Spillover Violence from Mexico, Reality or Exaggeration

El Paso - Ciudad Juarez Border

From his office window, El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen has a clear view of Ciudad Juarez, El Paso’s blood-drenched sister city just across the Rio Grande in northern Mexico.

The carnage that has claimed 4,700 lives over the past two years has been confined primarily to Juarez. But Allen is taking no chances. He recently obtained approval to buy 1,145 M4 rifles civilian versions of the military weapons used by U.S. combat troops — to put his officers on equal footing with the heavily armed criminals in Mexico’s drug gangs.

The drug war across the river is “so dadgum close that it has to be a concern to the law enforcement community here,” Allen said. “You have to speculate that it could come here. That’s a reality.”

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Gunmen Kill American Consulate Staff Members in Juarez

American Consulate Ciudad Juarez

Gunmen in the drug war-plagued Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez killed two Americans and a Mexican linked to the local U.S. consulate, an attack U.S. President Barack Obama said “outraged” him.

An American woman working at the consulate in Ciudad Juarez, just over the border from El Paso, Texas, and her U.S. husband were fatally shot by suspected drug gang hitmen in broad daylight on Saturday as they left a consulate social event, U.S. and Mexican officials told Reuters.

A Mexican man married to another consulate employee was killed around the same time in another part of the city after he and his wife left the same event, a U.S. official said.

The U.S. official, who asked not to be identified, said it was not clear if the victims had been specifically targeted, and the motive for the attacks was unknown.

Bloodshed has exploded in recent months in Ciudad Juarez as the head of the Juarez cartel, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, fights off a bloody offensive by Mexico’s No. 1 fugitive drug lord, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, at the worst hotspot of Mexico’s three-year-old drug war.

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From AFP – ‘Hit teams’ attack US consular staff, families in Mexico

Suspected drug cartel “hit teams” gunned down an American consular employee and her husband in a Mexican border city and killed a co-worker’s Mexican husband in a separate attack, a US official said Sunday.

The victims two Americans and a Mexican came under fire in separate locations as they were driving Saturday through Ciudad Juarez after earlier attending the same social event, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The killings marked an ominous turn in the drug violence wracking northern Mexico, and prompted the State Department to announce that Americans working at six US consulates in the border area could send their families away.

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Vigilantes Appear To Be Fighting Back In Mexico Drug War

Shadowy vigilante groups are threatening Mexico’s drug gangs near the U.S. border in retaliation for a wave of murders and kidnappings that killed 1,600 people in this city alone last year.

One group in the border city of Ciudad Juarez pledged last week to “clean our city of these criminals” and said their mission was to “end the life of a criminal every 24 hours.”

The emergence of vigilantes would be a new twist to a vicious drug war that killed 5,700 people in Mexico last year and forced the United States to give hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Mexican government.

Ciudad Juarez, a manufacturing center in the desert across from El Paso, Texas, was the scene of the worst violence in 2008 as drug cartels fought each other as well as staging kidnappings for ransom and extorting businessmen.

In an e-mail to news organizations, the “Juarez Citizen Command” said it was funded by local businessmen sick of abductions and extortion in the city, home to factories that export goods to the United States.

While none of the city’s 1,600 in the last year were undoubtedly the work of vigilantes, a body was found on January 7 with a message next to it that read: “This is for those who continue extorting.”

And six men in their 20s and 30s were shot dead and dumped together in Ciudad Juarez in October with a cardboard sign reading: “Message for all the rats: This will continue.”

Drug gangs often leave threatening messages with the bodies of their victims, but security officials said those two incidents might have been the work of vigilantes.

Another group, “Businessmen United, The Death Squad” put a video on Internet site YouTube last June threatening to go after kidnappers and criminals in Ciudad Juarez, the biggest city in Mexico’s Chihuahua state. The video is no longer on YouTube.

via Shadow of vigilantes appears in Mexico drug war – Yahoo! News.