Violent week in Mexico drug wars

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It’s been another bloody, tragic week in Mexico’s drug wars. The head of the local police in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, Artemio Mejia Chavez, was killed on Wednesday by 12 men dressed in black uniforms with the logo of Mexico’s FBI. On Thursday, a naval commander in the Pacific port of Zihuatanejo was ambushed--he survived unharmed, but his bodyguard was killed.

Proceso, the respected and left-leaning investigative magazine of Mexico City, dedicates its cover story this week to an analysis of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s decision to send the army into several states to fight the drug lords. The cover has the provocative headline: “Narco: Calderon’s Iraq.”

The piece has a detailed description of the May 2 incident in the southernstate of Michoacan in which five Army soldiers were ambused and killed by gunman working for a local drug lord, Flavio Rodriguez Espino in the town of Caracuaro. Afterwards, the police chief of Caracuaro was arrested because his officers simply stood by and watched while the soldiers were ambushed.

The newspaper Cambio of Michoacan reports that Rodriguez Espino was arrested by police in December but apparently let go.

Various analysts in the Proceso piece assert that the drug traffickers have lost their fear of the army, and that the army doesn’t have the resources to fight all the fronts in the drug war: Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo on the U.S. border, Acapulco and other towns on the Pacific Coast, and now Veracruz and other cities onthe Gulf of Mexico.

Mexico’s army is already severely stressed. The Secretary of Defense recently reported that 35 soldiers desert Mexico’s armed forces every day.

Posted by Hector Tobar in Mexico City.