Police Gunned Down Across Mexico In War On Drugs

MEXICO CITY — The war on drugs in Mexico is blamed for an alarming string of assassinations this year of police and others who were in key positions to hinder — or help — organized crime rings.

In one of the latest killings, three top police officers in the Pacific port city of Lazaro Cardenas in Michoacan state were found dead on Oct. 16 with gangland-style shots to the head. They were the city's top public security director, his assistant director and a commander of officers in the port. The assistant director, a city police officer said, had received at least three death threats on his cellular phone recently from drug traffickers.

While Mexico's northern border cities cope with dueling cartels and associated violence, cold-blooded executions have also taken place in cities all over Mexico where airports, sea ports or highways are known to be used to ferry South American cocaine and other narcotics.

An estimated 900 to 1,000 people have died in murders related to drug trafficking this year. At least 35 police of high rank in federal, municipal or state forces have been gunned down in brazen attacks from Mexico City to Acapulco to Cancun and Playa del Carmen, the latter two major U.S. tourist destinations on the Caribbean.

"We are in a period of extraordinary violence. It's not new for police to get killed, but recently it does have to do with the anti-drug offensive by President [Vicente] Fox's government," said Jorge Chabat, who researches the impact of drug trafficking on national security at the Center for Economic Investigation and Instruction in Mexico City.

Among the civilian casualties this year in the drug war was the customs manager of the shipping service DHL at Mexico City's airport. He was chased down on a Mexico City street and shot to death Aug. 21 in his car. It is widely believed the shooting was punishment by traffickers because the manager reported to police that he found a package containing narcotics destined for Illinois.

On June 16, a director of Mexico's federal preventive police at the airport was shot to death in front of his Mexico City home. He had just been transferred to the airport and was killed two weeks after leading the seizure of a major shipment of drugs there.

Federal police at the Mexico City airport have continued to make major seizures of money and drugs. On Oct. 19, $1.2 million dollars were found stashed inside cans of chile peppers bound for Colombia from Mexico City on a Copa Airlines flight. On Oct. 15 nearly $4.7 million was seized at the airport. On Aug. 24, $7.8 million was seized from inside kitchen equipment that was to be imported to Colombia in a flight.

"It's hard not to notice these killings. They are all over Mexico," said a U.S. official in Mexico who spoke on condition of anonymity.

He said some killings stem from corruption, with police officers dealt the ultimate penalty for failing to fulfill promises to a cartel or failing to switch allegiance to a rival. But some, the official said, are because officers honestly tried to do their jobs.

"Who would want to do their work knowing that if they make an interdiction their lives are at risk?" said the American official, acknowledging that the assassinations have a chilling effect on the will of some police to take on the cartels.

The official also noted that some of the cartels are using hired killers who were once members of an elite military anti-drug group known as the Zetas.

"You're talking about highly trained persons who protect the traffickers," the official said. "We've heard they are always once step ahead of law enforcement."

In the Caribbean resort of Playa del Carmen, residents were stunned when city public security commander Carlos Hiram Rodriguez was shot to death by masked men while he sat in his car in front of his home on Sept. 7.

"It was like an alarm went off. We haven't had these types of activities on the Riviera Maya [the Caribbean coast], but we knew there was drug trafficking" said Vicky Cevallos, manager of the resort's chamber of business and tourism.

Fox has dispatched army soldiers to patrol cities afflicted by violence and police killings, including resort ports like Playa del Carmen and Acapulco. In Acapulco, at least nine police, including the city's police chief, have been slain this year. Law enforcement officers this summer seized arsenals of AK-47 assault weapons and grenades in a Pacific coast resort.

Shortly after the weapons were seized in August, the second in command of a state police force that participated in the seizure was gunned down as he walked out of a restaurant in Acapulco accompanied by a television and radio executive.

On Sept. 17, assailants attacked a federal police officer in Acapulco in broad daylight, shooting him to death and wounding the officer's teenager nephew. Mexican Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca, admits the nation is continuing to struggle to contain organized crime involved in smuggling a wide array of narcotics to the United States.

He believes the size of Mexico's federal police organization is "extremely small" for the daunting task of hunting down traffickers along with other federal crimes the office has to handle across the entire country.

The office has only 3,000 agents in a force called the public ministry, 7,000 FBI-like agents and 1,100 crime investigation experts, he said. A massive restructuring of the Mexican attorney general's office, proposed by Fox two years ago, is stalled in Mexico's congress.