Mexico's Counter-Reformers: Strong and Wrong

Mexico’s incipient effort to modernize its criminal process is at a sadly familiar crossroads.  Because reform does away with some of the mainstays of Mexico’s patently inefficient and abusive law enforcement machinery, some politicians are beginning to blame it for a worrisome but decade-old rise in crime and insecurity.

Speaking recently to a high-level audience convened by Mexico’s Supreme Court, Interior Secretary Fernando Gómez Mont echoed the tired criticisms of those who claim to see in justice reform an invitation to criminals and chaos, instead of a move toward strengthened processes and institutions. He took particular aim at Chihuahua, one of a handful of Mexican states to implement oral trials, establish pretrial bail hearings, and offer beleaguered prosecutors and judges a greater range of options for resolving cases. Gomez Mont blamed the state’s “conception of criminal justice” since reform efforts in 2007 for rising “anarchy,” especially, he noted, in the infamous border town of Ciudad Juarez—the site of hundreds, if not thousands, of particularly brutal murders of young women.  Yet the “desgobierno” of which he speaks has marred life in Chihuahua since the early 1990s, when for instance, the Juarez murders began.

Mexicans such as Juarez’s anguished mothers, or the residents of troubled states like Sonora, Sinaloa, Nuevo Len, Tamaulipas, Guerrero, need not be familiar with the relevant empirical studies, police focus groups, victim surveys, and internal government assessments to know that since the mid ‘90s the nation’s law enforcement has earned the dubious distinction of being both profoundly ineffective against crime and extremely abusive of suspects and victims alike. The sources tell a depressing—but not new—story:  less than a quarter of Mexican crime victims even bother to report the incidents to the police, and of that slender fraction, an anemic one percent get to court. Nearly a decade ago, that figure was 1.6 percent.

In 2006, Gómez Mont’s boss, President Felipe Calderón, launched a three-year war on organized crime that sent thousands of soldiers into Chihuahua alone and spawned the phrase “arrests to nowhere,” referring to a pattern of high profile arrests followed by muted, no-explanation releases. When one considers as well the inconvenient truth that organized crime is a federal, not a state matter, it becomes crystal clear that the Secretary is living in a rather ostentatious glass house.

Unfortunately, the Secretary’s remarks portend a dangerous political climate. When crime grips the public imagination, some politicians—and much of the public—are bound to cleave to simple, tough measures instead of more substantial and balanced reforms that will take, at best, years to bear fruit. If this mood predominates, relatively straightforward amendments to penal and procedure codes such as Chihuahua’s will end up as the temporary high water mark of reform, rather than part of a sustained process of urgently needed interlocking institutional and legal changes. Most disturbing is the prospect that the long list of challenges—including the need for profound changes in internal police governance and external oversight, more effective police strategies and investigations, an overhaul of the prison system, and better information management systems across all relevant institutions—may never get tackled if change itself is fingered as the culprit.