© Daniel Aguilar/ReutersThe drug trade in Mexico has left many police forces powerless due to corruption or intimidation.
An entire 20-man police force has resigned in a northern Mexican town after a series of attacks that killed the police chief and five officers over the last three months, state officials confirmed.
The officers' resignation on Thursday night left the 13,000 people of Ascension without local police services, Chihuahua state chief prosecutor Carlos Manuel Salas said. State and federal police have moved in to take over police work, he said.
The mass resignation appeared to be connected to a Tuesday attack by gunmen that killed three of the town's officers, Salas said. But it wasn't the first deadly attack on the police department this year.
In mid-May, police chief Manuel Martínez, who had been in office just seven months, was gunned down with two other officers on a nearby highway. The three had been kidnapped a day before police found their bodies riddled with bullets in the back seat of a sedan.
The town's police force was relatively new. Angry residents had led authorities to replace the entire force last September after the mob killings of two teenagers who had allegedly kidnapped a girl from a seafood restaurant. People claimed police officers were aiding drug gangs.
Martínez, with his new police force, had said he wanted to end the kidnappings and extortions that have terrorised the town where people grow green chili and cotton.
The new police in Ascension had installed a telescopic camera in the town's plaza that rotated, giving officers at the station the ability to zoom on a site as far as the outskirts of town. In addition, townspeople helped police dig a broad ditch around the town to prevent criminals from escaping on back roads.
Ascension is south-west of Ciudad Juarez, the border city across from El Paso, Texas, that is one of Mexico's most violent cities. The state of Chihuahua has had the most homicides blamed on organised crime and drug trafficking since the government's anti-drug offensive began in December 2006.
Elsewhere, the defence department announced that a 19-day offensive in northern states against the Zetas drug cartel had resulted in the shooting deaths of 30 alleged criminals and a soldier. The army said that among those killed was Jorge Luis de la Pena, the Zetas boss for Nuevo Laredo, the city across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas.
Troops also detained 196 people in different cities during operation "North Lynx." The Zetas gang, known for its viciousness, has been fighting its former ally, the Gulf cartel, in Mexico's north since early 2010.
Source: The Associated Press
One of the great unanswered questions of this century is how these criminal drug businesses got so powerful and well-funded.
The first and primary reason governments exist is to protect their borders from the threat of armed outlaws. Won't they ever learn how to do this?
As men on both sides die, SOMEONE is just feeding more in. Who is doing that, and why have they been so successful? Finding out the answer and doing something about it is our only hope for preventing this situation from continuing to get worse.