The Mexicanization of American Law Enforcement: The drug cartels extend their corrupting influence northward. | City Journal

The Mexicanization of American Law Enforcement: The drug cartels extend their corrupting influence northward. | City Journal

• The drug cartels extend their corrupting influence northward.

"Beheadings and amputations. Iraqi-style brutality, bribery, extortion, kidnapping, and murder.
More than 7,200 dead—almost double last year’s tally—in shoot-outs between federales and often better-armed drug cartels.
This is modern Mexico, whose president, Felipe Calderón, has been struggling since 2006 to wrest his country from the grip of four powerful cartels and their estimated 100,000 foot soldiers.
But chillingly, there are signs that one of the worst features of Mexico’s war on drugs—law enforcement officials on the take from drug lords—is becoming an American problem as well.
Most press accounts focus on the drug-related violence that has migrated north into the United States. Far less widely reported is the infiltration and corruption of American law enforcement, according to Robert Killebrew, a retired U.S. Army colonel and senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for a New American Security.
“This is a national security problem that does not yet have a name,” he wrote last fall in The National Strategy Forum Review.
The drug lords, he tells me, are seeking to “hollow out our institutions, just as they have in Mexico.”...
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