Mexican police still patrolling without guns, officials say

CIUDAD MIGUEL ALEMÁN, TAMPS., MEXICO — Police in five Tamaulipas border cities continued to patrol the streets Monday without service weapons, nearly a week after military forces confiscated them in a series of surprise raids.

But officers in Reynosa, Rio Bravo, Matamoros, Nuevo Laredo and Valle Hermoso have managed to maintain the peace armed only with nightsticks and batons, officials from each city said.

“We don’t know when our weapons will be returned,” Rio Bravo police Chief Adan Nava Correa said in Spanish on Monday. “But until then, we are working normally.”

Last week, tanks surrounded local police stations in the border towns and soldiers took away department-issued firearms, searched officers and checked radio communications for signs of cooperation with drug smugglers.

The coordinated raids halted patrols for the day, but officers in most of the affected cities were allowed back on the streets without weapons by that evening, said Miriam Medel Garcia, a spokeswoman for the Mexican consulate in McAllen.

“They were all very cooperative with the military,” she said.

By Monday, only officers in Ciudad Miguel Alemán — across the river from Roma — had their weapons returned, despite the city’s growing reputation as a base for cartel activity.

“We can say that our police are now certified,” Mayor Servando Lopez Moreno said. “Miguel Alemán is a very safe city.”

The raids, which followed the arrests earlier this month of four Nuevo Laredo police officers charged with radioing information of military activity to cartel members, have become a frequent tactic of Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s administration, in his efforts to weed out police corruption across the country.

Last year, the army conducted similar operations in Tijuana, B.C.N., and Monterrey, N.L., as well as towns in the Michoacan, Sinaloa and Sonora states. In each case, confiscating officer’s weapons allowed military officials to check whether weapons held by local police had been used in past drug crimes.

But so far, the Tamaulipas searches have yielded few obvious results.

Although at least 17 officers were detained during the sweeps, none have been officially charged with criminal activity, government officials said. Three officers were taken into military custody in Matamoros and soldiers seized a semiautomatic rifle not officially registered to the police.

In Rio Bravo, the search resulted in the seizure of two unregistered police vehicles and the detainment of 14 officers whose radios were not tuned to official channels. All of the officers were later released, city officials said.

Representatives of the Mexican defense ministry, which controls the army, could not be reached for comment Monday and have yet to publicly acknowledge last week’s operation.

The coordinated searches came after weeks of violence between soldiers and elements of the Gulf Cartel, which controls smuggling routes throughout much of Tamaulipas and into southern Texas. Since taking office in December 2006, Calderón has dispatched thousands of soldiers to the region in an effort to stamp out the group’s influence there.

Part of that effort, government officials said, must address corruption of municipal and state police who are believed to tacitly allow — and in some cases even aid in — smuggling activity through their jurisdictions.

Last week, a federal jury in McAllen convicted former Tamaulipas state police commander Carlos Landin-Martinez, who was once believed to have been second-in-command of the Gulf Cartel’s Reynosa operations.

A former drug trafficker and witness in that case told the court that smugglers routinely rely on police cooperation to move their loads through cities such as Reynosa.

But Lopez, Miguel Alemán’s mayor, is just content his city’s police force appears to have turned up clean. Fighting his nation’s drug war, he said, remains somebody else’s problem.

“(The cartel) is another story,” he said. “Federal authorities have to deal with that.”

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La Frontera staff writer Martha Leticia Hernandez contributed to this report.

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Jeremy Roebuck covers courts and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4437.