Front-runner’s focus crime, not cartels

— Shortly after sunrise one day last month in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, police found 14 butchered bodies in a van outside City Hall, a salvo in a seesawing battle of horrors between Mexico’s two most powerful drug cartels.

Soon after, nine people were hanged from a bridge in Nuevo Laredo. Fourteen heads were left in coolers outside City Hall. Eighteen mutilated bodies were dumped by a scenic lake in western Mexico. The decapitated bodies of 49 people were dumped outside a small town 75 miles from the U.S. border.

The front-runner in Mexico’s presidential election says he can ease the waves of violence consuming the country by changing the focus of its six-year offensive against organized crime.

President Felipe Calderon’s administration has targeted the top ranks of the country’s drug cartels, deploying thousands of troops to capture crime kingpins and seize their drugs and weapons, often in close coordination with the U.S.

Enrique Pena Nieto, who has a double-digit lead five weeks before the July 1 election, says his top security priority will not be arresting the leaders of the organizations that move hundreds of millions of dollars of narcotics each year into the United States. Instead, he and his advisers say, they will focus the government’s resources on reducing homicide, kidnapping and extortion - the crimes that do the most damage to the greatest number of Mexicans - by flooding police and troops into towns and cities with the highest rates of violent crime.

“This doesn’t mean that we don’t pay attention to other crimes or that we don’t fight drug trafficking, but the central theme at this time is diminishing violence in the country,” Pena Nieto said.

Pena Nieto’s campaign said drug cartels could still be attacked, particularly if they carry out murders, kidnappings and extortion, but arresting their leaders will no longer be the focus of government efforts.

“Each administration chooses its operational objectives, and the objective per se is not the extradition or capture of big bosses, or the burning of seized drugs,” said Pena Nieto’s campaign coordinator, Luis Videgaray.

Some observers say that a strategy to reduce violence above all else could mean that drug dealers who conduct their businesses discreetly will be quietly left alone.

“I think that it’s very clear that he’s moving in the direction of concentrating the resources that the federal state has [toward] fighting crime and violence that affect people in Mexico ... as opposed to concentrating the resources on combating drug trafficking,” said former Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda. “If you have scarce resources and you’re focusing them on A, you’re not focusing them on B.”

Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, known by its Spanish initials as the PRI, ruled Mexico for 70 years until it lost the presidency in 2000, and high ranking party figures and their relatives were often accused of striking deals with cartels in exchange for political protection. Violence was far lower, in large part because cartels maintained uncontested control of smuggling routes in many parts of the country.

Meanwhile, with Mexicans expressing strong support in polls for a militarized confrontation with crime, Pena Nieto is promising continuity in key aspects of Mexico’s U.S.-backed drug war. He has rejected legalization, called for more cooperation with Washington and praised Calderon’s decision to confront the cartels shortly after taking office.

On the campaign trail, Pena Nieto has been emphasizing his plans to maintain or increase the military presence in violence-torn cities like Monterrey and Veracruz. He has pledged an increase in the number of federal police officers from 36,000 to 50,000, and is also proposing a new semi-military police force composed of former soldiers and marines under civilian command that would be deployed to the towns and cities suffering from the highest violence and weakest policing.

Pena Nieto’s new approach “would not stop fighting the drug cartels, but it would shift from targeting the heads of the cartels,” campaign spokesman Diego Gomez said. “What Calderon has been doing is just targeting a few main cartels and splitting them up and what you have is chaos.”

All three major Mexican presidential candidates have been criticized for vagueness in their proposals on conducting the war against crime.

Josefina Vazquez Mota has been vocally supportive of her National Action Party’s current policy, pledging to expand the federal police to 150,000, a roughly fourfold increase over current numbers. Fellow backers of the current U.S.-Mexican strategy argue that the attack on cartels is showing results, with crime groups weakened by Calderon’s six year offensive, and preliminary and unofficial statistics showing signs of violent crimes beginning to wane in some parts of the country.

Leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has placed more emphasis on withdrawing the military from the streets, fighting corruption among government officials and reducing crime by reducing social inequality.

Front Section, Pages 9 on 05/26/2012

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