Police Forces May Be Replaced as Mexico Takes Action Against Corrupt Municipalities Mark Stevenson - The Associated Press
go to original December 3, 2014

A Mexican soldier guards municipal policemen who were arrested in the state of Michoacán. (Reuters)

MEXICO CITY – Mexico’s most corruption-plagued municipal police forces would be replaced by state police within two years under a bill President Enrique Peña Nieto has submitted to Congress.

Municipal police in the states of Guerrero, Tamaulipas, Jalisco and Michoacán would be placed under state control quickly, because “these are the states most urgently in need of attention,” according to the bill submitted late Monday.

In September, a drug cartel-infiltrated municipal police force in the Guerrero state city of Iguala detained 43 students and turned them over to the gang, which reportedly killed them. The city’s mayor and many of his police officers have been arrested. In the northern border state of Tamaulipas, many municipal police forces have already been effectively dissolved, because they were unable to face up to warring drug cartels or had been coopted by them.

In Michoacán, civilian vigilantes were invited to join a state rural police force that has taken over security duties in many towns in the state’s hot lands region.

The rest of Mexico’s 31 states would have presumably more time to implement the reforms.

Read the rest at The News

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