Mexican Politics and the Whack-a-mole Drug War: Mexico's Morales Tackles Creaky Justice System

From 'InSight Crime,' more on the dynamics behind the scenes of the Mexican attorney general's office. 

Mexico's Morales Tackles Creaky Justice System: "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. ...

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 thatMorales 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."