Mexico Abolishes Anti-Drug Force

Mexico on Wednesday abolished its main anti-drug force, disgraced by the discovery in February that its director and many of its agents were working for traffickers, and announced that it was working to create a replacement organization from a small nucleus of trusted agents.

The new agency, the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Attention to Drug Crimes, will occupy the same downtown Mexico City building as the organization it will replace, the Institute for Combatting Drugs, and will be headed by the Institute’s current director, Attorney General Jorge Madrazo said.

But the institute’s approximately 1,000 agents will be required to undergo an extensive battery of drug, polygraph and other tests designed to examine their trustworthiness in order to obtain posts in the new organization, Madrazo said. Despite the precautions, however, questions have already been raised about the integrity of the new special prosecutor’s organization.