Underpaid police open to criminal bribes

Mexico's drug war has exposed the weakness of its criminal-justice institutions.

Numbers are not the problem: with 366 officers per 100,000 people, Mexico is better supplied with police than the United States, Britain, Italy and France, among others.

But it is badly organised and corrupt. Policemen earn an average of US$350 ($445) a month, about the same as a builder's labourer, meaning that wages are supplemented with bribes. Carlos Jauregui, who was Nuevo Leon's chief security official until March, reckons that more than half the officers in the state were being paid by organised crime. A policeman in Monterrey can be bought for about 5000 pesos ($400) a fortnight, Jauregui reckons.

"Police are treated as second-class citizens," says Ernesto Lopez Portillo, head of Insyde, a Mexico City think-tank.

They are kept that way by the constitution, which separates police officers from other public servants, meaning they do not qualify for the standard minimum wage and the 40-hour weekly work limit.

Police forces are in theory overseen by internal investigation units, but their findings are secret and, in any case, Lopez Portillo estimates that fewer than 5 per cent of forces have such a body.

The Government has focused on reforming the federal police, with some success.

The force has gone through a deep purge, with a 10th of its officers sacked in the first eight months of this year for corruption or incompetence. Pay has gone up, and so has recruitment.

At the beginning of President Felipe Calderon's term there were 6000 officers in the federal force; now there are more than 30,000 - some seconded from the army. The Government is developing an external body to review the police.

Mexico is a federation of 31 states and 2456 municipalities, whose governors and mayors guard their limited powers jealously. Policing is one of them, and the quality varies wildly: there are fewer than half as many local police per head in Tamaulipas as in Tabasco. Some 400 towns have no police, and 90 per cent of municipal forces employ fewer than 100 officers.

Some mayors are under enormous pressure from criminals to keep things that way.

A patchwork of command muddles operations. In Monterrey, the metropolitan area alone has 11 different forces, using different training, tactics and even brands of radio. "If a criminal crosses the street he has reached a safe haven," said one official.

Last month, Calderon presented plans to unify the police in each state, bringing the municipal forces under the control of governors. The measure now has broad support in Mexico City but requires changes to the constitution, which more than half the states must approve.

But reforms are slow. An exam introduced two years ago to weed out dim or corrupt policemen has been taken by fewer than a quarter of officers, and by fewer than a 10th of state police.