Former Prosecutor in Mexico Gunned Down

A former Mexican federal prosecutor was taken from his wife’s side and shot in the street in a wealthy residential district of Tijuana by uniformed men who identified themselves as federal agents, authorities said Thursday.

The mob-style slaying of Martin Ramirez Alvarez, a lawyer who worked as a federal prosecutor in central Mexico in 1993, was the latest in a barrage of killings that have claimed the lives of seven senior law enforcement officers from Baja California this year.

Much of the violence is believed to be linked to the Tijuana drug cartel, and some of the victims are suspected of having been corrupt allies of the traffickers. Few of the slayings have been solved.

A top state human rights leader called on authorities to provide a full public accounting of the circumstances leading to the murder of Ramirez.

“Authorities must investigate whether [Ramirez] had anything to do with organized crime, for the health of the institution as well as its public image,” said Antonio Garcia Sanchez, the human rights ombudsman of Baja California. “This was not a coincidence. It had something to do with his job.”

The gunmen stopped Ramirez, 30, as he drove down Calle Paricutin on Wednesday morning with his wife, Celia Moreno, 29, saying they were federal agents and needed to speak with him at their offices, according to the judicial police statement. Officials said the men had handcuffs and police radios.

They drove Ramirez a short distance and shot him point-blank in the street, speeding away in a white Dodge Ram panel truck that was later found abandoned nearby, the statement said.

Municipal police arrived to find Moreno kneeling over Ramirez’s body in tears, a handful of spent .38-caliber cartridges scattered in the street, according to Rosalio Gomez, a Tijuana municipal police spokesman.

The killing occurred behind the Agua Caliente racetrack in Lomas Hipodromo, an upscale Tijuana hillside district that has been the scene of drug-related violence in recent years.

Men in federal police uniforms have been blamed for a string of crimes in Tijuana since the nationwide dismissal of more than 700 allegedly corrupt federal police--including half of the 120-strong Baja force--in August.

Baja state Atty. Gen. Jose Luis Anaya Bautista said the killers might have been criminals using police uniforms or dismissed police who turned to crime. He offered no motive for the slaying, though he repeated his contention that 40% of all Baja killings are drug-related, and said state authorities were investigating.

Anaya Bautista called for the implementation of an interagency system to monitor dismissed federal police agents, saying his office was already keeping a close watch on two suspicious groups of former Baja agents.

Hector Villareal, a spokesman for the Mexico City attorney general’s office, said Ramirez had served as a federal prosecutor in 1993 in the central Mexican cities of Puebla and San Luis Potosi. He resigned the same year, though Villareal said he was unsure why.

“We’re not going to investigate this case,” Villareal said. “The crime had nothing to do with his federal activities.”

Human rights leader Garcia Sanchez said he found it suspicious that Ramirez left his post after less than a year.

“This chain of killings has created tremendous concern,” Garcia Sanchez said. “Authorities must clarify cases in which one of their officials, former or current, dies in suspicious circumstances, to quell the public doubts that this produces.”