, and other sectors of civil society, and theirimpact on the rule of law.

S E E K I N G THE O R I G I N S OF THE S E C U R I T Y

P R O B L E M

Scholars have described contemporary Mexico as a place where impunity is the rule and legality is the exception (Pardinas 2003), Oneobserver has even suggested that if someone actually tried to plan al ck of control over public security forces, not only in Mexico City butalso in a good part of the rest of country, they could not have done itbetter (Alcocer 1997, 49), Blame for this situation is routinely assignedto the country's difficult economic situation and dreary employmentconditions, which motivate desperate citizens to pursue a life of crime.Growing income polarization and a failure to recover from more than adecade of recession mean that real wages have remained stagnant andunder- and unemployment have been on the rise.

These problems have been particularly severe in Mexico City, alocale hit especially hard by the collapse of the import substitutionindustrialization model. The city's industrial sector has been mortallywounded by the opening of the economy and the relocation of Mexico

City factories to the border areas, closer to new markets favored by theexport-led model that the government prioritizes. As a result, manyworkers previously employed in the city's industrial sector have lookedelsewhere for income. Youth unemployment has been an especially bigconcern, given Mexico's age structure. This demographic problem hasfueled the rise of youth gangs.

Still, the problem of public insecurity owes equally as much to howMexico City police have responded to growing criminality. In an eco-nomically squeezed environment in which state downsizing has made itdifficult to raise public sector salaries, the police themselves have beentempted to engage in crime It is not uncommon to find police acting as


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control of impunity. But such a policy has not been seriously pursued,partly because macroeconomic policy constraints associated with eco-nomic liberalization have limited public sector investment capacity.

The biggest obstacle to eliminating police corruption by raisingsalaries, however, is the enormity of competing funds available for buying police impunity, a situation that stems from the drug trade.Although international drug trafficking and the sale of illegal drugs inMexico have existed for decadessome say since the 1940s (Sadler2000)they remained a relatively low-profile sector of the nationaleconomy until recently (Astorga 2000; Benitez 2000), Beginning in theearly 1990s, especially when the U,S, Drug Enforcement Agency man-aged to cut off direct supplies between Colombia and the United States,much of the drug trade moved its operations to Mexico (Andreas 1998),and drug money began to infiltrate a variety of agencies of the state andsociety, including the military and police (Pifieyro 2004; Pimentel 2000;Gonzalez Ruiz et al, 1994; Kaplan 1991), At present, it is widely assumedthat practically the entire state apparatus is involved in a vicious strug-gle against drug trafficking (Zepeda Lecuona 2004; Arzt 2000), so muchso that the current government's struggle against police corruption andimpunity is very much linked to the problem of rooting out organized

crime and other mafia drug lords, whose tentacles have even reachedinto the office of the presidency New York imes 2005),Even so, a singular focus on economic conditions or drug money

can go only so far in accounting for police corruption and public inse-curity, primarily because the historical origins and institutional under-pinnings of these problems are much deeper, A culture of corruptionand impunity among the police has developed over the decades, and itfinds its deepest roots and greatest reach in the nation's capital. In thepopular imagination, problems with police impunity trace to the 1970s,a time when a larger brotherhood of corrupt police officers linked toMexico City police chief Arturo Durazo grabbed the public eye (Zepeda1994) and society experienced the decomposition of the securityorgans of the State (Alcocer V, 1997, 50), But the true roots of policecorruption go back to the postrevolutionary period and the tradeoffsmade between revolutionary leaders and Mexico City police in theirefforts to defeat counterrevolutionary forces associated with Porfirianloyalists (Davis 2001),

In the initial years surrounding the 1910 Revolution, many counter-revolutionaries counted on the military for support, Prorevolutionary


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should be recalled that a large majority of Mexico City residents did notsupport the Revolution and were hardly excited about the barrage ofpeasants, workers, and northern provincial elites who comprised the

revolutionary coalition in its early years. Revolutionary leaders thereforeneeded a new police force, loyal to these new prorevolutionary popu-lations and their sentiments and willing to demonstrate their loyalty byarresting or harassing counterrevolutionaries and others the new politi-cal leadership considered dangerous. As a result, in the immediate rev-olutionary aftermath, Mexico City policeindividually and as an institu-tionwere given extraordinary leeway and very little discipline.

In theory, once revolutionaries consolidated their hold on the Mex-ican state, there should have been considerable scope to transform thelocal police's task from that of fighting counterrevolutionaries to secur-ing the rule of law. But the contested nature of postrevolutionary statebuilding and the ongoing struggles within the revolutionary leadershipover which factions would prevail prevented this transformation forquite a while.

The period 1910-20, for example, saw ongoing conflicts within andbetween police and the military about who had the authority to securepublic order in the capital. These concerns were finally resolved by

placing military commanders as Mexico City police chiefs, therebygiving the police considerable institutional power and a sense of enti-tlement, based on the feeling that their function was national securityand not merely public service or urban order in the capital. Yet whenthe Mexico City police had been successfully transformed into an organ-ization of progovernment loyalists allied with the military apparatus,individual police would still run up against political or ideologicalopponents in other branches of the state and legal system. This fre-quently resulted in court dismissals of police deta inees or repudiation oftheir grounds for arrest. This response further emboldened the policeand their superior officers to disregard the judicial end of the legalsystem and act on the basis of their own views of what was just orimportant for the Revolution. As the courts and the legal system becam enotorious as venues where elites with money or political influencewould readily prevail, the police further sought to follow their ownsense of justice, legally acknowledged or not.

Actions of the revolutionary state further contributed to problem s of

police impunity. As early as 1918, President Venustiano Carranza actedon his concern that the courts were still overly controlled by pro-Por-


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legal separation of police powers gave the executive branch more con-trol over who would end up in the hands of the courts, because thejudicial policewho alone had the right to arrestanswered to a fed-

eral ministry under the supervision of the president's office. But in addi-tion to empowering certain cadres of police who were most linked tothe presidency, this reform also laid the foundations for greater corrup-tion in the entire system of policing, even as it isolated the various stepsof the legal process in such a way as to produce overall system dys-function or fragmentation Reforma 2003a; Davis 2001).

Police corruption and citizen distrust intensified throughout the 1930s,a period that proved politically contentious for the government. The entiredecade of the 1920s and much of the 1930s were marked by the emer-gence of labor and other social movements pushing for more democracy.Some of the most active and mobilized opposition groups operated in thecity's municipal politics, with municipal leaders often using their own localpolice to battle each other in the struggle for political power. The instancesof armed conflict among contending political parties and local police notonly tarnished the police's reputation; they also drove the revolutionaryleadership to centralize political control of both policing and urban gover-nance. The elimination of democratic political institutions in Mexico City

in 1928 and the elected mayor's replacement by a presidentially appointedregent fiirther enabled the ailing party's use of police to fight politicalopponents, whether local or national. These ranged from striking workers,as in the 1940s and 1950s, to protesting saidents and democracy advo-cates, as in the 1960s and 1970s.

The police's own willingness to harass the state's self-proclaimedpolitical enemies and to operate above the law made citizens ever moredistrustful of police motives and legal institutions, giving additionalincentive to resolve violations of the law at the street level throughcoercive bribery rather than through juridical procedures guaranteed bythe formal system of justice. These informal practices fueled an evenmore vicious cycle of police corruption and judicial weakness that servedto legitimate an alternative or unofficial system of everyday justicewhile also undermining the courts and the rule of law (Picatto 2004).

H A S D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N M A D E A D I E FE R E N C E

During the seven decades the PRI remained in power, party and gov-ernment leaders managed to keep the worst manifestations of police


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DAVIS: MEXICO S POLICE REFORM 65

Mexico s slow but steady democratic transformation during the 1990shelped to put an end to the cover-up by catapulting problems ofimpunity and public insecurity into the public limelight and unleashing

a floodgate of citizen hopes about reversing the problem.Citizen perceptions that criminality and violence were on the rise

stemmed partly from the more competitive and independent media,which themselves were a product of democratization (Lawson 2002), Inaddition, expectations for improvement were high because democrati-zation held the promise of offering new channels for expressing con-cerns and seeking remedies. Still, growing citizen concern about crimealso owed to the deteriorating conditions on the ground, not m erely thestate s inability to cover it up or increased expectations of accountabil-ity. By the mid-to-late 1990s, just around the time Mexico City residentswere granted the right to elect a mayor democratically, the city founditself awash in robberies, kidnappings, stolen car rings, extortion, andother forms of violent and nonviolent crime, including rape and homi-cide (Davis and Alvarado 1999), Between 1995 and 1998 alone, theoverall crime rate in the city nearly tripled (Fundacion Mexicana Para laSalud 1997, 16).

To be sure, the relationship between violence and democratization

is a complicated one. It is difficult not only to distinguish the cause andthe effect but also to distinguish the impact of political versus economicliberalization on public insecurity. In Mexico City, most observers cite1994 as the year criminality and public insecurity burst out of control.This was the year the North American Free Trade Agreement changedseveral key aspects of the macroeconomy, such as the tariff and tradestructure, making border areas more hospitable to domestic and foreignmanufacturing firms and directly hurting the more protected industrieslocated in the capital. The 1990s also hosted the democratization ofMexico City governance, with a series of constitutional changes intro-duced to empower a local consultative body with legislative power (theAsamblea Legislativa del Distrito Federal, or ALDF), followed by a moveto allow direct election of the mayor for the first time since 1928. Theselegislative changes not only brought new anti-PRI political forces intocity government; the local defeat of the PRI also destroyed old socialnetworks and institutional practices, some of which contributed to thegrowing social disorder. Without the PRI at the municipal helm and with

the party weakened by electoral defeat, neither police nor citizenscounted on the same informal patronage and patron-client relations thati t d d h d k t i t f th bli d th h l


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PRI and its relationship to the police. This was first evident in 1995 and1996 when the last ritsta to govern Mexico City, Oscar Espinosa Vil-lareal, called for militarization of the city's police force, using the army

to purge the corps of its most corrupt elements (Lopez Montiel 2003).Villareal's efforts came partly in response to social movements clamor-ing for the revitalization of democratic structures and practices in thecity. It was under Villareal's mayorship in 1995, indeed , that the NationalCongress passed legislation fully to democratize Mexico City gover-nance starting in 1997. With crime rates skyrocketing after 1994, andwith popular elections for a democratically elected mayor to be held ina scant two years, it seemed evident to Villareal and the PRI leadershipthat the party that had the most to offer in crime fighting or guarantee-ing public security might have the best shot at winning the city oncedemocratic rights were established (Gonzalez Ruiz 1998, 90).

In theory, Villareal's idea of militarizing the Mexico City policemay have seemed a good move because the military had long playedthe role of fighting drug lords and organized crime, and many localpolice were directly implicated in mafia and drug-running activities. Themilitary also was considered a revered social institution with consider-able prestige earned from its role in the Revolution, an image its lead-

ership had parlayed into considerable political power over the years. Incontrast, police in Mexico were routinely considered to be the unedu-cated, undisciplined, and uncivilized dregs of society, and their activi-ties were sharply distinguished, in both law and social consciousness,from those of the military.

In practice, however, the logic underlying the decision to militarizethe police was flawed. The military's longstanding involvement in fight-ing drug lords meant that many of its personnel were just as corrupt asthe police. Indeed, several of the military officers appointed to cleansepolice forces in Mexico City were subsequently sent to jail for criminalactivities (Pifieyro 2004). The threat of military intervention in localpolicing only increased the police's resolve to maintain monopoly con-trol of the city, partly to protect the same locally based illegal economyand drug-trading networks. In reality, neither the police nor the militarywanted to stop the drug-related criminality, but instead wanted to insertthemselves into these lucrative networks of illegal activities at theexpense of potential competitors. Thus with m ilitary-police competition

for control over the rights to police criminals, violence and conflictaccelerated among the police, the military, and the drug-linked mafias,h f h l i f h h


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sions independent of local input and out of concerns for national secu-rity, sovereignty, and party hegemony as much as for crime fighting.Thus the chain of authority among the party-state and the country'scoercive forces was condensed and concentrated at higher levels.Because major nodes in this chain were already prone to impunity andlacking commitment to the rule of law, and because police and militarywere already directly involved in illegal activities themselves, theinvolvement of higher-ranking authorities in crime fighting brought boththe police and the military into a direct relationship with criminals,tempting the law enforcers with higher volumes of cash and pow er andmaking it harder for them to keep to the straight and narrow path.

In 1997, when Cuauhtemoc Cardenas succeeded Villareal in themayor's office, expectations about eliminating corruption rose dramati-cally. The PRI was now out of power in the city, and Cardenas claimedthat he would establish both democracy and order. That Cardenas wasemboldened by support from social movements and some renegadeforces from the PRI, who knew the ruling party's operations from theinside, further raised citizen expectations that he would put an end tothe dirty tricks that had sustained the cycle of police corruption andcriminality. One of the great advantages Cardenas brought with him tothe mayor's office, despite his lack of control over the police, was thedemocratically elected ALDF, dominated by members of his party.Therefore he was not hamstrung by old riistas in his efforts to enact areform. Yet he also faced obstacles.

First, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) was a relativelynew party, born out of the struggle for democracy. This meant that Car-denas came to power with a much weaker and less organizationallydeveloped party base. Second, Cardenas had left the PRI for the PRD,

generating considerable antagonism from many riistas

who saw him asa traitor to the party his father, former president Lazaro Cardenas, wasinstrumental in forming. Both factors further estranged him from thepolice and intensified their unwillingness to help in his crime-fightingproject. Indeed, after several high-profile efforts to call attention topolice corruption, Cardenas was met by public intransigence from sev-eral leading police officials, one of whom went directly to the press todefend vigorously the moral quality of the city's police. (This despitehis acknow ledging the occasional problem of judicial police . . . link-

ages with mafia dedicated to the robbery and reselling of automobilesand autoparts. La ornada 1999b).


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nouncements was to insist that he would not bring in the military toreform tbe policealthough his appointment of a retired military offi-cer as the first police chief placed generated considerable skepticism

about tbe veracity of this claim. Still, his subsequent appointments ofcivilians Alejandro Gertz Manero as Federal District police cbief andSamuel del Villar as DF attorney general soon reinforced his commit-ment to a new strategy of reform. Shortly thereafter, Cardenas intro-duced new structures for hiring and formulated alternative mechanismsfor police oversight. These changes included the introduction of liedetector tests for new and returning police personnel, forced resigna-tions among the judicial police, and a new system of tracking preven-tive police by neighborhood.

Unfortunately, even these strategies yielded few positive results,and a few negative ones; the reform's ineffectiveness was visible almostimmediately. Beat cops boldly protested the new government's anticor-ruption measures by withdrawing tbeir services completely in such away as to abet crime. Crime rates immediately went through the roof, aproduct perhaps also of police involvement in criminal acts as a form ofretribution. The level of calculated impunity in the first several weeksafter the reform was introduced was so extreme tbat Police Cbief Gertz

Manero was compelled to acknowledge publicly tbat Mexico City's 40,000-member force [was] out of control (Gregory 1999, 4).

The reform efforts did not touch tbe real beart of tbe problem,wbicb was government incapacity legally to indict tbe criminal elementsthemselves. Most beat cops refused to cooperate witb the state in inves-tigating drug and otber gang-related crime, and the strong-armed effortsto purify the judicial police had alienated key elements in that next stageof tbe administration of justice, the courts. There was therefore even lesscooperation between different crime-fighting elements in the justicesystem than before. Police Cbief Gertz Manero publicly acknowledgedthis problem, lamenting the lack of institutional or legal coordinationwhich [could ] link [crime] prevention with investigation or articulatecivil, business, and penal codes .La Jornada 1999a).

D E M O C R T I Z T I O N D R I V E S IN T R S T T E

ON O T

The question emerges, however, why the police were so intransigenttheir opposition to the reforms of the Cardenas administration and why


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rity reform which abetted crime because the disruption of the inter-nal security system took its toll they did bear fruit in that CentralAmerican nation for several years (Call 2003, 83 ).' So why was it so dif-

ficult to make much headw ay in Mexico, even when a democratic open-ing appeared in 1997? More to the point, why does it seem that policecorruption and resistance to reform even worsened as democracy deep-ened in the years to follow?

Part of the answer rests in a more nuanced understanding of thenature of the democratic transition and its political effects. Whiledemocratization did give the newly elected PRD government in MexicoCity a public platform to call for changes in the police, political condi-tions and institutional goals on the national level did not follow suit.Throughout Cardenas's term, the PRI maintained its monopoly on thenational executive, and with it a reservoir of institutional capacities thatcould be used to undermine police reform efforts in the capital. Theseincluded a system of federal police forces tied to the national executivewith a history of intervening in Mexico City affairs, a military bureau-cracy still answering to the PRI and also increasingly worried aboutexposing its own complicity and impunity, and considerable federalcontrol of local finances in the form of a budgetary veto on Mexico City

expenditures. The Mexican Constitution also set clear limits on themayor's autonomy to name his own police chief Any appointee had tobe jointly supported by the president and approved by the NationalCongress. Many local police, moreover, still had strong connections tothe PRI, given the history of complicity. Thus the persistence of thesestnictures and practices constituted a nontrivial barrier to reform.

Yet why did the PRD not successfully compensate for Cardenas'sfailures when his successor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, becamemayor in 2000? That year also brought the defeat of the PRI at thenational level. Why was progress still elusive and conditions seeminglyworse? One explanation is that even with' the PRI purged from thenational executive, the nation's third major political party, the NationalAction Party (PAN), had gained control of the presidency. Yet it, too,had very few of its own networks of control over po lice or military. Forprecisely this reason, when the newly elected President Fox wanted todeal with the problems of police corruption, he had to do so throughthe institutions over which he had som e authoritynational (that is, fed-

eral police and the attorney general's office), not local institutions inMexico City, where corruption was organized differently. Moreover,


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tralization of institutions and efforts close to the president's office, inindividuals and agencies the new president could trust.

Far from solving the problems of corruption and insecurity, how-

ever, these actions fueled the cycle of police and military corruption, asdrug and crime-fighting agencies were restructured or even eliminated,thereby driving the dismissed personnel straight to their original part-ners in crime (often bringing with them the weapons and informationthey had used before their dismissal). Complicating matters, centraliza-tion of reform efforts alienated Mexico City officials, who, with demo-cratic rights and responsibilities, now had their own networks, orienta-tions, and partisan goals with respect to public security. The lesson hereis that to enact police reform in this highly corrupt system would haverequired a shared commitment by the competing political parties at mul-tiple local and national government levels and by actors in a variety ofinstitutions or agencies where impunity had once existed. But the his-torically ingrained and systemic patterns of police corruption, combinedwith contested partisan character of Mexico's democratic transition,made such a shared commitment almost impossible.

All this is well revealed by a closer look at the national administra-tion of President Fox, his efforts at police reform, and how they affected

his relationship to Mayor Lopez O brador. Fox and his party, the center-right PAN, came to power in no small part because during the presi-dential campaign he identified police corruption and public insecurityas key problems to be solved during his administration. Once heassumed the presidency, Fox was rudely confronted by the reality thathe lacked the political networks or institutional connections with policeand military to be able to introduce a reform from within. Several ofthe high-level military generals, drug czars, and attorneys general heappointedand in whom he invested great public and private confi-dencewere found to be directly implicated in criminal or illegal net-works, as were a good number of the high-level administrators of thenew federal police force that Fox established to replace the old cor-rupted one (Hernandez 2003b).

That newly democratic Mexico was now governed by a nationalcongress divided almost equally between the three major competingparties set further limits on the types of reforms Fox could introducefrom the national executive. His newness to politics and the relative

institutional weakness of the PAN, as a party and within the statebureaucracy, further prevented Fox from mounting a close team of allies


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DAVIS: MEX ICO'S POLICE REFORM 71

The limits to police reform also translated into problems for MexicoCity mayor Lopez Obrador. Although Fox may have been genuinelycommitted to solving the problems of criminality, insecurity, and

impunity facing the country, he also knew that federal support for localpolice reform in Mexico City would directly translate into political ben-efits for the PRD and Lopez Obrador. He therefore had very little incen-tive to coordinate reforms on the national level with those beingadvanced on the local level in Mexico City. Mayor Lopez Obrador, forhis part, was just as hamstrung by his electoral concerns and the politi-cal bases associated with his own territorial jurisdiction.

On the one hand, Lopez Obrador was very interested in police

reform because he saw growing criminality and public insecurity as amajor obstacle to his planned rescue of dow ntow n Mexico City and itstransformation into a mecca for global capital (both businesses andtourists). The revival of the downtov/n was important for the mayorbecause he was desperate for financial resources to govern the city,given that there was very little goodwill to initiate federal transfers fromeither the national congress or the presidency. He also needed funds tobring middle-class and business allies as a coalition of partners into aparty that was known as an advocate mainly of workers and the poor.

The working class and poor of the city, on the other hand, were thePRD's natural base; and while these constituencies had plenty of citi-zen and neighborhood organizations committed to police reform andpublic security, they also brought an additional political base that lim-ited Lopez Obrador's commitment to police reform: citizens employedin the informal sector.

Among Lopez Obrador's strongest allies in newly democraticMexico City politics were lower-income citizens in downtown areaswho sold goods, som etimes illegally, on the s treets. These activities haddeveloped over the years with full police complicity, and much of theMexico City police's involvement in contraband and drugs can be tracedto these relationships. Many of the mayor's efforts to dismiss or reformthe police threatened those lower-income comm unities. So did his sup-port for a physical renovation of the downtown, a plan designed toemulate a similar one in New York that called for a different structureof policing. This was a threat to those low-income residents whoseproperty values and livelihood would be affected by plans to clean up

downtown (Davis 2005).With these competing political constituenciesand his own contra-


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duced by Lopez Obrador and his police chief, Marcelo Ebrard (fired byFox in the lynching episode), fell into one of three categories of action:renaming old police forces with new, citizen-friendly titles, such as

policia comunitaria appointing new police leadership and recyclingcorrupt police out of the force but keeping old organizational structuresintact (Sarre 2001); or developing more community-run policing pro-grams, built around PRD ideals of citizen participation but with the goalof bringing citizens to the front lines of crime fighting. None of thesethree approaches touched the source of the problems of criminality orpolice corruption (Davis 2003).

W H E R E D E M O C R A C Y M E E T S CENTRALIZATION

Lopez Obrador has tried to balance his own political constituencieswhile struggling to keep the federal government and its police forcesfrom politically monopolizing the terrain of local police reform. As hehas muddled through several superficial police reforms, however. Pres-ident Fox has pursued his own reform agenda. The result might be char-acterized as dueling police reform efforts, paralleled by dueling polit-ical parties and dueling presidential candidates controlling duelingpolice forces, with each set of forces trying to capture large swathes ofpublic loyalty.

Because Lopez Obrador has long been considered the man mostlikely to defeat the PAN or the PRI in the 2006 presidential election. Foxhas been ever more reluctant to work with him to solve Mexico City'spolice corruption problem. If anything. Fox has tried to take the spot-light away from Lopez Obrador on the police front, and he has used avariety of powerful measures and bureaucratic agencies at his service to

do so, not to mention his much greater fiscal resources (Morett 2003 9).Fueled by a desire to reap the political capital from police reformefforts. Fox has instructed the national executive branch and its depend-encies to fund new and more narrowly circumscribed institutionaldomains for policing that effectively redraw the boundaries of authorityso as to exclude the old tainted elements of the police, in Mexico Cityand elsewhere, while also creating an alternative agency answering onlyto him. This is a strategy of centralizing power in order to enable polit-ical and institutional-managerial aims.

The move toward police centralization was first seen in Fox's deci-sion to create an entirely new national police force called the Federal


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DAVIS: MEXICO S POLICE REEORM 73

police. Given the structure of legal authority in Mexico, this entailed thecreation of a yet another new framework for judicial police that wouldreplace the old Federal Judicial Police (PJF). This new, more powerful,

and more centralized agency for criminal investigation, called the Fed-eral Agency of Investigation (AFI), opera ted along the lines of the Amer-ican FBL Agents from both of these new security forces, moreover,would be able to enter Mexico City if the nature of the crime underinvestigation (a federal crime, such as drugs or kidnapping, includingpolice involved) so warranted.

While these reforms greatly increased the president s control overthe police, they still could not reverse the decades of impunity and thebreadth of corruption; nor could this institutional reorganization com-pletely stop the po lice s ow n retaliation against the new forces in power,two realizations that further drove Fox to enact more centralizing, quasi-authoritarian state controls. In June 2003, Fox felt compelled to createyet another new federal agency, called the Subattorney General s Officefor Special Investigation of Delinquency (SIEDO), a separate agency toreplace the AFI, directly empowered with investigating those crimes inwhich corrupted military and police were most implicated: narcotrafficking, arms trading, robbery, child prostitution, human slavery, kid-

napping, money laundering, and terrorism. Whatever the rationale, theimplications have been clear: Fox strategy for reforming the police hasbeen greater centralization, which, by giving the federal executivegreater pow er for clandestine investigation, also increases the state sauthority and coercive power in ways that echo the predemocratic era.

The problem is that this strategy has fueled further police corrup-tion even as it backtracks on decentralized democratic ideals. More cen-tralized efforts to shut corrupt police out of the state and punish themfor past abuses have driven many police officials directly into the crim-inal world, especially as the Fox administration s all-out war on drugcartels has motivated drug lords to marshal greater and greater resourcesto infiltrate both the police and military. One could conclude, indeed,that it is this dynamic that explains why, soon after SIEDO s creation, itwas found to be infiltrated by corrupt elements i NI en Linea 2004c),and why a key drug cartel was ab le to plant a spy in the president soffice. Indeed, almost every new police agency that Fox has establishedor tried to reform since coming to office has been found to be riddled

by corrupt elements, from the PFP (Joyner 2003, 12) to the Fiscalia deEspecializacion para la Atencion a Delitos Contra la Salud, or FFADS(H d d J 2003 14) hi i h AFI


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Such developments further push the Fox administration to findgreater means of hierarchical control to rein in the problem, includingthe use of highly specialized military personnel clandestine and not

against the police and other potential suspects (Hernandez 2003a, 14),The use of one coercive arm of the state against the other not onlyunderscores the depth of the problem of corruption; it shows that theMexican government has found itself forced to rely on authoritarian-eramilitarized tactics to bring the problem under control, leading many crit-ics to label the Fox administration increasingly authoritarian (CM enLinea 2004c),

The logical progression of this vicious cycle of failed police reformfollowed by a more centralized, quasi-authoritarian response was seenlong before the dismissal of DF police chief Ebrard in December 2004,It appeared as early as April, when President Fox created what Mexico'spapers have called a superfiscalia and a superpolicia or two new,highly centralized, powerful national offices for a super attorney gen-eral and super police QLafornada 2004), It is still too early to under-stand the full political and legal rationale or even the implications of thisnew reform, w hich breaks with past efforts by Fox and his predecessorsbecause it mixes and matches both investigative and preventive police

in one agency (superpolice, or those answering to the Secretary of theInterior) while separating both from the criminal prosecutor's office.

To a certain extent, such a strategy might allow the Fox governm entto eliminate some of the interagency rivalries between preventive andinvestigative police forces that have sustained corruption, p revented thearrest of fellow police, and undermined the rule of law for so manyyears. But the quixotic and potentially dangerous aspect of the reformis that it creates two competing agencies that overlap in function bothinternally and externally. One combines investigative and prosecutorialfunctions in which some but not all investigative police are involved(the attorney general's office); the other combines preventive and inves-tigative policing functions in which some prosecutorial groundwork islaid (Secretary of the Interior/police),

The bureaucratic fragmentation that results owes something not justto the institutional fallout from reorganizing cadres of police who, inpractice, are not ready to relinquish their networks of authority and affil-iation. It also owes much to how the remixing of these different aspects

of the administration of justice system (that is, the constitutional sepa-ration of police and judicial power) has created two new federal agen-


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DAVIS MEXICO S POLICE REFORM 75

opan lynchings and has long been the source of tension betweenMexico City administrators, those in the surrounding State of Mexico,and the federal authorities La Jornada 2001a; CNI en Linea 2005b).

Combined with a centralization of power in the national state thatlimits the power of local authorities in subnational jurisdictions likeMexico City, these organizational changes call into question the coher-ence and efficacy of many of democratic Mexico s key governing struc-tures, as well as the longstanding constitutional precedents and the legalcode separating these aspects of police powers. In addition, the com-bined effects of these reforms create problems of transparencynot tomention legitimacy and trustfrom the vantage point of civil society. Itwould not be unreasonable for the average citizen to ask which policeare answering to which authority. Nor would it be far-fetched todescribe the situation in postmodern terms: no one knows for sure whatis a real reform and what is an illusion. Yet this, unfortunately, is thestate of affairs that promotes further political disengagement, a keyfoundational element of a vibrant democracy.

C I V I L S O C I E T Y TA K E S O V E R

Delegitimation of state structures and the absence of transparency andaccountability by no means signal the end of democracy, of course,even if they do diminish its quality. Mexico s own history is replete withepisodes in which citizens have struggled to revitalize, reclaim, or estab-lish the state s accountability and transparency, thereby making democ-racy a process as much as an outcome. It takes an engaged and partic-ipatory citizenry willing to demand this in order to make it happen. Yeton precisely these counts, the situation in Mexico is not that hopeful, at

least in terms of concerted citizen claim making on the state withrespect to police; and again, it is the government s failure to enact aviable police reform that lies at the heart of this problem.

To some extent, this is a vicious circle: without citizens organizedand struggling for government accountability and transparency in rout-ing corruption and cleaning up the police, elected officials will not gothe extra mile to attack the problem. Yet without concrete gains in root-ing out police corruption and strong accountability from the state, eitherlocal or national, citizens become further alienated from their demo-cratically elected officials and take up alternative means to address secu-rity problems even as they bypass democratic institutions In Mexico


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even more cynical about the possibilities of clamoring for true reform from above.

With Mexico City's police seemingly out of control and the govern-

ment unwilling if not unable to turn around the accelerating problem ofpublic insecurity, citizens and businesses have started to absorb theservicing and protection duties that have long been the legitimatecharge of state-employed security forces. This was evident long.beforethe recent citizen mobilization, and was reflected in the unprecedentedexplosion in private policing in Mexico's capital during the 1990s. Theboom in crime starting in 1994 generated considerable demand for pri-vate security forces. The economic liberalization and commercial open-ing of the country further contributed to the proliferation of privatesecurity forces in the immediate post-NAFTA period because it allowedforeign com panies to offer security services. Highly lucrative profits anda relatively low investment were two of the benefits of this business.

To coordinate the proliferating private security forces in this period,in 1994 Mexico City created the Private Security Services RegistrationDepartment Direccion de Registro de Servicios rivados de Seguridad),which, in its first year of operation, counted 2,122 registered privatesecurity firms in the Federal District.'' By 2002, the number of private

security firms operating the capital neared 1 000 and these companiestogether employed approximately 22,500 private security guards.

To be sure, citizens cannot be faulted for turning to the privatesector to solve problems that the government has proved incapable oftackling. By so doing, citizens are effectively introducing their own bottom-up police reforms, built on a rejection or repudiation thatimplies a legitimation of public police 's willful disenfranchisementfrom ascribed duties. Yet bypassing public police in favor of privatesecurity forces also has its darker side. Such actions not only let corruptpolice off the hook by taking citizen pressure off the state; they alsosometimes generate more violence and insecurity, even as they raisetroubling questions about democracy, equality, and the rule of law moregenerally. Whenever rnore persons start bearing arms as a condition oftheir employment in private security services, and citizens themselvesstart to carry guns for self-protection from criminals and police alike,violent resolutions to questions of public insecurity become the norm,thereby fueling the vicious circle of violence and insecurity. The

recourse to lynchings and the emergence of vigilante mentalities can beseen as the logical extension of this situation.


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DAVIS: MEXICO'S POLICE REEORM 77

fordable. When both state and market failures in police services leavecitizens vulnerable, they have little recourse but to act on their own.Still, the overall security situation can deteriorate further when commu-

nities or private police com pete with public police for a monopolyon the legitimate use of force. Indeed, in Mexico City, public and pri-vate police forces, not to mention communities themselves, have insome instances battled with each other, fueling an environment of fearand insecurity. This dynamic may partly explain why, in the last severalyears, as the number of private police has risen, citizens have startedmaking formal complaints against them.

The magnitude of the problem and the volume of complaintsagainst private security forces still does not match that leveled at thepublic police, of course. But as a trend, it is noteworthy. In 2002, whenstatistics were first compiled, Mexico City governing officials saw morethan a fourfold rise (from to 22) in monthly complaints against privatepolice between May and November alone. That private police fre-quently are composed of ex-military or ex-police members may accountfor some of the transference in impunity and frequent human rightsabuses to their ranks. Whatever the source, accounts of private securityforces thwarting public police, and vice versa, are routinely reported by

citizens and officials alike. One high-profile example occurred severalyears ago in an armed shootout in the downtown Mexico City neigh-borhood of Tepito, a mere couple of hundred yards away from theadministrative offices of the newly democratically elected president andmayor (Davis 2003; La ornada 2001b).

For many citizens, one seemingly positive sign on the horizon is therise of new social movements and nongovernmental organizationsdevoted to questions of public security. Many grassroots groups aretaking the problems of police corruption and public insecurity to heart,seeking alternative solutions and community practices at the neighbor-hood level. In this sense, citizens are both building on and reinforcingthe democratic practices and advances that resulted from many years ofstruggle against authoritarianism. Over the last several years, the MexicoCity government has supported citizen security meetings at the level ofthe delegation, with the goal of bringing residents and police togetherin democratic dialogue about how best to guarantee public security. Theresults have been limited, however, for obvious reasons. Citizens do not

speak frankly about police corruption and impunity in their neighbor-hood when those very same police are sitting across the table, armedwith their note pads to identify citizens by face street and so onA cer


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78 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 48 : 1

mption are those operating citywide, which guarantees a larger scale andscope for action and organization. Yet this makes smaller, community-based organizationsthe bread and butter of much civil society activism

and a vibrant democracyrelatively insignificant in tackling the problem.Instead, the high-profile organizations that operate on this scale tend tocollaborate with private sector businesses. In Mexico, one such organi-zation funded by the private sector, the Citizens' Institute for the Studyof Insecurity Qnstituto dudadano de Estudios Sobre la InseguridadICESI), has developed a massive public relations campaign about policecorniption; its efforts have included the publication of names of policeofficials known to be involved in illegal activities.

Organizations such as ICESI have considerable clout because oftheir connections to wealthier elites in society, and a great deal of legit-imacy because they are independent from the government institutionsthat may be linked to police corruption. But these types of organizationsalso have a narrowly defined view of the problem of public insecurity,and they rarely engage government agencies or key democratic institu-tions. Organizations linked to business chambers of commerce andother private sector entities, moreover, care about problems like crimeand police corruption because they create an environment that puts

economic gains in jeopardy, either by creating locational disincentivesfor private investors or by driving away potential consumers, notbecause of their concern for civil society. Within this framework, con-cerns about justice and human rights are not so central, while the tech-niques these organizations favor are more consistent with an authoritar-ian, eliminate the problem no matter what it takes ethos than acommitment to democracy, due process, and the rule of law.

This is not to say that all civil society organizations appropriate thebusiness agenda of stopping crime at all costs. A number of the civilsociety organizations in Mexico have taken a human rights approach tothe problem. But in the last several years these seem to be declining innumber compared to the more anticrime-oriented NGOs and citizenorganizations, several of which are now working with some policedepartments in the Mexico City area to place greater restrictions on indi-vidual liberties. Thus the emphasis has shifted from police reform tocriminalization, with human rights issues shunted to the sidelines.Notably, newfound citizen activism for hardline measures against crime

suspects is encouraged by many police, who have a vested interest inblaming the criminalsand thereby diverting attention from their owncorrupt forces while also avoiding human rights discourses that could


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police leaders, and local government officials. The Giuliani plan, builtaround the broken windows idea that cleaning up the streets and estab-lishing neighborhood livability is the key to crime reduction, calls for a

bike in penalties for criminals and an increase in police powers to arresttbose who are in tbe wrong place at the wrong time. Civil liberties areoften the first casualty of such an approach, even as police increase ratherthan decrease their discretionary power. Yet as citizen support grows forsuch hardline measures, the sky seems to be tbe limit, as evidenced bynew efforts in Mexico to install the death penalty. In a move that suggeststhat authoritarian tendencies are alive and well, support for this positionis now advocated by some mem bers of the PRI (Pardinas 2003), who,tbrougb their recent victories in tbe State of Mexico, bave found them-selves competing with PRD loyalists for the votes of the metropolitan cit-izenry. Differentiating thernselves in terms of wbo is hardest on crime isperhaps tbe last salvo to be launched in a tight electoral field in wbich allparties are desperate to secure their political future.

In a democracy there should be bealthy debate about bow best tosolve key social problems, including crime. Likewise, a split in civil soci-ety between those who take a hard, anti-civil liberties line and thosewho are committed to human rights is not so difficult to understand.

What is most troublesome in tbe new discourses that have emerged inMexico, then, is the failure to target police corruption as part and parcelof tbe problem of crime and public insecurity. Citizens cannot fight tbisbattle alone; tbey surely cannot do so if they ignore police corruptionand focus only on crime and insecurity. The localized nature of socialmovement activism and most community organizationscoupled withtbe divergent framings of tbe problem among them, be they anticrime,pro-human rights, or otherwisecontinues to isolate individual organi-zations from each otber in ways that prevent them from acting as aunited front against the corruption problem. Civil society activism cango only so far if both state and civil society are not united togetherbehind this common goal.

The power to change endem ic police corruptionin Mexico and else-whererests on civil society's institutional capacity to transform thesystem of policing and the overall administration of justice; and thisrequires, among other things, legislative and policy actions in which tbestate and political parties also are key players. But how can this be accom-

plished in a virulently competitive political context when the parties areunwilling? Or in an environment where a commitment t buman rights andth i f li t b ifi d i d t t th li t


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The point here is that even though civil society continues to organ-ize around the problem of public insecurity, the fragmentation amongcitizen groups and NGO unwillingness to find powerful state and party

allies prevents them from making further headway. In the meantime,police remain relatively unaccountable to just about everyone, exceptperhaps their direct superiors and in many cases not even them. As theproblems of public insecurity and police corruption persist in MexicoCity, bringing new practices of insecurity that redefine relationshipswith power, fellow citizens, and space, to use Susana Rotker's formu-lation (2002, 13, emphasis in original), daily life spirals ever downwardinto the depths of chaos, unpredictability, and disorder.

T H E S O C IA L C O N T R A C T U N D O N EA N D I M P U C AT I O N S FOR D E M O C R A C Y

Today, as democracy has taken deeper root and started to blossom, thestate is still so fragmented and riddled with police corruption, and soci-ety perhaps even more alienated and cynical than earlier, that even thislong sought-after prize seems strangely irrelevant for many. Does thisalso mean that democracy, not to mention its quality, is the true victimhere? While it is too early to write the obituary for democracy in Mexicoor its capital city, the country's still-fragile political system does seem tohave been critically wounded by the paradoxical developments ofrecent years, including those set in motion by concerted efforts toreform the police from above and remedy the security situation frombelow. As democracy has deepened, the security situation has wors-ened, citizens are more politically disenfranchised than ever, and feware turning to their democratic leaders to solve the problems.

It should be borne in mind that democracy is a social project asmuch as a set of constitutional guarantees about structures andprocesses of political representation. It will flower only when there arestrong connections between the governors and the governed in a socialcontract that ties citizens to each other and to the state in a commonframework for social order, political representation, and political action.For such a situation to materialize, citizens and the state must accept asingle rule of law with predictable results and mechanisms or structuresof representation and accountability. But both the law and these mech-

anisms remain strangely elusive in Mexico today.One reason the viability of the social contract is now under threat is


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DAVIS: MEX ICO'S POLICE REEORM 81

above or below, have driven rather than reversed the cycle of state dele-gitimation, citizen frustration, police intransigence, and citizen anarchyleading to vigilantism and the irrelevance of the rule of law. Decades of

authoritarian governance caused Mexico's citizens to be prepared tomobilize independently of the state. This is one of the reasons thatdemocratization has been successful in the present period. But citizens'historical proclivities to mobilize against the PRI furthered the state'sreliance on corrupt police officials to sustain its monopoly on power.

Economic liberalizationand more recently, globalizationalsohave made their mark by opening borders in ways that al low each ofthese protagonists to further their own aims without directly engagingthe others. Direct foreign investment and foreign aid go to nationalstates; clandestine global networks of illegal trade fuel police impunity;and international advocacy groups support civil society organizationsthat are f inancially rewarded for bypassing government programs andmobilizing for police reform. Thus the new world order has made eachof these three actors less willing to tie their fate to each other in thesame territorial space in the search for a new and democratic politicsand society.

This phenomenon parallels the transformational shift from solid to

liquid m ode rnity, to use the term s of the great po stm od ern theoristZygmunt Bauman, in which widespread social disorder results fromchanging social and political practices. Bauman contends that in thenew world of l iquid modernity,

all communities are imagined, but the stability of this shared life ismore fragile than ever due in fundamental ways to weakening tiesbetween nation and state. The human pursuit of security and dig-nity is threatened by the deterioration of effective governing struc-

tures and boundaries of appropriate scale. . . ; while the verye.ssence of society, a normatively structured way of life for a groupof people within recognizable boundaries, is in jeopardy . . . [and]growing numbers of individuals are left to their own resources toresolve increasingly social problems. (Quoted in Brueggeman2004, 222)

Privatization of police, the des pe rate search for authoritarian or vigilanteactions to maintain social order, and the declining institutional capacityof the Mexican state to fulfill its normative responsibilities can all beidentified as signs of this troubling state of affairs.

What Bauman calls l iquid modernity might also be understood as


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mean that Mexico is on the precipice of a period in which regime type 'may not be as relevant as the extent of social chaos and disorder forcharacterizing the quality of political life, democratic or not. Given the

problems of police corruption and attendant vigilantism, certain loca-tions in Mexico City are now considered no man's lands where terrorand brute force, not a social contract, a formal legal system, or democ-racy, set the rules. In this environment, the value of human life isdegraded, as are the enlighted institutions and principles that gave riseto concerns about humanity in the first place. Ciaudio Lomnitz's deeplymoving and powerful ethnographic foray into what he calls a decayingMexico City discusses these developments as the degradation of peopleand a depreciation of life, in which the experience of violence, andthe fear, guilt, and impunity that are associated with it bring humansensibility nearly to an end (Lomnitz 2003, 48).

What we are seeing, in short, is not merely the unfulfilled promiseof democratic gains that most observers hoped would accompanyMexico's transition from authoritarian rule. Nor are we merely seeing ademocracy with diminished quality. We are confronting elements ofextreme social disorder and a breakdown of political and legal institu-tions and practices that make questions of representation and demo-

cratic participation almost irrelevant. Missing is the shared enlightenedcommitment to social order and rule of law that served as the midwifeto democracy over the last several centuries. In a society marked byunpredictability, violence, state fragmentation, and societal breakdown,the challenge of reform is indeed immense. Forget democratic deepen-ing; forget bettering the quality of democracy; forget the nuts and boltsof police reform. How about reconstructing, reviving, or renewingmodern enlightenment ideals and an attendant commitment to the ruleof law with the hope that with such social infrastructure a vibrantdemocracy will once again become something worth struggling for?That particular transition may be the hardest of all to achieve, yet itsurely will be the most lasting and worthwhile.

NOTES

1. Villareal (2002) used time series data from a sample of 1,800 Mexicanmunicipalities to demonstrate a direct relationship between democratization defined in terms of increased electoral com petition) and violence, as mediatedby the breakdown of patronage relations.


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DAVIS: MEXICO S POLICE REFORM 83

3. Transaction costs are defined as liabilities involved in firing corruptpolice from their jobs. In the search for newiy gainful employment after theirdismissal, many ex-police turned directly to the life of crime (Call 2003, 843).

4. Officials acknowledge that many more pirate com panies failed to reg-ister and thus remained beyond government scrutiny. Among those pirate firmsthat did register, almost half (1,123) were subsequently closed because of irreg-ularities in their functioning: no permits for the use of firearms, lack of registra-tion of firm personnel, and so on. Data on private police drawn from interviewsand documentation provided by the Secretaria de Seguridad Publica (Office ofthe Police ChieO, Mexico City, summer 2002.

5. Statistics from the Registration Office suggested that one-third of the per-sonnel (30 percent) in private security forces come from the military and thepublic police ranks. In research team interrogations with several representativesfrom private security firms, the numbers were closer to 50 percent. See RoblesZapata 2002.

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Alcocer V., Jose. 1997. Inseguridad publica. Proceso (Mexico City), September28: 49-51 .

Alvarado M endoza, Arturo, and Sigrid Arzt, eds. 2001. El desajto democrdtico deMexico: seguridady estado de derecho Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico.

Andreas, Peter. 1998. The Political Economy of Narco-Corruption in Mexico.Current History 9 1 (April): 160-70 .

Arzt, Sigrid. 2000. Scope and Limits of an Act of Good Faith: The PAN's Experi-ence at the Head of the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic. InBailey and Godson 2000. 103-25.

Astorga, Luis. 2000. Organized Crime and Organization of Crime. In Bailey andGodson 2000. 58-82.

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Documents

Dark Side of Police Reform in Mexico