The creeping march of narco violence in Mexico

The war between Mexico's cartels and law enforcement agencies reached a chilling new height this week. Assassins ambushed the acting chief of Mexico's federal police, Edgar Millan Gomez, as he walked into his apartment in Col. Guerrero in Mexico City early Thursday morning. The papers are saying the Millan Gomez murder is the work of the Sinaloa cartel. Put in perspective, this means violent criminal organizations are engaged in low-grade, pinpointed warfare against the whole Mexican law and order infrastructure -- and they're winning.

Thursday's high-profile assassination throws the country's entire anti-narco effort into a state of uncertainty, while narcotics continue to flow north and the killings go on incessantly. So far 1,000 people have died in the narco war this year alone. It just doesn't stop. It was another bloody week in the Mexican north, with a sex crimes investigator killed brutally in her driveway in Juarez on Monday. And just this morning, gunmen shot and killed a high-ranking federal anti-kidnapping agent, also here in Mexico City.

Read more at "Sex crimes investigator assassinated in Juarez."

* Photo above, federal officers salute recently fallen police, by AP via the L.A. Times.

Comments

[Gustavo Arellano]

Are they winning? The way the media spins it up here, such killings are the last gasps of the defeated narcos. Then again, that stance is exactly how Bush spins Iraq and Afghanistan...

[Daniel H.]

Imagine gunmen waiting at Chief Bratton's door in L.A. and taking him out. Now imagine the same thing happening to FBI Director Robert Mueller, which is more equivalent to the murder of Millan Gomez. El Universal just said in an editorial that the nation "is at war," and the stakes are the fundamental principles of justice that supposedly govern Mexican society.

Yes the cartels are in disarray, but that's why they're so brazen and lethal. And last I checked the flow of drugs to feed demands in the eager U.S. market has not been severely impacted (notwithstanding a few major stings here and there).

So, all in all, it sounds like a lopsided tally sheet to me.