MEXICO CITY: Success in Mexico's crackdown on drug cartels depends more on overhauling the country's judicial system and cleaning dirty money out of politics than adding more cops and guns, experts here say.
Mexico's next president, Enrique Pena Nieto, will inherit the country's long drug war and the resilient cartels' blood-soaked trail of kidnappings, beheadings and mass graves when he takes office on December 1.
The telegenic 45 year-old leader has promised to quickly bring down the homicide rate more than 50,000 people have been killed since 2006 and has vowed to form a national gendarmerie to replace corrupt local police.
But he will also maintain the military deployment that President Felipe Calderon launched in 2006 and has reassured the United States that there will be no radical changes to anti-drug policies.
Beyond saying that success will be measured by a lower homicide rate rather than drug busts, Pena Nieto's proposals differ little from Calderon's policies.
But Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which ran Mexico for seven decades through a mix of cronyism, bribery and rigged elections has long been seen as having more sway over the drug lords through its extensive and long-standing networks at the state level.
"There is no evidence of explicit agreements" between PRI governors and drug lords to maintain peace, said Edgardo Buscaglia, an organized crime expert at ITAM university here and Columbia University in New York.
"However there is plenty of evidence of infiltration in political campaigns and in all the political parties. And since the PRI has governors in more states, there is more infiltration in local PRI governments," he said.
Campaign cash became more important when the PRI lost power in 2000 and elections became more competitive -- and in Mexico there is no control over where the cash comes from.
"Local and state-level politicians will seek support without asking too many questions," Buscaglia says, adding that the corruption eventually flows down to police.
He believes Mexico should look to Colombia, where a clampdown on shadowy campaign contributions in the 1990s was followed by a police purge seen as having been largely successful.
Pena Nieto seems to be thinking along the same lines, and has hired Colombian former police general Oscar Naranjo as his adviser.
Naranjo's hiring "was aimed at giving confidence to the Americans," who may be nervous about the new administration, said Raul Benitez-Manaut, a security specialist at the National University of Mexico (UNAM).
Experts argue, however, that effective reforms would have to target the judicial system as well, widely seen as the weakest link in the drug war.
"Prosecutors are not independent. They respond to state governors," Buscaglia says. "It's a feudal system."
Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, of the University of Texas at Brownsville, argues that despite frequent allegations, "no high-level official has been held accountable for corruption during the Calderon administration."
She points to rampant corruption in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, which she describes as a "narco-state."
Tamaulipas is the stronghold of Los Zetas, the vicious paramilitary drug gang known for decapitating and dismembering its enemies.
Mexican federal prosecutors are investigating three ex-governors of Tamaulipas all PRI members on various drug charges, including money laundering, and have barred them from leaving the country.
The highest profile case is that of former governor Tomas Yarrington, whom US prosecutors accuse of taking millions of dollars worth of bribes from the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas and investing it in Texas real estate.
Yarrington, who is in hiding, has claimed innocence through his US lawyer. In Veracruz, to the south, the Zetas have infiltrated the city police and the rival Sinaloa gang has taken over the state police, contributing to a rash of violence that recently led Calderon to order the navy to take over the port.
Benitez-Manaut believes the new president will have more influence over his fellow PRI governors than Calderon and his predecessor, Vicente Fox, both from the conservative National Action Party (PAN).
"The main pressure point is the budget," Benitez-Manaut said. In Mexico, states rely heavily on federal income, especially for public safety funds.
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