Leftists on both sides of the border are ecstatic at the ousting of Gen. Sergio Aponte Polito from his posting in lawless Tijuana. The General had been critical of the corruption of public officials and the inefficiency of local police in dealing with the powerful Mexican Cartels.

Toward the end of his tenure he was known for making waves with public missives lambasting the authorities and for giving the hard pressed citizens of Tijuana the option of reporting crimes to the military rather than risk running to the corrupt police. In other words, he was just what the Mexicans needed, the Patton of the drug wars. From SFGate:

An outspoken general who urged residents to call the Army when they witnessed a murder or drug deal in this crime-stricken border city was ousted Friday after repeatedly chastising police for being corrupt.

As the army’s top officer in northwest Mexico, Gen. Sergio Aponte Polito publicized a phone number to field the public’s pleas for help, and on Sunday he gave the news media his latest 5,700-word bombshell letter complaining about bad cops.

Such public provocations are extremely out of character for military leaders in Mexico — and may have cost the popular Aponte his job.

[…]

Aponte was reassigned to the Mexico City-based Supreme Military Tribunal and replaced by Gen. Sergio Magana Mier, who was most recently the Army’s top commander in Guerrero state. The Defense Secretary said such rotations are common in a press release that also announced transfers of five other generals and dozens of lower-ranking officers.

But the general’s fate reflects larger questions in Mexico about how to control drug-fueled violence, which has soared in the years since President Felipe Calderon moved to openly confront the cartels that move cocaine into the United States. Some Mexicans see the police as corrupt and the army as the only hope. But others fear soldiers are overstepping their authority and abusing their power by raiding the homes of suspected criminals.

Aponte led many of the 20,000 troops Calderon dispatched to retake wide swaths of Mexico that were taken over by drug trafficking. And he pushed limits by asserting a dominant crime-fighting role for soldiers in a city where police are considered too ineffective or corrupt to call. He named his phone-in campaign “Nosotros, si vamos,” or “Yes, we respond.”

“What he’s doing is completely unprecedented,” Roderic Camp, an expert on the Mexican military at Claremont McKenna College, said recently.

The jowly, silver-haired 64-year-old general speaks in severe tones and writes as if he’s inscribing his epitaph. In his latest missive, he declared that he was relieved of four previous assignments because he denounced ties between drug traffickers and public officials, and openly challenged the defense ministry to support him this time.

Looks like standing up for the good people of Mexico has consequences. Read the rest of the article and see how leftist academics shill for the drug lords by trying to vilify a man who was simply trying to give the people of Mexico a fighting chance.

h/t Crime Scene KC