Ideas

A pair of interesting ideas surfaced from the PRI this week: 1) Charging Cisen, the Mexican intelligence agency, with monitoring police around the country, and 2) removing the amparo, an often abused Mexican legal mechanism that amounts to a delay in prosecution, from those charged with drug crimes. The first idea seems a bit far-fetched and unwieldy. Requiring more law enforcement support from Cisen is one thing, but is it practical to have all the nation's police work monitored by one federal group, as opposed to building independent internal affairs bureaus operating within the departments? And if it is practical, is the nation's intelligence body the best candidate? The second idea, if it can be achieved without infringing on civil rights (I'll leave it to Mexican legal experts to figure that out), seems more useful. In any event, at least they're thinking.