No Silver Bullet in Sight: The Paths and Pitfalls of Police Reform in Mexico

When Mexico’s president-elect, Enrique Peña Nieto, assumes office on December 1, 2012, he will take on a difficult legacy. As America’s neighbor to the south, Mexico was the Latin American country most affected by the international financial and economic crisis¹ and, not least due to its strong ties to the U.S. economy, remains in a difficult condition. Politically, the country is perhaps more polarized than ever; many discussions about Mexico’s future center on whether the country should be considered a “failing state,” and whether the conflict between the government and the drug cartels should be classified as a “war” rather than democratic transition.

With the number of casualties hitting almost 60,000 in recent years, violence has reached a level hard to imagine for an OECD member state with the potential of Mexico. Expectations are high for Enrique Peña Nieto, since the departing president, Felipe Calderón, has not managed to control the violence during his ending six-year term. In fact, he stirred up a hornet’s nest when, troubled by internal conflicts regarding the legitimacy of his election victory in 2006, he made the decision to pit the Mexican army against the drug cartels when the army was ill-prepared for internal security tasks. Far from offering a solution, this controversial decision increased the brutality of the conflict, transforming it into one that is settled in broad daylight on the streets of many Mexican towns rather than in the desert of Northwest Mexico, and has led to serious human rights violations committed by members of the armed forces against civilians.

Of course, public security—or the lack thereof—is not the only issue observers of the country’s democratic development should worry about these days. However, security is the issue which affects all others—from the state’s imperfect monopoly on the use of force and rampant corruption, a new political pluralism that is at stake, to a high concentration of mass media in the hands of the elite, to name only a few of the challenges.

Accordingly, there is probably no issue higher on the policy agenda in Mexico now than police reform, and it is therefore welcome that a new book recently published by Daniel M. Sabet focuses precisely on the obstacles to professionalizing Mexico’s police forces. Not surprisingly, Sabet’s research has already received considerable attention in the policy community. In fact, there is rarely a new study by a young scholar as acclaimed as Sabet’s: The Inter-American Dialogue’s Michael Shifter refers to the book as “a superb, rigorous, careful study,”² and Andrew Selee, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, calls it nothing less than “one of the best books on Mexico written in English in recent years.”³

Daniel M. Sabet is a specialist in governance, policy analysis, and public sector reform research who earned his Ph.D. in political science from Indiana University-Bloomington. He currently serves as the director of the Center for Enterprise and Society at the University of Liberal Arts in Dhaka, Bangladesh and is a visiting researcher at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, which funded his study. Sabet’s research agenda emerged from his earlier work coordinating rule-of-law educational programs for police throughout Latin America as part of the National Strategic Information Center’s “Culture of Lawfulness” project. Some of the findings presented in his most recent book have been previously published as working papers, articles, or book chapters that are already heavily drawn upon in academic discussion.⁴

Police reform has been high on the Mexican policy agenda since the mid-1990s. Sabet seeks to answer why a decade and a half of reform efforts have failed to produce a more honest and effective police force protective of human rights. Although on other occasions the author has also worked on reform of the...