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 Editorials | Issues | November 2006 
Toll Mounts in Mexico's Drug War
 Hector Tobar & Cecilia Sanchez - LATimes
| | Police officers patrolled the beaches of Acapulco, which has the fifth-highest crime rate in Mexico and is in the throes of a drug-cartel turf war. Last year, there were 51 drug-related homicides in the resort city. (Luis J. Jimenez/Copley News Service) |
The death toll in Mexico's drug war has surpassed 2,000 this year, with a newspaper editor found dead in the resort city of Zihuatanejo and a police commander assassinated in Tijuana apparently among the latest victims, according to news reports.
Another police commander was killed Monday in the northern city of Monterrey, and four people were reported killed in the southern state of Guerrero.
No government agency keeps a running tally of the drug-related killings, but according to human rights organizations and newspapers an average of six people are killed in the country's drug wars every day.
The newspaper El Universal said Saturday that its tally of drug-related killings for the year had reached 2,012. Last year, more than 1,500 people were killed in violence related to a lucrative trade in illicit drugs, including cocaine and methamphetamines.
The death Friday of Misael Tamayo Hernández, the editor of the daily newspaper El Despertar de la Costa, appeared to be the sixth killing of a Mexican journalist this year, according to the group Reporters Without Borders.
But in a country where drug killings are often public events - a hail of bullets on a busy street, a decapitated head deposited on the steps of a government building - Hernández's death was different.
Hernández died before dawn in a Zihuatanejo hotel room, officials said. His sister Ruth Tamayo, who identified his body at the Zihuatanejo morgue, said he was neither shot, nor strangled with a towel, or tied up and executed, as reported by various local media.
The editor was found with three puncture wounds on his shoulder, Tamayo said. According to local officials, the coroner established the cause of death as "heart attack" but could not rule out foul play until a toxicology report was complete.
Days before he was found dead, the editor had written a column denouncing local corruption. The southern state of Guerrero, which includes Zihuatanejo and Acapulco, has been ravaged by a battle between competing drug cartels and the police. Hernández's newspaper reported extensively on the violence.
Three days before Hernández's death, Mexican President-elect Felipe Calderón visited Zihuatanejo to deliver a speech to a foreign trade conference. He dedicated a part of his speech to addressing fears that the wave of drug-related violence sweeping his country might chase away foreign investment.
Calderón, set to take the oath of office Dec. 1, promised his government would not waver in its battle against drug violence.
"It's going to take work, time and money" to win the battle, Calderón said. "And it will probably cost us human lives as well. . . . But there is no other alternative."
In April, hit men deposited two severed heads outside a Guerrero state government building in Acapulco. "So that you learn to respect," read a message scrawled on a red sheet left nearby. In October, two severed heads were discovered on Acapulco's beach.
In Tijuana on Thursday, more than 10 heavily armed men ambushed a police vehicle on a busy thoroughfare near downtown, killing one police officer in a shootout that left a flower vendor and a taxi driver injured.
A police commander, Héctor Gaxiola Gamez, narrowly escaped the attack. But the next morning, gunmen again caught up to the commander, and this time they did not miss. Gaxiola's body - handcuffed to that of his brother - was found in an empty lot, his body disfigured by more than 100 gunshot wounds.
Gaxiola Gamez was the 19th law enforcement officer to be killed this year in Tijuana. Many were killed after the August capture of alleged drug lord Francisco Javier Arellano Félix, which many experts believe has triggered a battle for control of the lucrative narcotics trade in the city.
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer Richard Marosi contributed to this report. |
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