Why soldiers don’t make good cops: Experiments from Mexico to Honduras

By Chris Hershberger-Esh, MCC’s Context Analyst for Latin America and the Caribbean, based in Mexico City. 

Today Juan Orlando Hernandez was sworn in as Honduras’ new president. In the country with the highest homicide rate in the world, his campaign was boosted by his commitment to increase the use of the military to secure communities, saying he would place “a soldier on every corner.”

President Hernandez would do well to observe the successes and failures of military policing in Mexico. While there are no easy solutions to this widespread violence, experiments in the region have shown that military policing is a dangerous, ineffective strategy.

On December 11, 2006, then-Mexican-President Felipe Calderon, sporting a dark-green military jacket and hat, announced the deployment of 4,000 military troops to his home state Michoacán. The move was intended to stem the increasing violence led by drug cartels, and was later replicated in many other crime hotspots. There are currently 45,000 military troops deployed around the country.

Over the next three years, homicides in Mexico almost tripled from their 2006 level. The brutal crackdown has terrorized communities and scared away tourists, but the cartels have not been weakened and the supply of drugs continues to meet U.S. demand.

It appears to be a failed experiment from top to bottom, but a closer look reveals that the heavy hand of the Mexican military has not been applied evenly across the nation. Glimmers of hope do exist.

When I moved from Philadelphia to Mexico City in August, many concerned friends and family asked, “Is it safe?” Safe is relative, but I’m far more threated by the automobiles here who don’t believe in red lights or stop signs than I am by drug cartels or even petty criminals. In fact, the homicide rate in Mexico City is less than half that of Philadelphia.

I would hardly hold Mexico City police as the gold standard for policing, but they must be doing something right. How does Mexico City keep a murder rate of 8.6 per 100,000 when the Pacific beach-resort town of Acapulco, 5 hours south, has an astronomical rate of 142 per 100,000? How has Juarez, a few years ago considered the epicenter of the horrific war on drugs, become relatively safe?

There may not be a one-size-fits-all approach to effective policing, but there certainly is one method that is almost sure to fail, from the standpoint of making a community safer: military policing.

Calderon’s war targeted cartel leaders, and by that measure had a degree of success. But when kingpins were jailed or killed, those lower in command took over and the cartels splintered into many smaller factions, that were often more dangerous than the originals.

According to Mexico’s attorney general, 60 to 80 new trafficking groups have emerged since the crackdown.  Free market capitalists, like Calderon and the U.S. government that supported him, should understand that weakening monopolies encourages competition, and thus efficiency improves. Somebody will always step up to fill that insatiable demand from up north.

Similarly, when the military locked-down certain areas, cartels often reemerged elsewhere. This is known as the “balloon effect.” Whenever pressure is applied to one area, the cartels and trafficking routes move into a new available space. Some cartels have become an increased presence in Guatemala and Honduras as a result of the Mexican crackdown.

Honduras, conveniently located right between Colombia and Mexico, has become the favored stop-over point for cocaine shipments heading to Mexico. The hundreds of tiny Caribbean islands make excellent places to pick-up and drop-off cocaine and fuel for boats. La Moskitia jungle on the eastern coast is full of practically invisible airstrips for airplanes to deliver their product.

Not coincidentally, Honduras’ homicide rate—now the highest in the world—has spiked since Calderon’s war on cartels in Mexico started in 2006. As Nathan Parish Flannery points out in this must-read article, the failure of the drug war is largely due to individual states fighting an international problem unilaterally.

Further, soldiers are trained to fight an enemy, not create community stability. As troop levels increased in Ciudad Juarez between 2006 and 2010, homicides increased by a factor of ten. Cartels thrive amidst instability and war-zone-like conditions.

Since 2010, Ciudad Juarez has turned around. The army left that year, and federal police briefly took over until July of 2011. Since then, the city has been in control of the municipal police chief Julián Leyzaola. According to Flannery:

The cartel feud continued to burn in Juárez, but Leyzaola nonetheless sent out municipal police to patrol the city, focusing on establishing a sense of law and order in the city center. He also increased police presence in certain high-risk communities. “You can’t apply a strategy from a desk. You have to apply it in the street,” Leyzaola said in an interview with The New York Times.

This community-focused policing, in addition to the Sinaloa Cartel consolidating power of the city, has led to Juarez’s murder rate dropping from 250 a month down to 40. The dubious title of “Most Violent City in the World” has since passed to San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

Mexico City has been a shining example of the benefits of community policing. Under the leadership of two mayors from the leftwing PRD, Mexico City has gone from being one of the most dangerous cities in the world to becoming one of Mexico’s safest.

Crime in Mexico City was bad in the 1990s. Robberies, kidnappings and murders were far too common, which built a reputation that Mexico City has struggled to shake. In the late 1990s, the army was brought into high-risk neighborhood, but to little effect.

Since 2000, however, policing tactics changes and things turned around quickly. The police chief copied some of New York City mayor Rudy Gulliani’s “broken windows” tactics, in addition to installing security cameras and instituting community patrols. The police tolerated small scale drug dealers, as long as the dealers stayed out of protected zones and refrained from violence. With so many small scale competitors, there is little turf worth fighting for, unlike the cartels’ lucrative trafficking routes.

In 2012, while many of Mexico’s top tourist destinations found themselves with a U.S. State Department travel advisory, Mexico City’s travel advisory was finally removed.

I understand the instinct to fight violence with violence. Cartels, gangs and petty criminals have terrorized much of the region in recent years, and citizens want governments to punish them. Soldiers, however, are trained to fight enemies, not rebuild communities. They turn at-risk communities into warzones, rather than making them safer.

Latin America is experiencing a new type of violence. A couple decades ago, civil wars plagued the region, but today’s raging violence no longer has battle lines. It is about economics, not politics. Nevertheless, governments continue to respond with outdated war-like tactics—to disastrous results.

As Honduras’s government tries to deal with a horrific epidemic of violence and organized crime, they should learn from Mexico’s successes and failures—as should Mexico’s federal government, for that matter. Rather than punishing criminals or disrupting drug routes, the governments’ primary goals should be safe communities and secure citizens. Municipal police are far better equipped for this task than soldiers or military police.

For more on this topic, check out Military, Secuity and Elections in Honduras: A Community Perspective by my Hondruas-based coworker Megan Turley