CIUDAD JUAREZ is a city in Mexico that is under police state and martial law since 2008. About 10 murders a day happen in the dangerous city. At the end of March 2008, thousands of soldiers and federal police officers arrived in Ciudad Juarez as part of a surge against drug dealing. After the police and troops arrived, the murder rate, violence, and kidnapping increased significantly.
“When the wave of kidnappings grew, it was because of the arrival of the federal police,” said Leobardo Alvarado, who runs the alternative news outlet JuarezDialoga.
Ciudad Juarez is on the map as a city with one of the highest murder rates in the world.
Citizens of the city reported seeing cases where the army and federal police killed minors, as well as police and soldiers directly involved in robbery
“Mexican police, indeed, are widely reported to be involved in the trade of drugs, actively through assistance or passively through corruption,” wrote Mathieu Deflem, a professor at the University of South Carolina, in 2001.
“The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, along with trainers from the U.S are providing basic training to Mexican Federal Police recruits,” said Stephen Harper during a stop in Guadalajara in 2009.
The RCMP also trained 300 mid-level Mexican officers, and 32 Mexican police commanders received training at the Canadian Police College.
The New York Times reported that this training involved “conducting wiretaps, running informants and interrogating suspects.”
There is no transparency from the RCMP when it comes Mexican cops coming to train in Canada, thus there is no way to verify whether or not Canadian-trained Meixcan officers have been directly involved in criminal acts.
“For security reasons we cannot give you the names of the Officials that attended training at our Canadian Police College,” wrote RCMP media liaison Greg Cox in an email to The Dominion.
By late 2011, US funding had been used to “train over 55,000 law enforcement and justice sector officials, including 7,200 Federal police officers,” according to the US State Department.
RCMP and US training of Mexican police is taking place alongside officers from Israel, Colombia, France, Spain, El Salvador, Holland, and the Czech Republic. Maribel Cervantes Guerrero, the highest ranking federal police officer in Mexico, was trained in the US, Israel and Spain.
Canada’s growing corporate presence in Mexico may in part explain the increasingly close military and police co-operation.
