Mexico - Mexico’s parties warned over drug money

[Lunar Loops]

This from the Financial Times (article link):

Mexico’s parties warned over drug money

By Adam Thomson in Mexico City
Published: September 24 2008 02:07 | Last updated: September 24 2008 02:07


Mexico’s centre-right government on Tuesday admitted that there was a ”latent threat” of drug money finding its way into the country’s political campaigns and warned that the country’s police forces had been ”infiltrated” by powerful cartels.

In an address to Congress, Juan Camilo Mourińo, a government minister, said: ”The risk of drug Money in campaigns is, of course, a latent risk.” He added: ”The police are infiltrated and as long as they are infiltrated we cannot, fully, guarantee security or secure people’s confidence.”

Mr Mourińo’s stark appraisal of the challenges that Mexico faces in its attempts to control rein in organised crime comes amid an escalating wave of drugs-related violence that has claimed more than 3,200 lives so far this year – an increase of nearly 50 per cent compared with the whole of 2007.

In a particularly worrying development last week, suspected members of one of the country’s drugs cartels lobbed three grenades into a public gathering, killing eight people. The attack was the first time civilians had been so blatantly targeted since President Felipe Calderón declared the drugs war a priority in December 2006.

Indeed, some observers have even started to ask themselves whether Mexico is starting to head down the same bloody path that Colombia trod during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Mr Mourińo’s comments on Tuesday follow warnings made several weeks ago by Guillermo Valdés, head of the administration’s Cisen intelligence organisation, that the country’s democratic institutions, including the national Congress, were under threat from the cartels.

”Drug traffickers have become the principal threat because they are trying to take over the power of the state,” Mr Valdés told the Financial Times and a small group of foreign media at the time.

But they also come as the country’s political parties are starting to think about the campaigns for next summer’s mid-term congressional elections. Most political analysts believe that Mr Calderón’s National Action Party (PAN) stands to lose ground to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Just a couple of years ago, that would have been unthinkable. The PRI, which governed Mexico for 71 uninterrupted years until 2000, had just notched up its worst presidential election result in history, coming in third place behind the leftwing Democratic Revolution Party (PRD).