HomeNewsAnalysisMexico's Morales Tackles Creaky Justice System
ANALYSIS

Mexico's Morales Tackles Creaky Justice System

JUDICIAL REFORM / 6 JUL 2011 BY PATRICK CORCORAN EN

Marisela Morales is just a couple of months into her tenure as Mexico’s attorney general, but she already has a mountain of issues weighing down on her.

As the Los Angeles Times reported in a recent profile of Morales, the official faces a number of political, cultural, and organizational challenges as she takes the reigns of the PGR, as Mexico’s Justice Department is called.

Among the most important bottlenecks for the new attorney general is the system's failure, in many cases, to move from arrests to trials, and much less to convictions. As InSight Crime noted in April, the PGR’s own figures indicate that in 2010 72 percent of all federal arrests, which includes most offenses related to organized crime, were dismissed without the suspect being submitted to a legal judgment, typically due to lack of evidence.

This and other problems long predate Morales' arrival to one of Mexico’s top law-enforcement jobs, and her efforts to fix them are complicated by ongoing judicial reforms that are changing the format in which PGR prosecutors bring cases. From the old system of written, closed trials, Mexico is moving toward an adversarial, oral system much like that in the U.S., which is scheduled to be in place by 2016.

Another of the biggest issues facing Morales is political corruption. While dirty police are arrested with great frequency in Mexico, politicians that provide favors to organized crime groups or just take public funds are rarely punished. At the same time, rumors of wrongdoing fly incessantly, which has led some to the conclusion that Mexican authorities aren’t really interested in punishing politicians’ wrongdoing.

Morales seems to have arrived to her office intent on changing that. Within a couple of weeks of her arrival, a number of politicians, including the former governor of Chiapas, had been fingered for corruption charges. But the most high-profile attack so far -- the arrest of Jorge Hank Rhon, a former Tijuana mayor and famously wealthy scion of a prominent political family -- was a disaster. Indeed, the embarrassing dismissal of weapons charges against Hank Rhon merely laid bare the scale of the problems facing Morales.

Among Mexican commentators, much of the blame for the Hank Rhon debacle has fallen at the feet of other agencies, namely the army, which videotapes show manipulated the evidence against Hank Rhon, and the interior secretariat, which reportedly planned the operation. As the Times reports, Morales tersely replied that she accepted “None” of the responsibility when asked about her role in a recent television interview. But Morales’ agency, which presents criminal cases before the judge, was the one with egg on its face in the immediate aftermath of Hank Rhon’s release.

Some say that discrediting Morales and the PGR was the Machiavellian goal of such a shoddily planned and executed arrest operation. Jorge Zepeda Patterson, one of Mexico’s preeminent journalists, suggested that Morales was set up to fail, with competing agencies aiming to knock the new kid on the block down a peg. He also speculated that her being one of a small number of women at the top of Mexico’s criminal justice hierarchy, and the first female attorney general, increases the scope of her challenge.

Regardless of the animosity and sexism that may be directed toward Morales from within the government, the problems in convicting suspects, and the relative decline in importance of the PGR over the past several years, the PGR remains one of the nation’s key criminal justice agencies. Consequently, its recent fade in prestige and in capacity poses a significant impediment to improved public security in Mexico. As the Mexico City daily El Universal wrote upon her arrival to the post:

The challenge for whoever heads the PGR is significant. It goes from attacking a deeply rooted culture of inefficiency and corruption, which necessarily will affect powerful economic and criminal interests, but there's no turning the page, no possibility of starting with a clean slate. Without changing this, there will be no way that soldiers, marines, intelligence agents or police will have success in their work in the field. If the fight is sabotaged from the PGR, everything else is doomed to failure.

Her ability to address those problems, rewrite that description, and build a PGR that is no longer an agent of impunity will go a long way to determining both her legacy and the state of Mexican security.

share icon icon icon

Was this content helpful?

We want to sustain Latin America’s largest organized crime database, but in order to do so, we need resources.

DONATE

What are your thoughts? Click here to send InSight Crime your comments.

We encourage readers to copy and distribute our work for non-commercial purposes, with attribution to InSight Crime in the byline and links to the original at both the top and bottom of the article. Check the Creative Commons website for more details of how to share our work, and please send us an email if you use an article.

Was this content helpful?

We want to sustain Latin America’s largest organized crime database, but in order to do so, we need resources.

DONATE

Related Content

ELITES AND CRIME / 3 NOV 2022

The trial of Genaro García Luna, Mexico's public security minister during the presidency of Felipe Calderón, is fast approaching.

EL SALVADOR / 13 DEC 2021

Efforts to reduce gang violence are often thought of as highly dependent on local conditions, but a recent report looks…

FENTANYL / 9 MAY 2023

Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG depend on a network of brokers to buy precursor chemicals needed to make fentanyl and…

About InSight Crime

THE ORGANIZATION

All Eyes on Ecuador

2 JUN 2023

Our coverage of organized crime in Ecuador continues to be a valuable resource for international and local news outlets. Internationally, Reuters cited our 2022 Homicide Round-Up,…

WORK WITH US

Open Position: Social Media and Engagement Strategist

27 MAY 2023

InSight Crime is looking for a Social Media and Engagement Strategist who will be focused on maintaining and improving InSight Crime’s reputation and interaction with its audiences through publishing activities…

THE ORGANIZATION

Venezuela Coverage Receives Great Reception

27 MAY 2023

Several of InSight Crime’s most recent articles about Venezuela have been well received by regional media. Our article on Venezuela’s colectivos expanding beyond their political role to control access to…

THE ORGANIZATION

InSight Crime's Chemical Precursor Report Continues

19 MAY 2023

For the second week in a row, our investigation into the flow of precursor chemicals for the manufacture of synthetic drugs in Mexico has been cited by multiple regional media…

THE ORGANIZATION

InSight Crime’s Chemical Precursor Report Widely Cited

THE ORGANIZATION / 12 MAY 2023

We are proud to see that our recently published investigation into the supply chain of chemical precursors feeding Mexico’s synthetic drug production has been warmly received.