“WTF? Is Homeland Security [sic] in charge of the military now?
ML/NJ “
Anything but REAL homeland security! Janet ignores our own porous borders with WAR raging on our Southern one.
Guadalupe’s only cop Erika Gandara kidnapped
GUNMEN have kidnapped the sole police officer in a northern Mexican town, a 28-year-old woman working alone after her colleagues resigned or were killed in the region’s brutal drug war. A dozen unidentified gunmen set Erika Gandara’s home ablaze last week and torched two cars parked outside before abducting her, the Chihuahua state prosecutor’s office.
Guadalupe, the town of 9000 inhabitants she helped keep safe, is located just off the US-Mexico border in the heart of one of the country’s most violent regions where 3100 people were killed this year alone.
A single woman without children, Gandara often patrolled the streets with her automatic pistol in hand.
She joined the police force in 2009, when there were 12 agents on the force with her.
As rampant drug violence spiralled, Gandara began to lose her colleagues, one after the next.
“Nobody wants to go into policing here, and the budget just isn’t there anyway,” she said earlier this year.
“I am this town’s only cop. I am the law... I am not here for humanitarian stuff, I am not here to do social work.”
The town of Guadalupe is just up the road from the hamlet of Praxedis Guadalupe Guerrero, where 20 year-old female college student and young mother Marisol Valles took over as police chief in October.
But Valles has said that given her inability to confront organised crime, she would focus on social work.
Guadalupe also is just 60km from Mexico’s crime capital Ciudad Juarez, the center of drug smuggling operations into the United States.
More than 30,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderon announced a widespread crackdown involving tens of thousands of troops that has so far failed to stem the bloodshed.
Over the same period, civil rights groups monitoring the developments have counted 5300 kidnappings - a 317 percent increase, according to Jose Luis Obando, who heads the Public Security Commission in the Chamber of Deputies.
In late November, unidentified gunmen killed another female crime fighter, Hermila Garcia Baeza, the police chief of Meoqui. a town in the state of Chihuahua, located about 175km from the US-Mexico border.
An attorney, Garcia Baeza had been on the job for only a month at the time of her death.
The Sinaloa and Juarez drug cartels are engaged in a bitter fight for control of Ciudad Juarez and its surrounding towns, key points to smuggle illegal drugs into the lucrative US market.
Shootings, arson and kidnappings have nearly become routine.
In thousands of Mexican towns, local police officers - too few, too poorly paid and inadequately armed to confront the scourge of bloody violence - end up turning a blind eye to drug traffickers or helping them. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news...-1225977069114
Damn - I knew it was just a matter of time but this woman had some guts - hopefully her kidnapping will awaken some in the government to take the battle to the drug dealers.