Federal police opened fire on municipal cops in the northern city of Torreón early Monday, killing at least one and arresting about 30, said the city’s mayor.
Mexican news reports characterized the pre-dawn altercation as a firefight between federal and local police officers. Federal authorities had no immediate comment.
The incident began when federal police detained two Torreón officers and 28 city patrol vehicles responded to a call for backup, said Mayor José Ángel Pérez by phone Monday afternoon.
“It appears (the arrested officers) were discovered mixed up in a problem with a truck that was in an irregular situation,” Pérez said. “We don’t know if it was for drugs or why. … We don’t have the official information.”
Pérez said it was unclear why so many patrol vehicles answered the call for help. After the incident, he fired the city’s chief of police for not being able to control the officers.
“There was a confrontation but we don’t know if there was a (shooting) response from our police,” the mayor said.
The federal public security ministry, which oversees the federal police apparently involved in the shooting, provided no information on the incident. A spokeswoman for the federal attorney general’s office said the detained city officers were being held for questioning but no charges were announced.
SOURCES: Sean Mattson San Antonio Express News
El Siglo de Torreon
Calderon vows to press war on cartels despite the body count
MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s security forces have been swept into the eye of the storm since President Felipe Calderon decided to get tough on the country’s drug-smuggling gangs.
Once-untouchable federal officials have been assassinated in the streets. Out-gunned soldiers and police have battled gangsters armed with grenades and bazookas. Local police chiefs have resigned, a few fleeing to the United States for safety. Hundreds of police and soldiers have been sent early to their graves.
Amid a fierce counteroffensive by the drug cartels, the question becomes: How long can, or will, Mexico’s thin police line hold?
Calderon and his top assistants say the security forces are up to the task. The gunfights and killings, including the assassinations this month of four top police officials, are signs of success rather than defeat, they say.
“This reaction is precisely a desperate act to weaken the federal police,” Calderon said, defending his policies and trying to rally the public to support them. “The effectiveness of a new, cleaned-up police force was hitting the criminals. We’re going to continue this frontal attack.”
But Bush administration officials, pushing Congress to approve a $1.4 billion, three-year package of equipment and training for Mexico’s security forces, warn that Calderon’s campaign will founder without the aid.
Analysts on both sides of the border worry that Mexico’s underequipped and poorly trained police forces — with long histories of ineffectiveness and corruption — will come up short.
“There comes a moment when the imbalance in resources reverses the relationship between government and cartels,” George Friedman, founder of Strategic Forecasting, an Austin political risk firm, wrote in a report on Mexico’s drug war this week.
“Government officials, seeing the futility of resistance, effectively become tools of the cartels.”
A relatively new twist
Other analysts point out that many Mexican policemen and officials have long been at the cartels’ service. They argue that much of today’s sustained violence against police — a relatively new twist in the country’s decades-long dance with the drug trade — arises from a fragmentation of a protection system that existed for decades.
Hundreds of dedicated police and soldiers have been killed over the years in the line of duty. But for much of the past, authorities and gangsters preferred their relationships to be defined by business rather than bloodshed.
Officials were killed if they welched on a deal with the criminals. They rarely were targeted for simply doing their jobs.
“They didn’t have to kill the police before, because the agreements were clear, and the limits were well defined,” said Ernesto Lopez Portillo, president of a Mexico City think tank that studies police and public security.
That has changed since the presidential elections of 2000 ended seven decades of one-party rule and shook the protection that it afforded the country’s gangsters, Lopez Portillo said.
Political power, and the cover it can provide drug traffickers, has splintered among the federal, state and local governments.
At the same time, a reorganization of the federal security forces, including the replacement of the notoriously corrupt Federal Judicial Police with a quasi-military force, has made enforcement more effective. Narcotics use has ballooned in Mexico, while smuggling organizations grew more powerful and more competitive with one another.
Now, each cartel has its own protection system, often based on the guns of local and state police. Many crime bosses also employ gunmen who until recently were active-duty soldiers.
Gangs’ firepower and vendettas have multiplied. Police have been caught in the crossfire. Chaos reigns.
“All the old alliances have broken down,” said Bruce Bagley, a University of Miami political scientist who specializes in the Latin American drug trade. “And they are striking back against cops, many of whom are dirty. The whole process has been thrown into flux.”
Calderon has ordered nearly 30,000 soldiers and quasi-military police into the fight against the cartels. The offensive has proved ineffective in stopping the trafficking of cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin to American consumers. But more than 3,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in the 18 months since Calderon became president.
The dead include about 300 federal, state and local police. Some have been killed by rivals of the gangsters who employed them. Many others were slain doing their jobs.
“There have been, obviously, very lamentable losses on our side,” Calderon told reporters this week. “But fortunately Mexico has many patriots like them.”
Calderon insists he is determined to press the crackdown, regardless of the body count. He has asked Congress for a five-fold increase in the budget of the federal police, to be used in large part to build new regional bases across the country.
“We will continue building a better federal police, which this country has severely needed,” Calderon said. “We’re not going to add to the abandonment, the cowardice or the complicity that allowed Mexico to arrive at this situation.”
Read more in the Houston Chronicle
NUEVO LAREDO — In a much-needed show of force, agents with the Agencia Federal de Investigaciones (AFI, similar to the FBI) and federal highway police set up a checkpoint Friday on the Bulevar Ribereño for vehicles headed to the Juárez-Lincoln International Bridge.Every vehicle was stopped and searched.
It was a welcome sight for many Nuevo Laredoans as well as city and state leaders, a day after there was a report of a gun battle Thursday that left one man dead in Los Torres subdivision. The body was removed before police could arrive.
Tamaulipas Gov. Eugenio Hernández Flores, in Monterrey to inaugurate Casa Tamaulipas, said Friday the efforts of federal police and the Mexican Army are welcome and should bring peace to Mexico.
“The federal agents and the Army are fighting organized crime and are giving no quarter,” the governor said. “There are orders from the President of México, Felipe Calderón, not to yield a single centimeter.”
Hernández Flores said he stands in solidarity with Calderón’s action because he is fulfilling his commitment to the people.
Officials said the checkpoints will be seen throughout the city, as agents and soldiers verify whether drivers have legal possession of their vehicles, whether they are carrying illegal arms or drugs, and checking IDs to look for outstanding federal warrants.
The latest group of agents arrived from Mexico City on Wednesday and promptly set up a checkpoint on Bulevar Luis Donaldo Colosio, at the entrance of the Fundadores-Infonavit neighborhood in the south part of the city.
One of the officers said they weren’t authorized to talk to the media about their operation, saying that the federal attorney general’s office or someone from federal police headquarters in Mexico City would be releasing a statement. None, however, was forthcoming Friday.
For his part, Infonavit resident Fabian García, who was one of the drivers stopped at that checkpoint, said he was pleased that the federal authorities are finally taking on its responsibility to protect people along the border.
Many drivers were surprised when they came up on the checkpoint and found themselves directed to wait in line as agents conducted the generally routine inspections. As officers searched the vehicles, others stood with arms at the ready, stern and alert.
The high level of precautions match the level of aggression exhibited by organized crime lords as they seek to frighten law enforcement.
The most recent attack occurred in Hermosillo, in the state of Sonora, where armed commandos attacked police officers in a brutal five-hour exchange of gunfire, ending with the deaths of 15 attackers and five officers.
In the state of Nuevo León, police officers, commanders and high-ranking law enforcement officials have been assassinated. In Nuevo Laredo, law officers also have been the victims of brutal attacks.
The show of force around Nuevo Laredo is promoting confidence among the residents, who have seen at least eight executions, including the one Thursday, in recent days.
Another woman who passed inspection at one of the checkpoints said that at least the federal officers are seen in public, patrolling and staffing checkpoints, which helps dissuade those who would commit a crime.
Meanwhile, in the Monterrey metropolitan area, the bodies of three more men were found at about 7 a.m. Friday. That brings the total number of homicides attributed to organized crime to 64 so far this year.
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