Acapulco - Risks for cops on the rise on Guerrero coast

Risks for cops on the rise on Guerrero coast

Wire services
El Universal
Jueves 20 de octubre de 2005
Nuestro mundo, página 1

ACAPULCO Someone is terrorizing the police of this beach resort, and the sudden surge in violence has so far baffled authorities. In the last year, nine police officers have been killed in Acapulco, a city of 700,000. Since January alone, there have been 20 execution-style killings, among them the municipal police chief, two Mexican tourists, a prominent disco owner and an investigator for the state attorney general's office.

Thugs in cars have thrown grenades twice at a police post in a popular tourist area. Another attack occurred in midSeptember when a group of men with machine guns strafed a police station on a road leading out of town, wounding three officers. On the same day, the head of the patrol division of the state police was gunned down in the inland capital, Chilpancingo, 73 miles northeast. It remains unclear if the two events are related, the police said.

"It's getting very dangerous to be a police officer here in Acapulco," said one young city officer, who asked not to be identified out of fear for his personal safety. "There have been weeks when three officers have been killed or wounded."

Law enforcement officials say some of the attacks on the police are linked to the spreading war between drug lords over turf. One theory is that the Zetas, who are enforcers and assassins for a drug gang known as the Gulf Cartel, are punishing the police for their supposed alliance with Los Pelones, slang for "new soldiers," a gang in the employ of Mexico's No.1 public enemy, Joaquín Guzmán, also known as El Chapo, or Shorty. But other law enforcement officials say those theories have come from unreliable witnesses and suspects in some of the crimes. What seems certain is that the struggle for control of the drug trafficking that flows through the state of Guerrero and along the roads toward the northern border has heated up, and this normally tranquil tourist town is now another headache for the federal government.

Shipments of guns from China and cocaine from Colombia have been seized in Acapulco's port, and law enforcement authorities say smugglers are increasingly using the entire Pacific coastline in the state of Guerrero. In addition, the state is known for marijuana and poppy production.

Still, the tourist town on a bay has until now escaped the kind of drug-related violence that has cropped up in places like Cancun on the Caribbean coast and in border cities Nuevo Laredo, Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez and Matamoros.

INCREASING VIOLENCE

The violence in Acapulco hit a high point in June, when the chief of the state police here, Julio Carlos López Soto, was gunned down in the heart of the tourist zone after leaving a well-known steakhouse, La Mansion. Two days earlier, Soto had taken part in the seizure of an arms cache in an upscale neighborhood. The weapons seized included automatic rifles, grenades and highcaliber handguns. The gunmen also abducted Soto's bodyguard, Pedro Noel Villega Aguilar, beat him and forced him to memorize a message for the authorities: that there were already 120 members of the Zetas in town who were intent on killing allies of Guzmán.

Around the same time two men arrested in a gangland shooting in Zihuatenejo, another resort town 153 miles up the coast, identified themselves to the police as Zetas.

But Heriberto Salinas Altes, the state public security secretary, discounted these assertions, saying they could be lies intended to mislead investigators. There is also evidence, he said, that some of the police killings are linked to personal motives, not organized crime.

Still, he acknowledged that the killing of López appeared to be "some kind of vengeance" from mobsters, and that the grenade and machine gun attacks on stations seem like shots across the bow. "We suppose these are warnings, signs that they are sending us, to tell us we are affecting some of their interests," Salinas said.

Mayor Alberto López Rosas said the recent wave of violence is unprecedented in Acapulco's history, but appears to be ebbing now. He attributed it to the rapid growth of Acapulco's luxury neighborhoods, where law enforcement officials say several drug lords have vacation homes. "The boom brings in the good, but also the bad," he said.

The mayor-elect, Félix Salgado, who takes over in December, noted that the violence seemed to heat up when a new governor from the left-leaning Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD) took office last year, suggesting that there might have been clandestine deals between members of the old government, controlled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and a particular cartel. He said the attacks appeared to be orchestrated by drug dealers from other parts of the country. "This is a kind of violence that didn't exist before," he said.

In the meantime, the police officers on the street are jittery. At the police station where gunmen sprayed officers with automatic weapons fire on Sept. 26, Officer Jorge Hidalgo paced nervously back and forth with his finger on the trigger of his rifle, his jumpy eyes scanning the traffic streaming by. There were bullet holes in the police truck and pockmarks on a concrete wall of the station.

"We're more alert," he said. "We don't have anything against anybody. We don't even know who these people are."

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