One would think the safest place to be in the embattled city of Juarez, Mexico, would be the police station. Not so if your name is on a hit list of people a drug cartel wants eliminated. Or if you’re impossibly outgunned.
That was the case early Friday morning, as one more police officer died when assassins barged into the Bermudez Industrial Park police station. Meeting no resistance, they sprayed bullets from an AK-47 into police officer Javier Alarcon Ruiz, identified as a lieutenant in some news reports and as a captain in others. No other information is available on the killing.
Twenty officers have been killed this year in the city of Juarez as part of the battle to rid the city of its criminal drug element.
In still another assault on police, gunmen ambushed two state police officers near their Culiacan, Sinaloa, headquarters and massacred an auto body shop owner and several of his employees, as well as a father and son who were picking up their car. This in a town where thousands of federales and military troops are patrolling. "When the federal authorities are on the east side of town, the killings take place on the west side," a citizen said. "When they are on the north side, the killers hit on the south side. It seems the only ones organized are the criminals.”
In the Thursday attacks, assassins opened fire on two policemen in the middle of the day as they rode in a pickup truck on a downtown street. One agent was killed and a commander severely wounded. When a second commander gave chase, a second assassin cut him down in an ambush.
Those gunmen or another team then attacked the body shop, killing three men on the sidewalk in front and then gunning down the shop’s owners and mechanics inside as well as the father and son, who were accounting professors.
The state of Sinaloa has one dubious achievement over the city of Juarez: By one media count, three times as many, or 62 local, state and federal police have been killed in the state this year., compared to 20 in Juarez.
Genaro Garcia Luna, Mexico’s secretary of public security, said in a recent radio interview that the drug gangs have ramped up the violence both to maintain control of their own members and to terrify communities into submission – a tactic that, to this date, is working.