Abstract
This chapter examines in detail the assassination of municipal police chiefs and top-level commanders in the state of Chihuahua (2006–2012). These murders are the result of the interaction between impunity in the political, legal and law enforcement systems and the goals and weapons of the criminal organizations. Such goals include: (1) retaliation for federal, state and local prosecution, (2) the attempt to neutralize police chiefs, (3) the effort to achieve intermittent local governance and/or to place corrupt police chiefs, and, (4) to reduce local governmental capacity in order to obtain greater freedom for movement of goods. A geographical mapping of the assassinations of local police chiefs and top-commanders in Chihuahua also reveals that they are not random but follow a northbound pattern along drug-smuggling routes. In some instances organized crime elements did take total temporary political control in some small towns near the U.S.-Mexican border and near the cross-roads of major drug-smuggling highways. These instances can be understood as limited “governance” through organized crime (Sheptycki, 2003; Sullivan and Elkus 2008).
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Notes
- 1.
These four goals are presented as “ideal types” and should be understood as such. In the empirical exposition that follows, there is some overlap between ideal types, i.e. the attempt to achieve intermittent local governance may also involve the attempt to place police chiefs favorable to organized crime elements. However, the attempt to achieve intermittent local governance does not always include the assassination of the police chief or top-level commanders and therefore it is kept as a separate category in the analysis.
- 2.
In Balleza, there were a series of assassination attempts on the police chiefs and top-commanders. The first (March 22, 2010) was unsuccessful because top-police commander Leoncio Loya Chavira who was ambushed in his vehicle along with the ex-mayor, Miguel Ángel Sandoval Prieto (2001–2004), survived the wounds from the armed attack on his vehicle. The attack came 1 h before the Army conducted an anti-organized crime operation on the nearby highway (XEPL 2010). The second set of assassination attempts happened to police chief Armando Sánchez [El Gato] in 2011. Sánchez would later flee the municipality with two municipal police officers after the State Attorney General’s Office issued a warrant for his arrest (for collusion with organized crime) in early 2012 (Al Contacto 2012) and was detained a year later (Nota Roja 2013). The subsequent police chief Federico Villas Brito resigned just after coming under investigation by the Federal PGR and the State Attorney General’s Office because of an anonymous tip linking the chief to armed groups and executions in the municipality (Nota Roja 2013). The assassination attempts on police chief Sánchez were preceded by a series of assassinations of the ex-mayor (2004–2007) who was assassinated along with the wife of another mayor at a funeral for an assassinated man (La Policiaca 2011b). The ex-mayor’s own husband, a PRI candidate for mayor, had been attacked and killed in 2004 and she then substituted for him and won the mayorship by a majority vote. Later, in Balleza in January 2010, the son of the new mayor was killed by gunmen. At that funeral, the nephew of the municipal police commander was also executed. In sum, in Balleza, the series of assassination attempts on the top-level commanders and police chiefs were accompanied by a string of killings of other local officials and their family members.
- 3.
The Chihuahua municipalities documented in the official SNSP-PGR (2011) data were Ascensión, Camargo, Cuauhtémoc, Guadalupe y Calvo, Guazapares, Hidalgo, Jiménez, Madera, Ojinaga) (n = 2,132 assassinations, 2006–2010).
- 4.
According to Excelsior’s study (2011b), the police chiefs killed in these states and municipalities include: Aguascalientes (n = 7), Baja California Norte (n = 1), Baja California Sur (n = 1), Campeche (n = 1), Coahuila (n = 1), Colima (n = 1), Durango (n = 8), Guanajuato (n = 6), Hidalgo (n = 3), Jalisco (n = 2), Michoacán (n = 3), Morelos (n = 2), Mexico State (n = 4), Puebla (n = 3), San Luiz Potosí (n = 1), Sinaloa (n = 4), Tabasco (n = 4), Quintana Roo (n = 1) and Veracruz (n = 14).
- 5.
If the municipality is not included in Table 2.1, the author did not find documented the assassination(s) of the police chief(s) or top-level police commanders.
- 6.
According to the Executive National Secretary of the National Public Security System, multiple Northern Tier municipalities simply lacked the local institutional capacity to implement the plan. In fact, many mayors “had gone to their respective governors and said: I have no financial, political or security capacity to have a police force, Governor, please take charge and give us police services” (Zacatecas Hoy 2011).
- 7.
Stratfor analysts contended that (then) confinement of the war to the north’s sparsely populated desert regions did not threaten the survival of the Mexican regime (in the southern heartland). This and the fact that the industry’s $35–$40 billion revenue in sales (largely to US consumers) was simply too beneficial to the Mexican economy led Calderón to sacrifice the Northern Tier to organized crime-related violence, according to analysts (Friedman 2010).
- 8.
According to the Mexican Military (Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional—SEDENA) and the US Department of Justice (2010), the Mexican military was temporarily deployed in drug interdictions and arrests of drug-traffickers in the following 8 municipalities in Chihuahua outside of Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua City (March 2008–August 2011): Ascensión; Villa Ahumada, Nuevo Casas Grandes, Guadalupe y Calvo, Batopilas, Janos, Parral, Delicias. According to Milenio (2012), there were 149 military operations in the state of Chihuahua between 2008 and 2010 (159 in Guerrero, 93 in Nuevo León, 92 in Coahuila, 72 in Sinaloa, 60 in Michoacán, 57 in Tamaulipas, 37 in Durango, 25 in Sonora, and 18 in Veracruz).
- 9.
In small towns in Northern Sonora, a virtual state of siege between rival cartels (Sinaloa versus Beltrán Levya) also led to the rise of de-populated “ghost towns” without police, schools, or businesses (LA Times 2010; Arizona Daily Star 2011). Cerro Prieto Sonora (pop. 500 in 2010, down from 1,750 in 2000) is located near the Altar-Sásabe highway 64 close to the U.S. border in Arizona. The last Army checkpoint is miles away, the town’s last policeman was murdered in mid-June 2011. The police station, schools and all local businesses closed then (NPR 2011). Just north up highway 64 in the small town of Saric, Sonora two mayors, a police chief and 10 police officers had all fled, leaving the town without police. No mail carriers, produce or soda distributors or even ambulances entered the town which was patrolled at night, according to residents, by 20–30 organized crime elements in 20–30 vehicles. With respect to cartel economic activities in the Sonoran village of Gila, cartel toll-takers monitor highway 64 toward the border and make sure each immigrant-loaded van has paid the $100 passage fee (LA Times 2010: 2).
- 10.
In Namiquipa, Guerrero, Galeana and Guadalupe y Calvo, retaliation for federal prosecution was a central motive in a series of law-enforcement assassinations. Namiquipa, a remote village, became a disputed drug trafficking route between the Sinaloa and Júarez cartels (Ríos 2011b: 21). In Namiquipa, the kidnapped police chief had been missing since 2008, the year the town treasurer was assassinated (7/25/08) (Reuters 2009). The mayor was assassinated on his way to work the following year (7/15/09) (Ríos 2011b: 21) in what Shirk in (Justice in Mexico July 2009: 3) writes was clear retaliation for federal (the Army’s) prosecution of organized crime elements.
“In a …targeting of a public official, gunmen assassinated Hector Meixueiro, the mayor of a ranching town in Chihuahua in clear retaliation for last month’s [Army] arrest of 25 men suspected of belonging to a cell responsible for carrying out kidnappings, extortion, and killings in the area. Meixueiro was shot dead as he drove to work on the morning of July 14 in his home town of Namiquipa. The killing corresponded with “narco-banners” hung in nearby Ciudad Juárez calling out Meixueiro and the state attorney general for the arrest of 25 cartel members in June. Last year, gunmen killed the Namiquipa treasurer and kidnapped its police chief, who is still missing. Also killed in retaliation for the arrests was local Mormon leader and anti-crime activist Benjamin Le Barón, who was kidnapped from his home in a rural Chihuahua community [Galeana] along with his brother-in-law….According to military authorities, the killings were perpetrated by a cell of either the Juárez or Sinaloa cartel responsible for carrying out kidnappings, extortions, and killings in the surrounding areas” (Justice in Mexico July 2009: 3).
In Galeana, the Army detained a Júarez cartel lieutenant and leader of a group of hit-men who operate in the Juárez valley and are housed in Guadalupe Distrito Bravo for the assassination of the high-level Federal Police intelligence agent José Alfredo Silly Peña (Marines). Silly Peña, along with 20 Federal Police elements, was in charge of the investigation of the kidnapping, extortion and murder of murder of Galeana anti-crime activist Le Baron. Silly Peña was ambushed while leaving a hotel along with 2 other Federal police agents who are still disappeared (Noticias PV 2009). In November 2008, Galeana’s police chief was assassinated just after receiving threatening calls from alleged organized crime elements that “the mayor was next” (El Paso Times 2011). The mayor subsequently fled to the US and went into hiding for 6 months.
In Guerrero, the police chief was assassinated on a town street just after finishing a course on Public Safety when intercepted by an armed vehicle whose occupants shot at the chief multiple times (Xepl 2008 and Xepl 2009a). In the municipality of Julimes, police commander Villicaya Checo was kidnapped just outside the courtroom by an armed commando, tortured and left in a ditch by the side of a local highway (La Policiaca 2012c). He had just given legal testimony regarding municipal support for a recent police operation (Código Delícias 2012a).
- 11.
García Quiñones was part of the first wave of female officers in Chihuahua along with Guadalupe Distrito Bravos police chief Erika Gándara (disappeared 12/28/10), Praxedis G. Guerrero police chief Marisol Valles García (fled to US after death threats, 3/1/11), Veronica Ríos Ontiveros (El Vegel, Balleza municipality) and Olga Herrera Castillo (Villa Luz, Balleza municipality). As of 2012, there were no reports of the assassination of either Veronica Ríos Ontiveros or Olga Herrera Castillo.
- 12.
In Aldama, the police chief’s son was attacked and pulled out of his vehicle on the highway by an armed commando, then tortured, executed with his hands bound and dumped. The assassins left his wallet, cell phone and personal papers in his patrol vehicle untouched (La Policiaca 2010a). In Batopilas and Gomez-Farías, police chiefs were ambushed on highways (Al Contacto 2011; Xepl 2009b).
- 13.
Armed cartel men also stormed the town, closed the streets, burned and/or looted eight houses including the doctor’s and beat up a teacher in the village of Jicamorchi (pop. 374 [2010]), in the hills in Uruachi municipality. This action caused 110 families to flee to nearby mountains and the town was left, temporarily, in the hands of cartel men (Código Delicias 2011a, b). By September 2011, the remaining town’s people had begun to arm themselves to confront cartel assassins that returned to surround the community. The PAN mayor Aldo Alejandro Campos said that the council only had 10 policemen but there were more than 60 armed men who fired at the police and then took refuge in forest outside of town (La Jornada 2011d). He also noted that the presence of soldiers and police investigators had not put the situation under control (Fox News Latino 2011) and stated: “These criminal groups have besieged us. If federal and state governments do not respond, people are willing to take some action on their own, because here there are left-over weapons. I do not want to do what is illegal, but if we have no other choice, we will”. A month later, the medical clinic and the schools remained closed and many families still refused to return. Some Jicamorachi residents also filed a complaint for property damage with legal authorities in Cuauhtémoc but omitted their names out of fear (Código Delicias 2011a). La Jornada (2011d) reported evidence of the emergence of rival DTOs (Júarez versus Sinaloa) in the town.
- 14.
The Chihuahua State Attorney General’s Office reported the incidence of significant organized crime related drug-trafficking and homicides along the Rosales-Satévo spur which feeds into Highway 24 (Valle de Zaragoza to Chihuahua) near Satévo (El Diario Digital 2012). In Valle de Zaragoza, police chief Carlos Rodolfo Güereque Hernández was the second of three consecutive chiefs in 2012 and the only one assassinated. The first chief, Carlos Miguel Vega Cazares, was tried and convicted for 8 years and 6 months for the abuse of authority and homicide of a civilian (El Monitor de Parral 2013). After the assassination of Güereque Hernández, the next Valle de Zaragoza police chief—Jorge Arturo Morales (took office 5/25/12)—fell under investigation by the PGR and State Attorney General’s Office. This is because the police chief accepted as a police officer an individual who had been detained and investigated for rape, marijuana trafficking and illegal border crossing on three different occasions by U.S. Marshalls (Nota Roja 2013).
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Appendix
Appendix
The Office of the Mexican Presidency released new drug-related homicide data in 2010 on all of Mexico’s municipalities (SNSP-PGR data base 2011). These official statistics on organized-crime related homicides from December 2006 to December 2010 were compiled by the PGR for the National Public Security System (SNSP) under Mexican President Felipe Calderón. The data is sub-categorized into four categories (total “drug-related homicides”, “aggressive homicides”, “confrontational homicides” and “executions”). Ríos and Shirk (2011: 6) contend that the SNSP methodology closely correlates with INEGI [Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía] and the newspaper Reforma’s drug-related homicide data bases. The SNSP-PGR executions data (2011) does not detail whether the victim of an execution was a state official, a drug-cartel member or a by-stander.
An examination of the execution rate in urban versus rural municipalities in Chihuahua shows that urban areas are, in fact, not significantly more violent than rural areas. The data in Table 2.2 “Executions in Chihuahua, By Municipality (2006–2010)” show that 46 % of Chihuahua’s municipalities (pop. less than 50,000) had execution rates worse than more urban Chihuahua City (41.22 per 100,000, pop. 819,543). Even more to the point, 14.5 % of Chihuahua’s municipalities (pop. less than 50,000) register execution rates worse than metropolitan Ciudad Juárez (116 per 100,000, pop. 1,332,131). Yet, Ciudad Juárez was the city frequently named by the press as the most violent city in the world (El Paso Times 2010a; BBC 2009a). In many of the smaller Chihuahua’s municipalities (pop. less than 4,000), the execution rates in the 2006–2010 period far exceed the United Nation’s definition of an epidemic rate of homicides (10 per 100,000), e.g. (Maguarichi, 800 per 100,000; Gran Morelos, 116 per 100,000 Satevó, 100 per 100,000; Santa Isabel and La Cruz, 80 per 100,000, Dr. Belisario Domínguez, 54 per 100,000; Coronado 44 per 100,000).
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Schatz, S. (2014). Rub Outs in the Territory: Killing Police Chiefs and Top-Level Commanders in Chihuahua. In: Impact of Organized Crime on Murder of Law Enforcement Personnel at the U.S.-Mexican Border. SpringerBriefs in Sociology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9249-3_2
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