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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | June 2005 
Mexican Government Says Violence on Border is Shared Problem
 Will Weissert - Associated Press
| | Amid border crime wave, Mexico's Fox calls for stricter punishments for corruption. |
Mexico City – Mexican and U.S. officials met Friday to find ways of fighting an escalating wave of violent crime along their border, a spokesman for President Vicente Fox said Friday.
Ruben Aguilar said members of a working group on criminal investigation formed as part of the U.S-Mexico Binational Commission were meeting in Mexico City and Washington.
Addressing reporters in Washington on Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the border crime wave "a very serious problem."
"We're very concerned about it and we're raising it at all levels of the Mexican government," she said.
Aguilar said Mexico's "government is also worried about the situation on the northern border and for that reason it is engaged in a battle and a frontal assault against organized crime."
Authorities in both countries blame the violence on a war for control of key smuggling routes into the United States between two of Mexico's most powerful drug smuggling syndicates.
Last week, the chief of police of the industrial border hub of Nuevo Laredo was shot dozens of times and killed mere hours after he took the post, prompting Fox's government to send soldiers and federal agents there.
Aguilar said that the problem, "as Secretary Rice acknowledged yesterday, is the co-responsibility of both countries."
"As Ms. Rice said, we don't want violence on the border, not on the Mexican side or the U.S. side," Aguilar said, adding that both countries "need to make unified progress."
On Thursday, gunmen shot and killed Pedro Madrigal, commander of a detail of anti-drug agents assigned to Mexico City's international airport.
Aguilar that since Madrigal took command at the airport in November, the 321 kilograms of cocaine agents had seized is "the most important amount in the history of the Mexico City airport."
"The investigation has revealed that there is a relation between the ... extreme effectiveness of this official against organized crime and his killing," Aguilar said.
He shrugged off suggestions that the wave of killings could be seeping south from the border to other locales, including the nation's capital.
"We all know that this is basically concentrated in the states of the north," he said.
But Aguilar added that anti-narcotics investigators are always potential targets of hit men working for drug pushers.
"That's common sense. The Mexican state assumes that," he said. "Of course it's a risk, any official in the line of fire against organized crime knows that he is also in the sights of the criminals." |
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