By RICK LYMAN
NUEVO LAREDO,
Mexico -- Moctezuma Rodriguez Meza says he has learned a thing or two
about the corrupting
power of greed during a long career in law enforcement, corrections and
security.
And it has come
in handy, he says, now that he is here in his native town trying to reform
one of the
most notoriously
corrupt and violent police forces along the trade-booming, drug-rich United
States-Mexican
border.
"For three years
here in Nuevo Laredo, it was chaos," said Rodriguez, the new Police Chief
of the city,
directly across
the Rio Grande from Laredo, Tex., at what is by far the border's busiest
commercial
crossing. "There
was violence, robberies, shootings, and we've discovered that in a number
of the
incidents, police
officers were involved. Ordinary people were abused by the police regularly;
bribes
were demanded."
Rodriguez was
talking about the Nuevo Laredo governed by the previous administration,
which
presided over
a city where by all accounts drug wars and official corruption had reached
alarming
dimensions even
by the standards of border towns.
Cleanup claims
by new administrations are common on both sides of the border, of course,
and the
purported cleanup
here comes just after the Mexican Government announced a new "total war"
on
narcotics and
just before the annual March 1 deadline for the President of the United
States to certify
to Congress
whether Mexico is a reliable partner in the war against drugs.
So Rodriguez will understand if his listener is a bit wary.
But he insists
that he and the new Mayor, Horacio Garza, are in earnest, determined to
cleanse this
teeming city,
which has nearly doubled in population, to 400,000, in the five years since
the North
American Free
Trade Agreement was adopted.
Rodriguez, 49,
works out of a dark corner office on the second floor of the city's shabby
police
headquarters,
at the southern edge of the downtown tourist district. Since taking office
on Jan. 1, he
has dismissed
130 of the department's 600 officers, including all 6 division commanders.
The only thing
slowing him
is that the police academy he created in January will not turn out the
first of its
every-other-month
class of 60 officers until March, and he can manage to reduce the force
only so
much before
fresh graduates become available.
United States
officials say they are cautiously optimistic, hopeful that Rodriguez's
seemingly energetic
efforts mean
he is a genuine reformer.
"We are very
positive about what he's done thus far," said Rudy Watkins, principal officer
at the
United States
Consulate here.
"But he's only
been in there since Jan. 1, so it's too early to tell much. So far, we
haven't seen much
change."
Ernesto Garza,
director of the Commission for Human Rights here in the state of Tamaulipas,
also
finds it too
early to declare victory. Even if Rodriguez proves as good as his promises
and his early
crackdown, the
question remains whether official corruption is too much an endemic problem
for him
to solve.
Garza (no relation
to the Mayor) says that his office handled nearly 400 complaints of human
rights
violations in
prisons and towns throughout the state last year and that the majority
involved abuses by
Nuevo Laredo
police officers, everything from curbside shakedowns to torture. "We'll
have to wait to
see how this
story will end," he said.
Rodriguez acknowledges
that it is common for a new police chief -- or, for that matter, a department
head in any
new administration -- to make dismissals a first order of business.
But he vows that
his drive will be no fleeting thing and will be aimed not at earlier patronage
hirings but
at corrupt,
undisciplined and lazy officers.
Already, he says,
just a few weeks into his tenure, he senses less violence and less tension
on the
narrow, rutted
streets of Nuevo Laredo, thick with traffic and pedestrians, some of them
among the
growing number
of tourists from north of the border.
Rodriguez was
born in Nuevo Laredo and became commandant of the overcrowded La Loma prison
here before
serving an initial two-year term as the city's Police Chief beginning in
1983.
Later he worked
for the state police and the Mexican Attorney General's antismuggling task
force
before returning
here to become chief of security for a local politician's campaign for
the Mexican
Congress.
Then, three years ago, "I thought Las Vegas might be worth trying," he said.
He went to work
there as a casino security officer, but late last year, homesick and energized
by the
reform promises
of Mayor-elect Garza, decided to apply for the Chief's job again.
"The biggest
problem I found when I came in here was lack of discipline and leadership,"
he said.
"Before, police
would abuse people, be involved in robberies, have shootings for no real
reason, act as
bodyguards for
narco-traffickers -- and they would not be punished, not even reprimanded.
So
everything unraveled."
Within a matter
of months this fall and winter came a series of horrors: Two Nuevo Laredo
officers
were grabbed
off the streets by unidentified abductors and have not been seen since.
Another two
officers were
killed when automatic weapons fire tore through their patrol car. And then
12 Nuevo
Laredo policemen
were involved in the shooting of a state officer. Rodriguez says he has
no doubt that
all these incidents
were somehow related to drugs and smuggling.
The new Chief
says that he has taken no special precautions for his own safety since
the dismissals
began and that
he has had no real trouble other than a handful of threatening phone calls.
He opened his
desk drawer and pulled out a glossy magazine about law enforcement in Central
and
South America.
On the cover was a general in Colombia who used to be among those in charge
of that
country's anti-drug
efforts.
"I know him," Rodriguez said proudly. "The cartels have put a price on his head of $10 million."
Out of another drawer he pulled a snapshot of himself and the Colombian officer standing at attention.
"I have no price
on my head," Rodriguez said, a thin smile forming at the corner of his
mouth. "Not yet.
It is early."
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company