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Caribbean-Latin America |
Chihuahua ambush was reaction to police strategy |
2014-02-18 |
![]() By Chris Covert Rantburg.com Last week's ambush and the deaths of three Chihuahua state police agents were a reaction by criminal groups to new measures taken by Chihuahua state's Fiscalia General del Estado (FGE), or attorney general according to Mexican news reports. A published report which appeared in the online edition of La Polaka news daily quoted an anonymous source within the FGE office, saying that Chihuahua state FGE Jorge Gonzalez Nicolas had been tasked with "dismantling the connections" between local criminal groups on the western sierras of Chihuahua state and the ministerial police agents who had been posted there by the previous Fiscalia, Carlos Manuel Salas. According to the report, as a solution Gonzalez Nicolas began to rotate state security officials among several offices in Chihuahua state municipalities, including the southern municipalities of Cuauhtemoc and Creel. The report goes on to note that the latest state police counternarcotics operation, which took the lives of six people in Bocoyna municipality, was part of a change in tactics in which police agents aggressively entered into areas known to be ruled by local criminal gangs, as happened in Bocoyna. A previous report posted on the online edition of La Parada Digital news daily said FGE Gonzalez Nicolas told a Chihuahua state Chamber of Deputies budgeting committee last December, the Junta de Coordinacion Parlamentaria, that his plans for the year 2014 included building a new regional police headquarters, presumably in southern Chihuahua, as well an intensifying police operations in the Mexican sierras with newly expanded Policia Preventativa elements. Gonzalez Nicolas was a regional attorney general for the northern district of Chihuahua state before he was appointed to his new post last October. In 2011 Gonzalez Nicolas had undergone withering criticism from grieving relatives of the Reyes Salazar family which lost several of its members to separate violent incidents including a triple murder in February of 2011. The claim at the time was that the three family members killed in 2011, Elias Reyes Salazar, Malena Reyes Salazar and Luis Ornelas Soto, were kidnapped by a "paramilitary group", which is a buzzword for unofficial state sanctioned killing. Since that time little evidence has surfaced that the 2011 deaths had a nexus with Gonzalez Nicolas or the Chihuahua state attorney general's office. Meanwhile in southern Chihuahua state, three individuals were killed or were found dead in ongoing drug and gang related violence.
Police have been conducting counternarcotics operations in municipalities of southern Chihuahua.
Chris Covert writes Mexican Drug War and national political news for Rantburg.com and BorderlandBeat.com He can be reached at grurkka@gmail.com |
Posted by:badanov |