In Mexico's Drug War, She is One Town's Lone Ranger
 Jesus Alcazar – Agence France-Presse
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November 23, 2010
| | Erika Gandara is seen next to an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle at the police station in Guadalupe, Chihuahua state, Mexico on November 18. Gandara is the only police officer in the town of 9,000 inhabitans bordering Texas, USA and 40 Kms away from Ciudad Juarez, where the drug cartels hold a fierce battle. (AFP/Jesus Alcazar) | |
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico – In the bloodstained chaos that is Mexico's drug war raging on the doorstep of the United States, Erika Gandara, 28, is standing tall, and alone. As her town's only police officer "I am the law," she says.
Gandara's town of Guadalupe, population 9,000, is near Ciudad Juarez, Ground Zero in Mexico's endless bloodletting between rival drug cartels battling for control of distribution routes to the lucrative US markets. Juarez sits across the border from the US city of El Paso, Texas.
And the toll the sustained violence has taken even on little Guadalupe is big: all of her fellow cops either have fled or been killed.
"Yes, I am a police officer," the fresh-faced Gandara, who might be mistaken for a high (secondary) school student in her purple hoodie if she were not packing an R-15 rifle, told AFP in an interview in her sparsely furnished office.
"I am this town's only cop. I am the law," she said.
And she meant it.
It has been months that Gandara has been going it alone on her quixotic drive to keep her town safe.
Some have compared her to another woman in the region who ended up her town's police chief by default. But Gandara is having none of it.
It was a month ago, not far from here in a town called Praxedis Guadalupe Guerrero, that university student and young mother, Marisol Valles, 20, was named that town's police chief in a twist that made international headlines.
But Valles also said given her inability to confront organized crime, she would try to focus on social work.
"I am not here for humanitarian stuff, I am not here to do social work," underscored Gandara, a law enforcement professional with under two years on the job, who is single and does not have children.
Gandara sees it as her job to enforce the law, now matter how tough the battle.
And this is a tough one.
Her town is 60 kilometers outside Ciudad Juarez, and the valley in which her town lies has seen more than 2,700 murders this year alone in presumed drug-related violence.
She started out as a dispatcher in her office in 2009, when there were 12 agents on the force with her.
As the drug raw violence began to spiral, she began to lose her colleagues, one after the next.
"Of my 10 coworkers, a few just resigned and the rest were all killed. Nobody wants to go into policing here, and the budget just isn't there anyway," she shrugged.
In addition to drug violence, her small town sees houses torched, shootouts, and kidnappings.
An armed commando rolled into town in October and shot up a home, killing four local people who work at a car parts plant.
Guadalupe is not unique: in thousands of Mexican towns, police forces are outgunned and underpaid, insufficiently staffed, and desperately low on hope.
Many not surprisingly end up in the pay of drug lords.
"Lots of people here believe the police are corrupt and on the take. I do not believe in that because, I think where the money is easy, death is going to get you in a hurry," Gandara says, admitting she does get frightened.
"Just like everyone else here," she said.
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