Posted on 04/21/2007 8:03:53 AM PDT by SwinneySwitch
MONTERREY, Mexico — With a warning to travelers and a complaint about criminals enjoying impunity, the United States has turned up the heat on Mexican law enforcers to deliver results against organized crime in the border state of Nuevo León.
For the first time, the U.S. State Department singled out Monterrey, a city with close business and tourist ties to San Antonio, in its update of its travel advisory on Mexico.
State and federal authorities here responded by throwing even more police officers in jail.
At least 22 officers have been taken into custody after the Monday arrests of 112 of them in a sweeping raid that left some of the state's rural districts without police forces.
Organized-crime-related charges could be presented against some of the arrested officers this weekend, Aldo Fasci a deputy state attorney general, said Friday.
The U.S. announcement doesn't advise against travel to Monterrey but notes "heightened risk in public places" there and in other areas.
Nuevo León this year became one of Mexico's hot spots for execution-style slayings. At least 50 people — including 18 police officers — have been killed there in 2007, the majority in the Monterrey area.
Not one of those killings has been solved, and general crime rates are increasing as purges and resignations deplete police forces.
"This impunity we are seeing is just giving the narcotraffickers, the bad people, a chance to continue doing what they are doing," Luis Moreno, the U.S. consul general in Monterrey, told a meeting of the American Chamber of Commerce on Thursday.
Authorities dispensed with the usual reaction to U.S. statements calling attention to Mexico's problems — irritation with American interference — by saying the concern was justified.
"My government does not undervalue the alert," Gov. Natividad González Parás said. "It's an alert that will bring us to work even harder against organized crime."
Aside from the massive arrests of police, results have been meager.
Held at the state's police academy, about 40 percent of those arrested have confessed to some illicit activity, officials said this week.
Fasci described a swath of municipal districts in the northern part of the state where the officers worked as a corridor for drug traffickers.
Targeting allegedly corrupt cops is a change of direction for authorities who downplayed their existence last year.
"If we want to reduce the violence and the operation of organized crime, the essential part is the cleansing of (police) forces," Fasci said.
"When police ... collaborate with organized crime, what happens is that they help them hide, and help them operate.
"And this implies a lot of problems at the moment of investigating, because everything is hidden with the help of the police," he said.
Eight officers were arrested as they arrived at the scene of a shooting. Federal authorities sent them to Mexico City.
Four police in another city were detained by state authorities after a shooting at a police station that left two officers dead — one who apparently took his own life and had a letter naming other police involved with organized crime, Fasci said — and one seriously wounded.
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mattson.sean@gmail.com
Nuevo Leon ping!
If you want on, or off this S. Texas/Mexico ping list, please FReepMail me.
Where do you go when the active murderers and criminals ARE the cops or are protected by them?
The arrests are good, but simply reveal what is easily seen on the surface and not the rotten core.
The Mexicans can’t put lipstick on this pig and say the finished product is going to be OK.
In the mid-fifties, my mother took me, my brother, and my slightly older cousin, a girl of mabye fourteen at the time, on vacation. We drove from Amarillo through Monterrey to Mexico City and back, stopping often in Mexico to sightsee.
That would seem to be an incredibly risky behavior today.
The war on drugs bears bitter fruit, and not just in this country.
I have a cousin in Piedras Nigras who’s always telling me to come and visit.
Anyone know if the situation has deteriorated in that part of Mexico?
Usually many of my family member go down there in April.......no one went this year.
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