Felipe Calderón acknowledges Mexican police corruption: "We need to get our house in order"

Winding up his trip to the United States after addressing the U.N. General Assembly in New York, President Calderon stopped in Los Angeles and delivered his remarks to the Mexican community there. "It's going to take time, but we don´t have any option, we have to clean up the police in our country." He also urged his audience, "Write your families back home, tell them to go to their governor, go to their mayor, and ask, 'When are you going to clean up these police departments?'" The president added, "Help us, because if society as a whole does not get involved and make some demands on our officials, this job is never going to get done."

Calderon condemned again the now defunct DEA "Fast and Furious" arms sales program, which resulted in the transfer of over 2,000 military grade firearms directly to Mexican drug cartels or their purchasing agents in the United States. He told his L.A. audience that after Mexico captured the high ranking narco criminal Jesús Enrique Rejón Aguilar, Aguilar testified that U.S. DEA agents had even showed him how to remove a tracking device from an AK-47 they had sold him. While some heads rolled as a result of "Fast and Furious" (http://mexicogulfreporter-supplement.blogspot.com/2011/11/two-us-officials-quit-over-fast-and.html), others involved actually got promotions. As the saying goes, government work is great if you can get it.