20-Year-Old Female Mexican Police Chief Fired For Abandoning Job; Official Says She’s In US

A 20-year-old woman who made international headlines when she accepted the job as police chief in a violent Mexican border town was fired Monday for apparently abandoning her post after receiving death threats.

Marisol Valles Garcia was given permission to travel to the United States last week for personal matters but failed to return to Praxedis G. Guerrero as agreed, according to a statement from the city.

“In the absence of (Valles Garcia’s) presence on the agreed-upon day and since there was no notification of a need to extend the period of her absence, the mayor has decided to remove her from office,” the statement read.

Local news media have reported that Valles Garcia is seeking asylum in the United States after getting threats against her life, but there has been no confirmation of that.

Her whereabouts are unknown but a Chihuahua state official told ABC-7 on Friday that Valles Garcia is, in fact, in the United States.

The official said family of Valles Garcia said she received telephone threats the last weekend in February and was accompanied by a local official to the international bridge near Fort Hancock, Texas later in the week.

There have been Mexican media reports that Valles Garcia is seeking political asylum in the U.S. Officials in Praxedis Guerrero denied that, saying she took took time off to take care of her sick son.

Valles Garcia, a criminology student was named police chief in October “since she was the only person to accept the position”, the mayor’s office of the town of some 10,000 people near the US border told local media in Mexico at the time of her hiring.

Valles was studying criminology in Mexico’s most violent city of Ciudad Juarez, some 60km west of Guadalupe.