Police abandon another Mexican town

AP/Houston Chronicle:

A southern Mexican town's 15-member police force has quit for fear of being assassinated in retaliation for a shootout with gunmen, a security official said Thursday.

Zirandaro was the second town in less than two weeks to be left without its police force as Mexico's drug cartels wage increasingly bold attacks against security forces. On Monday, the military took over a town near Texas after all 20 of its police officers were either killed, run out of town or quit.

Eight members of Zirandaro's police never returned to work after a May 13 shootout with gunmen that left a 32-year-old man dead, said Juan Heriberto Salinas Altes, the public safety secretary of the southern state of Guerrero.

The other seven officers — including the police chief — quit days later.

"The Zirandaro police quit the service because they feared the criminals would return to seek revenge," Salinas Altas told a news conference.

The identities of the gunmen were not known, but Salinas Altas said cells of both the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels were operating in the area.

About 20 Guerrero state police officers have taken over security responsibilities in Zirandaro, a town of about 24,000 people.

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Much closer to the US border is Palomas where NBC's Mark Potter reports a similar problem with consequences on our side of the border.

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In tiny Palomas, some 40 people have died in drug shootouts so far this year. The residents live in fear of getting caught in the crossfire and spend much of their time indoors. Recently, all of the town's police officers resigned and the police chief sought political asylum in the United States, claiming his life was in danger. Victims shot up in Palomas are often brought to the border in the hope they'll be treated in American hospitals.

Watching all this from Columbus, Luna County Sheriff Raymond Cobos told us he is worried the Mexican drug war could spread. "My big concern, and the concern of most officials here, is that it's going to spill over into the United States, into this community," he said.

The mayor of Columbus, Eddie Espinoza, is also keeping a close eye on Palomas, which he used to frequent. Now he is more cautious and fears that, in retaliation for recent killings there, even more gunfire could erupt, perhaps on his side of the border.

"I believe it will get much worse than it is now," he said. "I think we haven't seen the boiling point. I think we're still waiting for that to come."

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There is more in both stories. Columbus is raided by Pancho Villia's gang in 1916. In response Woodrow Wilson ordered Blackjack Pershing to launch a "punitive expedition" into Mexico. It was pretty much a fiasco, because of Wilson's incompetence.

However, it did have one interesting historic consequence for moder warfare. George Patton led a patrol using early autos and trucks and attacked an took one of the bandit hideouts. When World War I came along he was able to bootstrap this experience in "mechanized warfare" into a position of training and leading the US's first tank groups which had an impact breaking the stalemate of trench warfare. Unfortunately, after the war, the War Department thought this an aberration and Patton was sent back to the horse cavalry. It took another 15 years for them to come to their senses and start training for tank warfare.

This blog has been one of the most active in chronicling the drug insurgency in Mexico. Much of the recent action has been triggered by red on red battles between drug gangs and a military response by President Calderon who has been the most effective in dealing with the problem in my lifetime. But Mexico needs our help. The Democrats have been trying to cut back aid to Mexico because they do not like the armies involvement. As these stories demonstrate, law enforcement is not up to the job and the Army is the only realistic alternative.