Undermining the Rule of Law: Democratization and the Dark Side of Police Reform in Mexico

Latin American Politics and Society, Spring 2006 by Davis, Diane E

ABSTRACT

This article asks whether democratization, under certain historical conditions, may relate to the deteriorating rule of law. Focusing on Mexico City, where police corruption is significant, this study argues that the institutionalized legacies of police power inherited from Mexico's one-party system have severely constrained its newly democratic state's efforts to reform the police. Mexico's democratic transition has created an environment of partisan competition that, combined with decentralization of the state and fragmentation of its coercive and administrative apparatus, exacerbates intrastate and bureaucratic conflicts. These factors prevent the government from reforming the police sufficiently to guarantee public security and earn citizen trust, even as the same factors reduce capacity, legitimacy, and citizen confidence in both the police and the democratically elected state. This article suggests that when democracy serves to undermine rather than strengthen the rule of law, more democracy can actually diminish democracy and its quality.

In recent years, Latin American countries have made progress on the democratic front by ushering in more competitive political party systems and ousting longstanding authoritarian rulers. Yet a good number also have suffered through explosions of violence, rising public insecurity, and deteriorating rule of law, much of it fueled by police corruption and impunity. In response, democratically elected leaders have struggled to enact police or judicial reforms aimed at strengthening the rule of law and eliminating corruption among officers in the administration of justice system. The intensity and range of these efforts have been especially noteworthy in Mexico, where an unprecedented number of reforms, many of them directed toward the police, have been introduced in the several years since the Institutional Revolutionary Party lost its grip on national power.

Despite the clear resolve by Mexico's leaders to undertake police and judicial reform, the pattern of success has been mixed, especially when measured by degrees of public confidence in the police and the latter's capacities to reduce crime and guarantee public security (Alvarado Mendoza and Arzt 2001). Part of the problem is that a corrupt police force and a weak judicial system exist as two interrelated entities that together undermine the rule of law. This creates an environment in which criminality flourishes, even among the police themselves; citizens have little confidence in the rule of law or the officials entrusted with guaranteeing order; and public insecurity seems to be worsening day by day (Inzunza 2003; CNI en Linea 2005c).

At no time was this more evident than in late November 2004, when an angry mob of residents in a neighborhood of Mexico City called San Juan Ixtayopan (in Tlahuac) lynched two police officers, beating and burning them alive while hundreds of other officers surrounded the area, unable to quell the revolt (El Universal 2004; New York Times 2004a). Residents in this neighborhood on the southern outskirts of the capital claimed that the murdered victims were responsible for kidnapping two children leaving a local school. The officers, in plain clothes and sitting in an unmarked car outside the school at the moment of the attack, were members of the Coordinación General de Inteligencia para la Prevención del Delito, a special intelligence-gathering unit of the Federal Preventive Police (PFP).

Neither riot police nor a local elected official intervening on the officers' behalf succeeded in dispersing the mob or calming citizens, who, armed with sticks and knives, dragged the officers from their car and pummeled them lifeless (New York Times 2004a). Reporters, however, were able to get close enough to the scene to capture the killings on camera, and leaders of the angry mob allowed them to interview the two police officers. As the officers tried to identify themselves as undercover agents investigating drug dealing in the area, not as kidnappers, the mob remained irate and filming continued. Few in the crowd were convinced of their innocence because most saw only a fine line separating the police from criminals. These attitudes had been cemented by recurrent stories in the press exposing high levels of drug corruption and impunity in the Mexican police and military.

The lynching was neither the first nor the last in the Mexico City metropolitan area reported by the press in the six months surrounding the event (CNI en Linea 2005a). In the days and weeks that followed, citizens and the government reacted strongly to the deteriorating security situation. Those who sought a larger meaning felt a great temptation to highlight the "postmodernity" of the events, in that news outlets were able to record and shape an event that neither the state's elected officials nor its coercive forces were able to control and in which the lines between participant and observer were blurred. For most Mexicans, however, it was the "premodern" character of the violence that was most significant and troubling. Many saw the uncivilized mob character of the lynchings as a throwback to premodern times; a form of behavior assumed to be more common before the rise of the modern state, with its capacity to monopolize the rule of force, and before the rule of law, a legitimate and functioning judicial system, and democratic or consensual forms of governance. This view was reflected in the daily news media, in which citizens, politicians, and leading public intellectuals lamented that the longstanding problems of criminality and corruption in the justice system would generate such a "barbaric" response.