Bit by Bit, a Mexican Police Force Is Eradicated

New York Times ^ | January 11, 2011 | Randal C. Archibold

[Cardhu]

Guadalupe, Mexico — Her uncle, the mayor who gave her the job nobody else wanted, warned her to keep a low profile, to not make too much of being the last remaining police officer in a town where the rest of the force had quit or been killed.

But in pictures for local newspapers, Érika Gándara, 28, seemed to relish the role, brandishing a semiautomatic rifle and wearing a purple hoodie instead of a uniform. A patch covered an eye swollen from a bee sting.

“I am the only police in this town, the authority,” she told reporters.

Then, two days before Christmas, a group of armed men took her from her home, residents say, and she has not been seen since.

It was an ominous punctuation mark on the wave of terror that has turned this cotton farming town near Texas into a frightened outpost of the drug war. Nearly half of its 9,000 residents have fled, local officials say, leaving block after block of scorched homes and businesses and, now, not one regular police officer.

Far from big, infamous cities like Ciudad Juárez, one of the most violent places in the Americas, the war with organized crime can batter small towns just as hard, if with less notice.

The cotton towns south of Juárez sit in territory disputed by at least two major drug trafficking groups, according to government and private security reports, leading to deadly power struggles. But the lack of adequately trained police officers, a longstanding crisis that the government has sought to address with little resolution, allows criminal groups to have their way.

“Small cities and towns are really highly impacted,” said Daniel M. Sabet, a visiting professor at Georgetown University who studies policing in Mexico. “They offer strongholds organized crime can hold and control.”

[Cardhu]

I’d do it for say.... $200K/yr + expenses. I’d also want an APC and military weapons/equipment. ALSO, the authority to shoot first and ask questions later. Tell ya what, I’d either die spectacularly, of the druggies would go elsewhere.

I see you are a modest man with simple wants. If you had lived in Sodom or Gomorrah they would never have been destroyed.

I thought you would ask for enough to hire a couple of real bad guy druggies to police the place - while you lived it up with the ghod's gift to man.

Of course not forgetting include a gold plated health care and a politician's pension.

[Seruzawa]

Thank you, drug warriors.