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 News from Around the Americas | September 2006 
US Wants More Mexican Forces in Border Drug City
 Reuters
| | A sharp spike in drug-related violence has some analysts worrying about the 'Colombianization' of Mexico. (Eduardo Verdugo/AP) |
The United States asked Mexico on Thursday to send federal security forces back to the border city of Nuevo Laredo, which is still struggling with drug violence despite a security crackdown last year.
High-level law enforcement officials from the two countries met in Texas on Thursday to discuss a resurgence of drug violence in Mexico, where two cartels are battling for control of smuggling routes to the United States and local drug markets.
The battle has descended into barbarity in the western state of Michoacan, hit by a series of beheadings and other gruesome murders in recent months.
Suspected drug gang hit men shot and killed the assistant head of the municipal police force in Tijuana on Thursday in a hail of bullets from AK-47 assault weapons, police said. The policeman, Arturo Rivas, had recently been sent a funeral wreath as a warning from drug traffickers.
The officials agreed to set up a task force to work on the abductions of U.S. citizens, mostly in border areas where the drug feud is fiercest.
"We also continue to urge that Mexico consider returning federal forces in significant numbers to Nuevo Laredo as a short-term deterrent to the increase in violence there," the U.S. Embassy said in a statement.
Mexican President Vicente Fox briefly sent hundreds of troops and federal police in summer 2005 into Nuevo Laredo, the border city worst hit by drug violence. But drug killings in the city, across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas, have not stopped.
Mexico asked the United States at Thursday's meeting to curb the flow of illegal weapons into Mexico.
"A more fluid and efficient cooperation is needed against the trafficking of arms which often end up in the hands of organized crime groups," the Foreign Ministry said.
The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City last week cautioned Americans about a sharp increase in violence on the Mexican side of the border.
Mexico on Saturday extradited Francisco Rafael Arellano Felix, the oldest of four brothers accused of operating one of Mexico's most infamous drug cartels, in a rare hand-over of a major Mexican trafficker.
(Additional reporting by Lizbeth Diaz in Tijuana) |
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