Attacks Kill 7 Mexican Police In Tijuana
By ELLIOT SPAGAT, Associated Press Writer
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) – Seven police officers were assassinated in about an hour’s time in what authorities said Tuesday was a coordinated effort that followed months of relative calm in a border city stricken by drug-fueled violence. Three officers were injured.
Municipal police detained several people after Monday night’s attacks, said Jose Manuel Yepiz, spokesman for the Baja California state attorney general’s office. He did not have additional details.
After four officers were killed by gunfire outside a convenience store, police scanners hummed with “narcocorridos,” or drug ballads. One voice threatened over the airwaves that 30 officers would be killed.
One officer was shot dead in each of three attacks that followed, including one at a police station, Yepiz said.
The killings come as Mayor Jorge Ramos intensifies an effort to rid the police department of corrupt officers.
The city has fired 248 police officers accused of corruption since Ramos took office in December 2006 and about 130 others are suspended pending review for possible dismissal, said Julian Leyzaola, the city’s public safety secretary. The city has 2,160 officers.
Leyzaola said in an interview last week that about 15 Tijuana police officers had been killed on the job during Ramos’ administration.
Nine police officers were killed last year in neighboring Playas de Rosarito, a city of 130,000 people, including about 14,000 U.S. citizens, Mayor Hugo Torres said. Seven or eight were involved in drug trafficking, he said.
Monday’s killings were one of the most brazen since a period of bloodshed that claimed more than 400 lives in the last three months of 2008. According to U.S. and Mexican authorities, Tijuana is a battleground for two drug traffickers – Fernando Sanchez Arellano, heir to the notorious but enfeebled Arellano Felix cartel, and Teodoro Garcia Simental, a renegade lieutenant who broke away in April 2008 in a shootout that killed 14 people.
Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights, said Tijuana officers have been killed before but never so many in a single attack. He said the slayings may signal a new wave of violence in Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, California.
“The violence follows a pattern,” he said. “It falls, then it rises, then it falls. Today we are witnessing the beginning of the curve rising again.”
Nationwide, Mexico’s drug violence has claimed more than 10,700 lives since 2006, when President Felipe Calderon launched an anti-drug campaign. About 45,000 soldiers have been deployed to drug-plagued areas.
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Associated Press Writer Mariana Martinez contributed to this report.
