The New Nation - Internet Edition

AP, Tijuana

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. "As much praise as there is for Aponte standing up, there's a right way and wrong way to do things," said David Shirk, director of the University of San Diego's Trans-Border Institute. "His approach was to shoot from the hip more than was appropriate." 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."