After a prolonged and often heated negotiation between metro-area municipal mayors and state authorities, the city-wide (intermunicipal) Agencia Metropolitana de Seguridad (Metropolitan Security Agency) will be formally installed on November 16.
The decentralized agency will consist of a panel of up to 18 members culled from various sectors of public and private life. It will be non-operative and responsible for developing policy to coordinate and combat insecurity across nine metro-area municipalities, including Ixtlahuacan de los Membrillos, which borders Chapala. On the agenda for its first session to be held next week at Casa Jalisco is the selection of a general administrator and approval of its rules of operation and legal boundaries.
The agency will begin its duties on January 1, 2017, at the same time that an intermunicipal rapid-response police force, to be known as the Fuerza Única Metropolitana (FUM), begins operations.
The new force will comprise officers taken from across the metropolitan zone and be able to react immediately to situations in all jurisdictions, something that individual municipal forces are prohibited from doing.
The “compromise” of a dual-functioning FUM and the Agencia Metropolitana de Seguridad was developed after Jalisco Governor Aristoteles Sandoval nixed a project for a new intermunicipal force conceived by metro-area mayors from the opposition Citizen’s Movement party, under the leadership of Guadalajara Mayor Enrique Alfaro and Zapopan’s Pablo Lemus.