What We Are About To Do Here Is What The Good Lord Would Call A Cleansing of the Wicked. I Call It A Good Old Fashioned Texas Ass Kicking.
Posted on 08/06/2005 9:49:12 AM PDT by demkicker
Nuevo Laredo councilman and city policeman slain in ambush
MEXICO CITY - Unidentified gunmen shot dead a Nuevo Laredo city councilman and a police commander just blocks from City Hall Friday, continuing a wave of underworld violence gripping the border city this year.
Leopoldo Ramos Treviño, 44, who headed the City Council's public security committee, died in a fusillade of bullets at 9:20 a.m. as he drove his pickup toward City Hall in downtown Nuevo Laredo. Witnesses told police that three teenage gunmen boarded a car and drove off following the assassinations.
Federico Ocampo, a municipal police commander, also was killed, while city patrolman Alfredo Barberena and an unidentified passerby were wounded, police said.
State police investigators recovered more than five dozen spent bullet casings, most from AK-47 automatic rifles, at the scene.
A member of a prominent Nuevo Laredo ranching family, Ramos had joined the City Council in January and was an ally of Mayor Daniel Peña. His death comes nearly two months after the June 8 assassination on another downtown Nuevo Laredo street of Alejandro Dominguez, who had been named the city's police chief hours before he was slain.
"We are losing our city," said Nuevo Laredo merchant Jack Suneson, a vice president of the city's chamber of commerce who has been trying to woo back the U.S. tourists who have evaporated since the violence escalated this year.
"It's hard to put a good face on this when we have ... murders in front of City Hall," Suneson said. "It's madness.
"Everytime something happens we think we've hit bottom," he said. "But we're in a bottomless pit."
With Friday's killings, 109 people have been slain so far this year in Nuevo Laredo, a city of nearly 500,000 people across the Rio Grande from Laredo. All but a handful of the killings have been linked to the narcotics traffickers' turf war for control of the city's smuggling routes into the United States.
Ramos's death came almost simultaneously with U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza's decision to reopen the American Consulate in Nuevo Laredo on Monday.
Garza had ordered the consulate closed following a July 28 shootout between suspected gangsters in a wealthy Nuevo Laredo neighborhood that involved automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
In announcing the consulate's reopening, Garza said he was convinced Mexican federal authorities had heeded his call for "decisive action" in combating Nuevo Laredo's gangland violence. He did not elaborate as to what that action might entail.
The ambassador issued another statement Friday afternoon, pointing to Ramos's killing as proof "that the battle against Mexico's drug lords will not be won overnight."
Referring to his meetings with senior Mexican officials this week about the Nuevo Laredo violence, Garza said that "the commitments made and plans announced over the last few days are but a second step in a long road ahead for both our nations."
Ramos's killing "once again highlights the need for Mexico to stand resolute in its effort to rescue Nuevo Laredo from the hands of the kingpins and capos that are actively undermining the fabric of life in both our countries," he said.
A spokesman for President Vicente Fox this week conceded that a seven-week-old show of federal force in Nuevo Laredo and other cities plagued with gangland violence has not had the intended effects.
Fox called for intensifying the crackdown, known as Operation Secure Mexico, and met with top law enforcement officials. But no new strategies have been announced, or apparently launched.
Ramos was a founder of the annual trail ride across the northern Mexican desert in which Fox and border state governors participate. The slain councilman was an "attentive public servant willing to help the needy as if they were his friends," the Nuevo Laredo mayor's office said in a statement.
As the city councilman charged with overseeing public security, Ramos was deeply involved in the workings of the city's troubled municipal police force.
The councilman's brother, a former federal law enforcement official, was in the running this year to become the city's police chief, a Nuevo Laredo merchant who knows the family said.
Many Nuevo Laredo residents, like other Mexicans, blame U.S. consumers of cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana and other narcotics for their current crisis.
The belief is that if Americans stop buying the drugs, or U.S. officials stop them at the border, underworld gangs won't be scrambling to get the narcotics across the border.
Suneson, the Nuevo Laredo merchant and business leader, called on Fox to intensify the crackdown and for greater cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in obtaining and acting on intelligence as to gang leaders' whereabouts.
"They need to come in here and clean this place up," Suneson said. "It's not an impossible task. It just takes political will."
"But we're in a bottomless pit."
Senor, es porque ustedes son en Mexico. Lo siento mucho.
Yes, yes, but is Boy's Town safe?
Good spot for WOP (Wall of Protection) that will save American lives.
They don't want to clean it up.
I haven't been that far across the border in fifty years and I don't know much about Nuevo Laredo. But, "Boy's Town" used to be the safest place from theft or assault. They were pretty well patrolled. Of course there were other threats for those who availed themselves of the tourist attractions. Now probabaly all bets are off.
I hope Ramos isn't the wonderful guy that led the Mexican Cabalgada (trail riders) across the border to join us in the South Texas Trail ride to San Antonio.
Man, they were some nice people, and real vaqueros. We rode with them about 100 miles.
This is awful. Has anyone read 'No Country For Old Men' by Cormac MacCarthy?
There isn't a police force in Mexico that is not corrupt. None of them can be trusted.
Nor the military. The military is in control of the drug lords.
I agree with the Mexican officials. We've got to crack down hard on drug consumption here in the U.S. It's killing people in Mexico, destroying families here in the U.S. How many articles have we read about children being killed when mom/boyfriend were on cocaine?
Fox is really quite strong and smart! This new guy in Laredo thought, just because he was new, he didn't have to pay Fox and Mrs. Fox their share of the drug money or what he owed on all the other "enterprises" from which the Foxes are owed a cut. So Fox had his drug lord buddies or army subordinates (often the same guys) do the new guy. New guys are cheap; the lesson is priceless!
It's a quagmire! We need a timetable for getting out!
Hmm. Per capita it may be that this city has had more killings this year than Baghdad. If so, let me be the first to call for us to remove all our troops from Mexico and station them along our border.
What? No troops in Mexico? Well put them along the border anyway.
Mexican 'teenage murderers' !!!
WOW...sure nice to know our BP *supposedly* does criminal checks *before* they simply "Catch & Release" thousands of border jumpers.....
I'm sure most 'teenage gunman' have long criminal records......./sarcasm
I think you've nailed it!
"We've got to crack down hard on drug consumption here in the U.S."
We've been "cracking down" on drugs for the last 35 years. We now have para-military police departments and Federal ninjas shooting people and burning their children. Just what do you want? We are perilously close to a police state now.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.