Elite police force chief, Heberto Yoc Hermandez, was arrested Friday
Mexico created an elite force of federal agents modeled on the FBI four years ago, but now one in five members of the agency is under investigation for committing crimes, the attorney general’s office said on Sunday.
In a report obtained by Reuters, the attorney general’s office said 1,493 members of the Federal Investigation Agency, or AFI, are under investigation “for probably committing crimes,” and 457 of those currently face prosecution.
Read the whole article — and reflect on how much support border security receives from an “elite force of federal agents”.
This shows that once the corruption and rot sets in, it becomes very difficult to get rid of it. Those riding the gravy train see no reason to get off until the iron bars slam behind them or a bullet hits their head.
I’m currently reading Moisés Naím’s new book Illicit.
From pages 80 – 81, where he discusses the US’s “certification” program in the 1990s:
A former top official of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) told me that “before every trip I took to review with my counterparts in the Mexican government their efforts to combat drug trafficking, I was given a detailed briefing by our intelligence agencies about the ties between some of the high-level Mexican officials that I was going to meet and the drug traffickers. Yet after that I would go to another briefing where I was told that NAFTA was a priority for the United States and that I should be careful not to do anything that would jepoardize it. Our policy then and still now is highly schizophrenic.”
And from pages 83 – 84:
Wherever the drug economy has flourished there have been political consequences. The sums of money are just too great. At a minimum, it is virtually guaranteed that where there are substantial drug profits, there will be corruption and official complicity–very often at the highest levels. Elite drug squads and national police units from Mexico to Russia to Cambodia have found themselves infiltrated and bought. Prosecutors and judges are no different. all the evidence suggests that we should assume corruption, not the absence of corruption.