The irony seems lost on the cadets: Mexicans often struggle to distinguish cops from criminals. During his campaign to dethrone the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has ruled Mexico for the past seven decades, Vicente Fox pledged to restore the rule of law and weed out dishonest police and other public officials. Five months after his July victory, he finally takes office this week, and the race begins to fulfill his promises. Good luck. At the national level, he has proposed the creation of a “transparency commission,” which would investigate major corruption cases of the past, and a department of security and justice, which would consolidate various national police forces in an effort to separate law enforcement from politics. Even though Fox has limited direct influence in local jurisdictions like Mexico City, he will be judged by how beat cops there and around the country behave.
While police involvement in kidnappings and drug dealing captures headlines, the most endemic forms of corruption–and perhaps the most difficult to stop–are the generic bribery and extortion that have become a way of life throughout Mexico. Public-opinion polls show that Mexicans trust police even less than they trust politicians. Interviews with cadets, police officers and investigators trying to crack down on crime inside Mexico City’s 80,000-officer force revealed that even the most earnest cops often succumb to the temptations that are both plentiful and low risk. In a month, the cadets will be mere cogs in a system that pays too little, sometimes requires them to make payments to higher-ups and makes a mockery of their ethics class.
It is difficult to know how many crimes police commit since relatively few are caught. But some recent convictions in Mexico City show the crimes can be classified many ways. The creative: a motorcycle cop pretended to have been clipped by a car in order to extort several thousand dollars from the driver–while two other policemen played the part of civilians who witnessed it all. The comic: five officers smuggled hams in a car trunk out of the warehouse where hot to-go lunches are prepared for policemen. The passive: three police ensured the coast was clear for bank robbers to make a hit. And the tragic: an American expatriate died of asphyxiation after at least seven officers and an ex-policeman force-fed him alcohol to cloud his memory while they went on a tour of automatic-teller machines with his bank card.
For many cadets, the initiation into crime and corruption begins as soon as the six-month basic-training course ends. Or sooner. Last year an instructor was caught demanding $40 bribes to pass his students. “We have one of the most antiquated police forces in the Americas,” says the school’s director, Juan Torres Escamilla. His office has a rotary-dial phone on the desk and a set of out-of-date encyclopedias in a bookcase. For a visitor, he plays a promotional video entitled “The New Police,” which shows cadets, “Starsky and Hutch” style, rolling out of a skidding car. The school also has an Olympic-size swimming pool filled with greenish water as well as a make-believe neighborhood, complete with health clinic and post office, used in training. The roof of the shooting range leaks when it rains.
The 700 or so students are the survivors of a rigorous admissions process. It includes a criminal-background check, a medical exam, a physical-fitness test and a general-knowledge exam (sample question: “The disease known as athlete’s foot is produced by a. a fungus, b. a virus, c. bacteria, or d. worms). Finally, recruits must prove themselves emotionally stable by answering the 566 true-or-false questions that make up a personality test. Most cadets come from poor families and see a patrol car as a step up from a job as a construction worker or a clerk at Wal-Mart. The average age is 21. All have completed at least the equivalent of the ninth grade, but only 5 percent have finished high school. Almost half are married, usually with children. About 13 percent are women, and roughly a quarter have relatives in the force. In interviews, nearly everyone seems to have a tale of having been robbed on a bus or assaulted on the street.
“Open the door! Slowly. Get out of the car. Slowly. On your knees!” Wearing his KILLERS T shirt and aiming his baton as if it were a rifle, Mauricio Gonzalez barks the commands at two other cadets playing the bad guys in a training exercise. Gonzalez, a lanky 21-year-old, grew up surrounded by police, including his father and several uncles. In three months, he will be assigned to a patrol car and paid about $300 a month. He says that it is enough to live on, maybe even to buy his own set of wheels, but he worries how he would ever support a family. “Here they tell us not to be corrupt,” he says. “They pound it into your head. But from what I know, if you have a patrol car, you have to deliver money to your boss. And on what you earn as a policeman, a person with kids can’t survive. We don’t want to be corrupt. But they make you corrupt.”
So why would anybody want a job that pays so little, makes you the scorn of the public and could get you killed? “You can die, but you can also save lives,” Gonzalez says. “What if some bastard is raping a girl? This for me is the worst.”
The reality of police life is less romantic for his uncle Fernando. With 10 years of experience, Fernando Gonzalez, 31, earns about $400 a month. Like many of his colleagues, he works another job on his rest days, driving a taxi for an extra $200 a month. That often means finishing a 12-hour patrol at 6 a.m., sleeping a few hours, then driving for nine more hours. His wife adds $300 to the monthly income by buying clothes wholesale and selling them to neighbors. The family income affords them cable television, a two-bedroom apartment in a government-subsidized building and a 1989 Dodge with shredded seats. With help from his accountant brother, Gonzalez is able to send the eldest of his three children to private school.
Shop owners often give him a few pesos or some bread out of sympathy, though lately he’s been stuck with station duty because his patrol car is being repaired from a fender bender. He has been thinking about bribing a police mechanic in order to get back on the streets sometime before Christmas. “If you don’t want it to sit in the shop forever, you have to pay to have it done faster,” Gonzalez says. In his view, much of Mexican society is corrupt, which makes it difficult for police to stay honest. “Why do the restaurants sell adulterated wine? Because it’s cheaper and they can sell it at a higher profit. That’s how things work.”
It is a lesson reinforced again and again. A few years ago he broke up a robbery at a school. One of the suspects offered Gonzalez $4,000 to let him go. He turned it down and the department gave him an award for bravery. But he was soon disheartened to learn that the suspect had bribed a court official and was freed. “Many police set suspects free. They say, ‘Better that we get the money than somebody up the line’,” says Gonzalez. “We have needs.”
Equally frustrating is the refusal of citizens to report crimes. Gonzalez once saw three teenagers carrying garbage bags full of clothes out of a boutique. He jumped out of his patrol car, nabbed the suspects and grabbed a .357 magnum pistol from one of their belts. The owner only wanted the clothes, not the hassle of having to file charges, so Gonzalez had to let the boys go. But he decided to keep the gun, which he sold to a fellow officer–an illegal gun dealer–for about $500. “Many colleagues say I’m a fool because I’ve returned the booty from robberies,” Gonzalez says. “They see it as a just prize for the danger of the job. Many police are dead because of fights with criminals.” He once survived a bullet to the gut during a jewelry-store robbery.
Confidence in the police has sunk so low that when the Mexico City prosecutor released statistics this month showing that car theft, burglaries and murders have significantly declined in Mexico City since 1997, politicians quickly suggested that fewer and fewer people are even bothering to report crimes. One citizens group, Mexicans United Against Crime, recently conducted a telephone survey and found that 60 percent of crime victims, mostly of muggings and robberies, never went to the police. Of those who filed reports, a quarter said they were asked to pay a bribe to ease the process along.
The police in Mexico have never enjoyed great respect. The job has long attracted the poor, and there is a tradition of beat cops’ augmenting their salaries with tips from merchants. But the reputation of the police did not really start plummeting until the 1960s, as the government began cracking down on students protesting for democracy, cementing the image of the police as little more than an oppressive wing of the PRI, which had ruled Mexico since 1929. The most devastating blow came in 1976, when President Jose Lopez Portillo appointed his friend Arturo Durazo as the Mexico City police chief. The tales of corruption and brutality under his tenure are so legendary that they were made into a best-selling book and a movie, “Lo negro del Negro Durazo” (“The Darkest of the Dark Durazo”). Every week he demanded several hundred dollars from each of his 80 subchiefs, who in turn collected the money by extorting it from their underlings. The result was an institutionalized top-down pyramid of corruption that rested on beat cops, who were forced to rent their guns and pay their bosses for the right to patrol zones with the highest potential for extracting bribes from citizens. Durazo, who died in August, built a mansion modeled after the Greek Pantheon–adding a replica of Manhattan’s Studio 54 disco, a casino, a racetrack and a heliport–which was turned into the Museum of Corruption after he went to prison on racketeering and weapons convictions several years later.
Since the PRI lost Mexico City in 1997, the new government has been trying to clean up the police. The current chief, Alejandro Gertz Manero, fired several old bosses, restructured districts and began more careful monitoring of patrol cars. The efforts at times have bordered on the bizarre. For several months last year, only female police officers were allowed to hand out traffic tickets, on the theory that women are naturally less corrupt than men. The experiment failed. “I think Gertz wants to make changes. But he can’t,” says Jorge Chabat, a professor who studies crime. “The brotherhood”–as he calls the mafia-style network–“has been around for too long.”
One problem is finding witnesses. As in many cities, few police are willing to testify against their colleagues for fear of retribution. And citizens have come to accept and even appreciate the ease of being able to pay a bribe instead of going to court and paying the full-price fine. Last year an internal anti-corruption unit, known as Grupo Alamo, determined that a half-dozen cops were raking in several hundred dollars a day, extracted in $1.50 bribes from motorists who made a popular–and illegal–U-turn near a highway-exit ramp. A few blocks down the road, the investigators pulled over 63 drivers who had paid the bribe, but not one was willing to testify against the cops.
Despite such absurdities, there have been modest successes. The office of Roberto Perez Martinez, a city prosecutor, looms over a warehouse-size room of half-open file cabinets, desks stacked with bulging binders and dozens of lawyers and investigators hunched over computers. Perez oversees the prosecution of public servants, and in the last three years his office has sent about 900 officers to jail, mostly for extorting bribes. As for institutionalized corruption, Perez says: “We’re starting to break it. Were talking about very old structures and many interests. There are still so many gangs inside the police that are not identified.” Asked how many traffic police have never accepted a bribe, Perez answers without pausing: “Zero.”
When Fox becomes president this Friday, Mexicans will be looking for a quick fix. Fox has promised to filter corrupt police from the ranks but has also admitted that it would be difficult to suddenly fire thousands of them. Most analysts say that the most important change will come not from what Fox does, but from what he represents: a fresh start after 70 years of PRI rule. “Only society can change this. Not Fox,” says Ernesto Lopez Portillo, who has written extensively on public security. “I don’t believe in messiahs.”
Back at the Police Academy, the “Killers” pay close attention to a lecture on how to interact with citizens. “For the image of the institution we represent, we have to be clean-shaven, nails clipped, hair cut,” says the instructor. “We have to shine our shoes. We have to shine our badges. The uniform should be clean and ironed.” What he doesn’t say is that police officers often have to spend two weeks’ pay on those shoes, badges and uniforms. Oscar Garcia Ramirez, a 23-year-old traffic cop who drives a tow truck, was luckier than many. He was given the pants of a uniform, but the waist was size 40, eight inches too big. He bought three pairs in his own size.
Like many of his colleagues, Garcia was a crime victim before he was a policeman. Four years ago Garcia and his brother, Rodrigo, were getting a lift from a friend when they tapped another car at an intersection. The friend admitted it was his fault and agreed to pay for the damages. But when the three arrived at the house of the other driver with the cash a few days later, the man opened fire with a pistol. Oscar dove behind a parked car, but one bullet struck Rodrigo in the shoulder and another hit the friend in the ankle. The brothers went to the hospital and two days later to the police to report the shooting. After waiting for several hours, they finally were able to tell their story, but the man was never prosecuted. “They didn’t do anything,” Oscar says. “They said they were investigating. I don’t believe them. I know the system now.”
He joined the police to make money. And soon after graduating from the Police Academy in 1997, Oscar quickly learned that most of his colleagues were doubling their salaries with bribes. From his point of view, such transactions work in the interest of both the officer and the driver without tail-lights or a license. “Many times they earn very little, too,” he says. “We can’t make them pay the fine.” Married now with two small children, Oscar makes window frames, which brings in an extra $300 a month. He has also been building a second story onto a crumbling concrete house in a slum on the outskirts of Mexico City. “I sometimes impress myself with how much I have achieved in three years. Maybe it’s not a lot. But we’re trying to improve our lives,” he says. “Maybe when my kids are 20, this place will be better.”
Rodrigo, meanwhile, remained at home with his widowed mother in a two-room shack decorated with her Bible-scene posters and his cut-outs of women in bikinis. For a while, he helped pay the bills by working as a messenger and pulling passengers in a cart attached to a bicycle, all the while dreaming of becoming an electrician. But, he explains, “I didn’t have money to continue school. My brother told me the course at the Police Academy isn’t difficult.” Now one of the “Killers,” Rodrigo has already experienced the public’s disdain for his new profession. One day a week cadets ride along with full-fledged officers. “When we put our uniforms on, the people honk their horns because they don’t like us,” he says. Fox can’t change that overnight. But if Mexicans don’t start feeling safer soon, he could be the next target of their contempt.
