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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | August 2005 
Garza: Consulate Will Reopen
 Wire services
| | U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza, left, shakes hands with Interior Secretary Carlos Abascal after a meeting in Mexico City on Wednesday. (Photo: EFE) |
The interior secretary said Wednesday the U.S. ambassador had agreed to reopen the U.S. consulate in the border city of Nuevo Laredo after it was closed because of a wave of killings and violence.
"There's an agreement in principle so that in the next few days operations at the consulate can continue in a normal manner," Interior Secretary Carlos Abascal said after a closed-door meeting with U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza. Garza didn't make any public comments after the meeting.
The consulate, located across from Laredo, Texas, suspended all but emergency operations on Monday and was expected to remain closed for one week.
Garza cited "continued violence along the border" and an "alarming incident" recently in which a group of men arriving in several vehicles fired machine guns, grenades and a rocket launcher at a home neighbors say was a safe house for drug smugglers.
Surprised and angered by the move, Mexico called the ambassador's decision extreme.
Abascal said Wednesday's meeting was useful and positive. Gerónimo Gutiérrez, the nation's assistant foreign secretary for North America, also attended.
"We've exchanged impressions about the particular conditions of security in Nuevo Laredo and its repercussions for the consulate," Abascal said.
President Vicente Fox's spokesman, Rubén Aguilar, insisted earlier Wednesday that the consulate never should have been closed in the first place.
"Not only do the conditions exist to reopen the (consulate), but the conditions for closing it never existed," Aguilar said at his daily briefing with reporters.
More than 100 people have been killed in Nuevo Laredo since January, including 15 police officers. Authorities say two powerful drug gangs are battling for control of key smuggling routes into U.S. territory.
"This increase in violence has to do first with a dispute for power between organized criminals, and second with the concentrated efforts of the state to confront organized crime and obligate it to react," Aguilar said Wednesday.
In early June, Nuevo Laredo's police chief was gunned down hours after taking office, and a few days late police opened fire on a group of federal agents sent in to restore order, forcing Fox's government to launch a purge of local officers.
That purge was to be completed Wednesday, with all of the city's 460 police officers returning to patrols and carrying reconditioned guns. The original force had about 770 officers, but many were dismissed after failing to show up for drug tests, authorities say. |
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