The statements made by Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, Mexico’s Interior Secretary, which argued that, on one hand, the government could not provide a security body to every single municipality – especially after the violent events occurred in the state of Michoacán and the murder of the Mayor of Santa Ana Maya – and, on the other hand, Mayors throughout the country would have to cooperate in order to solve the violence problem, was received with a great deal of criticism by both the media and a sector of the general population. Regarding the former issue, even though it is comprehensible that the statement was said with the intention of merely pointing out that there are not enough police forces to personally protect every municipality leader in Mexico and that it is not the best way to deploy federal forces in tackling organized crime, the implicit question that the State cannot “guarantee” the security of a Mayor, it will not be able to guarantee that of the general population, certainly comes up to the table.
With regards to the latter issue, we applaud the willingness for an open cooperation but we question if in sub-national levels there is a capacity to enable such cooperation with federal government corporations, given the amount of population in several municipalities throughout the country and, subsequently, the lack and, in some cases, non-existence of local police forces.
In real terms, with around 38 thousand police forces, the strategy problem has to do with focus and, apparently, scarce resources in 2,440 municipalities and 16 Mexico City boroughs. We could generally classify municipalities in 3 kinds: firstly, high-density populated and relatively institutionalized municipalities with more than 300 thousand inhabitants (around 3% of all municipalities); secondly, medium-sized municipalities, with a population of between 25,000 to 300,000 residents (approximately 27% of municipalities in the country) and between 10 and up to 100 police forces and lastly, municipalities with less than 25 thousand inhabitants (70% of the country’s total), including rural zones with less than 2,500 residents, with police forces of less than 20 elements and in some cases, non-existent. Just like with companies, there are large, medium, small and micro (or non-extent) municipal police corporations. Taking up data pointed out three years ago by the former Secretary for Public Security, Genaro García Luna, 17% of municipalities don’t have police corporations (referring to between 355 and 400 municipalities) and from the more than 2 thousand police forces in the country, 89% has already 100 or less elements. Even though these numbers can be criticized and we don’t currently have exact data, the tendency suggests a lack of elements that can partially explain the emergence of self-defense community forces with assumptions that they have been armed by criminal organizations.
The aforementioned issues lead us to point out that there cannot be an effective cooperation with the federal government without a reorganization of police forces at both federal and municipal levels. Regardless of the discussion of a potential Unique Police Force, alternatives such as the creation of regional police forces, a scheme where municipalities with less than 50 thousand inhabitants can be able to cooperate with close-by boroughs that shame the same traits and that don’t exceed over 100 thousand residents, can form a common police force for the zone, need to be considered. In addition to this scheme of regional police, a scheme of close-by municipal police forces is on the agenda. Besides, it is essential to restructure inefficient state police forces and fixing coordination issues between medium and large municipalities with metropolitan police forces (though the mere existence of the latter only shows the weakness of state police forces).
In the end, the disagreement among the different levels of government as well as the federal administration and the public opinion regarding security reflects the clash of conceptions and reality between a political system that assumes itself as federal (and that it legally and functionally works that way) but is not structured to be successful. In the past, the federal government had such an influence that it could keep the order both in political and crime issues, not because there was a good security strategy but due to the political reality at the time. Nowadays, even with the ever-changing political realities (from PAN administrations that tended towards decentralization to PRI, a party that refuses to reverse it), the security system is still non-functional and everything suggests that it will not be until the main political problem is sold, an issue that is not new: centralizing or decentralizing in an appropriate way, instead of having the ever-present, hybrid and dysfunctional system currently in place.
CIDAC
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