Michoacán has received an exceptional treatment regarding public security from both the current federal government as well as from Felipe Calderón’s tenure. However, the approach that both administrations have taken has been quite different.
It was in his native state where Felipe Calderón started the Mexican Drug War and it was also the place where, in May 2009, one of the most scandalous failures of his administration occurred: the Federal Attorney’s Office was incapable of supporting the criminal proceedings against 17 local government officials working for the former Michoacán Governor, Leonel Godoy, as well as 12 Mayors from different parties. Almost five years later, now with local and federal government belonging to different parties, similar circumstances are repeated, however, this time, the results might not be the same. The differences between the Michoacán scandal from Calderón’s government to the legal process started on April 19th with the issuing of a detention order for Apatzingán’s Mayor, Uriel Chávez Mendoza, are not trivial and have become important tools in comparing both administrations.
In 2009, the Federal Attorney’s Office used the controversial legal procedure known as arraigo (pre-charge detention) to apprehend and subsequently carry out a weak criminal investigation that would later be challenged before the Judiciary Power and would end up with the release of the accused due to a lack of evidence. In contrast, the current administration decided that the criminal procedure should start from a formal legal complaint presented before local authorities in order to pursuit the charges of extortion and fraud towards several public officers working for the Michoacán government. Although it cannot be predicted that the current case will end up with a verdict and even less so that this verdict will remain after a potential judiciary challenge, the lack of a pre-charge detention as well as the apprehension following the issuing of a formal order of imprisonment by a local judge, certainly decreases the risk that the case may crumble during the trial while at the same time uses the judiciary control from the beginning of the aforementioned process. Another remarkable difference is the attempt to manage the case through local institutions, with the likely intention of showing that the local justice system does work, even when federal authorities are the ones that actually rule the state. Lastly, it does not cease to amaze that the Michoacán scandal was produced a month before the 2009 mid-term elections, while there is a strong interest in carrying out the local election with the most normal conditions that current circumstances may allow.
The process against the Mayor of Apatzingán also sends a message to the rest of Mexican states that could require from an exceptional arrangement of “mixed governance”. If the federal government intervenes within a local administration due to a public security crisis, municipal authorities would be under scrutiny and would, eventually, be legally prosecuted if any criminal conduct is proved. With this type of actions, incentives are created to control the rise of violence and avoid critical scenarios. The cost of reaching agreements with the organized crime is also increased, with all of its consequences.
Doing things differently does not equate to different results or, in other words, there is no guarantee that the current strategy will be successful in the long term, in a global sense and that it may enable the creation of a sustainable peace environment for the state. The aforementioned will not happen if the Commissioner does not have a transition plan in order to recover and transmit a sense of authority to local institutions. In the particular case of justice procurement and security, the emergency powers should first recover the monopoly of violence that is in hands of criminal networks and transfer it to strong and efficient institutions that have sufficient judiciary and police capacity in order to sustain it. As it occurs in all aspects of the Michoacán public administration, authority and rule of law have to be created where they are non-existent and that is a task that goes beyond allocating financial resources when done in an improvised manner. Not creating conditions at a local level implies perpetuating the federal supervision, which is something undesirable for several reasons. The first of them is that circumstances in Michoacán are not that different from other Mexican states and there is certainly not enough capacity to simultaneously sustain such systems throughout several entities. Secondly, there has repeatedly been an emphasis on the transience and the attempt to comply with the election process of local authorities, even when this does not mean the absence of a centralist and strong government that is willing to intervene.
The federal government has managed to pacify Michoacán using strength rather than solving the problems that caused the situation in the first place. Although there is no doubt that its attention for the legal concepts is quite different from the previous administration, there are no distinctions in the absence of a strategy of building a police and judiciary capacities. Without the aforementioned characteristic, the day that the federal government decides to retire its forces from the state, things will gradually return to its previous status quo: chaos.
CIDAC
Comments