The Houston Chronicle earlier this week reported the following:

Hundreds of Mexican troops and federal agents detained the entire Nuevo Laredo police force Monday, part of a wider operation launched by President Vicente Fox to contain the nation's drug-related violence.

City and federal officials said the nearly 700 detained officers will be tested for illegal narcotics use, subjected to detailed background checks and interrogated by federal officials before they are reinstated.

The mass detention of the police force followed Wednesday's assassination of the city's new police chief and the wounding Saturday of a federal agent by police.

However, one Department of Homeland Security law enforcer along the border raises an interesting question: If the "bad" Mexican cops are weeded out, who does that really help?

First, some background, as previously reported by Narco News:

The two rival drug lords at the center of the turf war (in Nuevo Laredo) are allegedly Osiel Cardenas Guillen and Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

Cardenas, who has been in jail on drug charges in Mexico since 2003, reportedly oversees his narco-trafficking organization from prison. His group, often referred to in the mainstream press as the “Gulf cartel,” has controlled the Nuevo Laredo market for years.

Cardenas’ primary enforcers are the Zetas, a group composed (in part) of former elite Mexican military commandos who deserted their posts to take up arms as mercenaries in the narco-market.

However, in recent years, Guzman has made inroads into the Nuevo Laredo market by waging a bloody street war against the Cardenas organization and the Zetas.

So with that backdrop in mind, the DHS law enforcer adds this bit of intel to the soup:

... People are being killed 'cause they belong to either Z's (Zetas) or ... Guzman's gang.... Either you are with us or against us....

(The) chief either pissed off one side or the other or got too close to one side or the other ... most are on the take if not all.  

They (the Mexican government) did send about 1,500 storm troopers into Nuevo Laredo last week to clean and exterminate all bad elements.

Now, back to what Narco News reported previously about the situation in Nuevo Laredo:

... The truth is that no one really knows whose force has the upper hand, or how many players are really making a run at gaining a foothold in the Nuevo Laredo narco-market. The attrition rate is in constant flux in this the turf war – due to murders, double-crosses and pay-offs.

Zetas and other mercenary gangs are in the game for money and the power that brings. Loyalty in that world usually goes to the highest bidder. Also in the mix as partisans in the war are corrupt law enforcers, who also play for money.  In all cases, death is the ultimate referee.

The U.S. mainstream media focuses on the Mexican “cartels” and crooked Mexican cops in the war on drugs, but rest assured that the trail of corruption and death on that front extends across the border and follows the money north throughout the narco-trafficking pipeline.

In other words, the action by Fox to take back control of the local Mexican police force in Nuevo Laredo will, if successful, by consequence neutralize one of the many factions in the narco-capitalism market in Nuevo Laredo.

It is likely that most of the Mexican cops who are on the narco-take are playing on the side of Cardenas and the Zetas -- not such a stretch to accept because, after all, Guzman is the new kid on the block in Nuevo Laredo.

 So, by clamping down on narco-corruption in the Mexican police force, doesn't Fox, by extension, increase the power of Guzman and his forces?

After all, somebody has been shooting Mexican cops in Nuevo Laredo in recent months, reportedly because those cops, just like in the days of Prohibition in the United States, were on the payroll of the narco-traffickers (bootleggers). If the power of the local cops in the narco-trade is diminished, someone will step into that vacuum, right? Those are the rules of narco-capitalism under Prohibition.

And like it or not, as long as Prohibition continues, the crooked cops taken off the streets today (on both sides of the border) are as replaceable as heroin addicts tomorrow.