AFI Disappearing

Excuse the length, but I think this Salvador García piece is worth repeating almost in full.

In just seven years, the Federal Agency of Investigation (AFI) went from being the “modern and scientific” police that the country was waiting for, to an “undesirable, corrupt, and inefficient” body that will be dissolved. Its agents, many trained abroad and in whose preparation the nation invested millions from the budget, will be merged and reintegrated into the Federal Preventative Police (PFP).

The failure of the AFI, one more in a long list of failed government projects, confirms that improvisation and happenstance have dominated for a long time the actions and policies in security. And this explains, in part, why we are in the midst of the worst crisis of insecurity and violence in modern times and why the delinquents—narcos, kidnappers, stick-up artists, people smugglers—take control all across the Republic and think that they are the authority.

Just when the government is bragging about capturing three alleged perpetrators of the terrorist grenade attack in Morelia—still without explaining clearly the motives behind the attacks or if there were intellectual authors, who they were, and what led them to attack the civilian population—the security institutions are shaken up with the disappearance of the AFI and federal agents publicly accuse their bosses, Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora and Secretary of Public Security Genaro García Luna.

Created in 2001 to replace the extinct Federal Judicial Police, the AFI was presented in the sexenio of Fox as the “great solution” to the corruption, inefficiency, and infiltration by criminals of the federal investigative police. With the change of sexenio or secretary, it would be understood that new officials arrived to “reinvent” with their ingenious ideas—as has historically occurred—the public policies, organizations, and institutions.

But right here the same “genius” who created the AFI, and who directed it five of its seven years of existence, today decides to disappear it. Thus, Genaro García Luna accepts his own failure and provokes many questions. How do you explain, for example, that in such a small amount of time a body with supposedly the strictest controls of its agents now must disappear because of infamy and incriminating documents relating to some of its members?

If the AFI didn’t fulfill its objective and was corrupted…there must be a resignation…of the official who spent hundreds of millions of pesos to create an agency that failed so miserably. Or is it just the agents who are responsible, and not those who directed them for so long?

The points about the haphazard nature of modifications in Mexican security policy are right on target, and it’s what I was getting at here. It’s also reflected in the 100-day security countdown (we’re almost half way there!), which is repeated on a daily basis on Cadena Tres, in Excelsior, and on the programs of Radio Imagen. I understand that Mexicans are fed up and want improvements now, but if the goal is to create a sustainable and long-term revitalization of Mexico’s public security institution, putting everything on such a short and arbitrary timeline is counterproductive. Hurrying something that should be a deliberate and methodical process will likely lead to more AFI-style fiascos in the future.