Mayhem Raises Fears of Wider Mexican Violence

Updated: 20 hours 32 minutes ago

Scott Martelle Contributor

(July 28) -- The call came earlier this month to the Mexican federal police in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, that a fellow officer was lying wounded on a street. When the police and a medical crew arrived, someone used a cell phone to detonate a car bomb, killing three of the rescuers -- including a doctor -- and wounding several others.

The next day in Torreon a few hundred miles south, a group of armed men opened fire on a wedding celebration, killing at least 17 people and wounding even more. The hit squad, Mexican federal officials reported earlier this week, were prisoners who had been routinely let out by their guards, provided with murder weapons and cars -- and then accepted back into the prison after the killings. The prisoners have been linked to at least two other shooting sprees.

As horrendous as those crimes might be by themselves, some experts fear they could presage a new level of violence in the already brutal war among drug cartels and the Mexican government -- one that could be cutting into foreign business investment and tourism, two staples of the nation's legal economy.

Bernardino Hernandez, AP

The grandmother of police officer Jose Ramirez grieves over his body after he was shot dead while on patrol July 17 in Acapulco, Mexico. Some observers worry that drug-related violence is pushing Mexico toward chaos.

And it raises significant questions about the effectiveness of President Felipe Calderon's U.S.-backed war against the cartels, which could be a factor in the spreading of the cartels' influence deeper into Central America.

At least 22,000 people have been killed since Calderon launched his war against the cartels in 2006, though no one has a clear count of the dead. Experts say the violence remains primarily score settling among the cartels and attacks between the federal police and the drug kingpins' troops, but the wedding massacre victims also involved civilians. And the car bombing, which so far has not been repeated, could easily have killed innocent bystanders.

Some experts are beginning to wonder if Mexico might be sliding toward the kind of chaos that once enveloped Colombia.

"We were already living with fear, but the kind of fear you have when living in a city that has a volcano or earthquake [risk], the kind of fear that is in the back of your mind," Jessica Pena, a sociology professor at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez, recently told The Christian Science Monitor. "But this is an extreme situation. I think this will change people's fears to the worst. ... This is something we thought just happened in societies like Iran or Iraq.

"How the violence will resonate -- and what path it might take from here -- is a matter of conjecture, though experts doubt it will improve in the near future.

"The situation is likely to deteriorate further before it improves, with a high possibility that increasing use of terrorist-style tactics and indiscriminate killings will raise the threat level to civilians and business investors not involved in the drug trade," said Robert Munks, Americas editor for Jane's Country Risk in London.

He warned against overreaction, pointing out that Mexico's drug violence is mostly confined to five northern states. But the detonation of the car bomb and the growing use of hand grenades (many of them leftover U.S.-provided materiel from the Central American insurgencies in the 1980s) are raising concerns that the cartels might be ratcheting up the violence.

"The fear has always been that cartels will resort to terrorist-style tactics against civilians as well as security forces if they feel the need to increase pressure on the authorities," Munks told AOL News. "There have been sporadic attacks targeting civilians since a grenade attack in Morelia [Michoacan state] in September 2008, but in general, intra- and inter-cartel violence and conflict with security forces has been the norm. The Juarez car bomb is certainly a worrying development that underlines how the threat to civilians may rise further, but I doubt that there will be a widening of the use of car bombs across the country.

"Eric L. Olson, a senior associate at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars' Mexico Institute, pointed out that the car bomb, while "unusual," was not aimed at terrorizing the population but targeted a perceived enemy: the federal police.

"They didn't set it off in the middle of the central park, or a market," he said. "Clearly they were going after some police officers. Still, it's a worrisome escalation, as they have not used this method before. It's a problem, but not a trend of targeting civilians directly.

"Prison corruption has long been a fact of life in Mexico, he said, though such overt complicity in drug violence is new. And it illustrates the different levels of corruption between local and state governments, and the federal government.

"There's a real strong difference in Mexico between the level of penetration at the state level by organized crime and the federal level," Olson said. "It's much higher at the state and local level. That's not to say there aren't corrupt federal officials, but it's a much bigger problem at the local.

"Whether the new tactics in violence will force changes in Calderon's strategy is uncertain in a nation where trust in government is already low. They are more likely to be viewed "as further confirmation" that skepticism of the government is well founded, Olson said.

"Overall, people believe President Calderon is basically honest and trying to do the right thing," he said. "But in general, people believe he's failing."
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Source: http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/recent-mayhem-raises-fears-of-wider-mexican-violence/19571517
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