| | |  Editorials | Issues | June 2009 
A Small Town Cop, Out-Gunned by Traffickers
 William Booth & Travis Fox - Washington Post
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Ascension, Mexico - The violence got so scary that hundreds of citizens occupied the town hall in May to demand that the Mexican army come protect them. Soldiers now rumble through a couple of times a week. Then they leave.
Jaime Antonio Chacón was on the beat here just three months when the rookie police officer stumbled upon an assassination in progress.
A couple of hitmen, known as sicarios in Mexico, were going after a local hoodlum when Chacón in his municipal police truck rolled into the middle of a gunfight last month. One of the sicarios took aim at Chacón’s forehead and squeezed off a single round.
In the video above, Chacón talks about how it feels to be a small town cop seriously out-gunned by drug-trafficking heavies with superior weapons and good aim.
There are more than 400,000 police officers in Mexico and the vast majority are municipal cops like Chacón. They are low paid, poorly trained, badly equipped. In Ascension, the police lack the working radios, bullet-proof vests and machine guns they want. Lousy morale creates ideal conditions for corruption, which is rampant in municipal forces.
Mexican cops also pay a heavy price. Since President Felipe Calderón declared war against the cartels in December 2006, more than 900 police and soldiers have been killed.
“This is dangerous work these days,” says Javier Muñoz Chavez, a veteran on the force.
“After the sun goes down,” Chacón says, “the shooting starts.”
We asked Chacón if he is afraid.
Not so much now, Chacón says, who was assigned to bicycle patrol. “Because I work during the day.”
About this Project
The border between United States and Mexico is the land where straight lines blur, and where two national cultures collide and collude. The writer Alan Weisman, author of "La Frontera", called the borderlands "the most dramatic intersection of first and third world realities anywhere on the globe." There is a lot of good on the border, and these days, plenty of bad. The border is a militarized hot zone, where tens of thousands of Mexican soldiers are fighting a vicious drug war against well-armed, rich and powerful drug traffickers, who smuggle across these desert highways 90 percent of the cocaine so voraciously consumed in the United States. On the U.S. side, the federal government is pouring taxpayer money into border, promising to stem the flow of cash and guns heading south, while the border patrol continues its ceaseless cat-and-mouse search for Mexican migrants sneaking north.
We're setting out to drive the borderlands from Ciudad Juarez, across the river from El Paso, to San Diego's sister city Tijuana. Along the way, we're going to tell the stories of overwhelmed small town sheriffs, of drug smugglers and drug czars, of the Mexicans who struggle to survive in dusty villages and the Americans who fear that the drug war is getting way too close for comfort. We're going to talk to cops and mayors, some scientists and singers, and lots of regular folks, too. We've got a map, an ice chest, a video camera, and the laptops. We've got some stories planned but we also would like to hear from you. What do you think about the drug fight along the border, and what it is doing to the people What dots on the map should we make sure to hit Please let us know in the comments section below. You can also join the conversation on Twitter by using the #mexborder hashtag.
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