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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | November 2006 
Northern Mexico Police Chief, Councilman Killed
 Associated Press
A police chief and a councilman were shot and killed Thursday in a Mexican border state where drug-fueled violence has increased and a string of law enforcement officers have been killed.
Police chief Baltazar Gomez and Osvaldo Rodriguez, both of the Monterrey suburb of Santa Catarina, were killed just after midnight by a gunman who followed them inside a convenience store where they had gone after attending a funeral, police said. A Santa Catarina city councilwoman accompanying the men was wounded.
Gomez, who had been police chief for three weeks, was the sixth law enforcement official killed this year in Nuevo Leon state, across the border from Texas.
Gomez's colleagues told the newspaper El Norte that he had received death threats from drug traffickers, but investigators hadn't yet determined a motive for the killings.
The border has seen a wave of violence attributed to a battle between the Sinaloa and Gulf drug cartels for billion-dollar smuggling routes into the United States. The struggle has spawned beheadings, grenade attacks and execution-style killings of rival gangsters and police officers.
Last week, Humberto Chavez, a police commander in the suburb of San Nicolas, was shot and killed outside his house.
Two Nuevo Leon police chiefs were shot and killed within hours of each other in February.
In June 2005, Alejandro Dominguez died in a hail of gunfire just eight hours after taking over as police chief of Nuevo Laredo, in the neighboring state of Tamaulipas.
The violence swelled following the 2003 arrest of Osiel Cardenas, alleged boss of the Gulf cartel, which long controlled crime in the region. Investigators say the arrest encouraged Sinaloa mobster Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman to try to fight his way into the area.
The bloodshed has continued unabated despite President Vicente Fox's call for the "mother of all battles" against drug traffickers, and the mobilization of thousands of soldiers and federal police.
Grenade Attack Kills Policeman in Acapulco
Associated Press
Unidentified assailants tossed a grenade at a police station in Mexico's resort city of Acapulco before dawn Thursday, killing a radio operator, investigators said.
The grenade exploded at the doorstep of the police station and metal fragments penetrated a door, killing officer Arquimidez Nava Vargas, said Jorge Reyes, an official with the local prosecutor's office.
In a separate incident about an hour later, witnesses told authorities that gunmen opened fire on policemen and civilians as they tried to tow a truck from a main boulevard leading into the city, killing the truck's driver and wounding two city policemen.
No information on a possible motive in that attacks was immediately available.
Acapulco has been riven in recent years by bloody turf battles between drug gangs.
There have been frequent grenade attacks against police stations in Acapulco, but they have seldom resulted in deaths. |
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