Violence is spinning out of control is areas along the U.S. Mexico border and now drug cartels are sending a chilling message to police and soldiers in cities across Mexico: Join us or die.The threat appears in recruiting banners that are hung across roadsides and in publicly posted death lists. Cops are receiving additional threats over their two-way radios. At least four high-ranking police officials were gunned down this month, including Mexico’s acting federal police chief
Mexico has battled for years to clean up its security forces and win them the publics respect. But Mexicans generally assume police and even soldiers are corrupt until proven otherwise, and the honest ones lack resources, training and the assurance that their colleagues are watching their backs. Here, the taboo on cop-killing familiar to Americans seems hardly to apply.Police who take on the cartels feel isolated and vulnerable when they become targets, as did 22 commanders in Ciudad Juarez when drug traffickers named them on a handwritten death list left at a monument to fallen police this year. It was addressed to “those who still don’t believe” in the power of the cartels.Of the 22, seven have been killed and three wounded in assassination attempts. Of the others, all but one have quit, and city officials said he didn’t want to be interviewed.
Violence is spinning out of control is areas along the U.S. Mexico border and now drug cartels are sending a chilling message to police and soldiers in cities across Mexico: Join us or die.The threat appears in recruiting banners that are hung across roadsides and in publicly posted death lists. Cops are receiving additional threats over their two-way radios. At least four high-ranking police officials were gunned down this month, including Mexico’s acting federal police chief
Mexico has battled for years to clean up its security forces and win them the publics respect. But Mexicans generally assume police and even soldiers are corrupt until proven otherwise, and the honest ones lack resources, training and the assurance that their colleagues are watching their backs. Here, the taboo on cop-killing familiar to Americans seems hardly to apply.Police who take on the cartels feel isolated and vulnerable when they become targets, as did 22 commanders in Ciudad Juarez when drug traffickers named them on a handwritten death list left at a monument to fallen police this year. It was addressed to “those who still don’t believe” in the power of the cartels.Of the 22, seven have been killed and three wounded in assassination attempts. Of the others, all but one have quit, and city officials said he didn’t want to be interviewed.
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