Shootings Renew Focus on Violent Crime in Mexico

Three high-profile shootings in the Mexican capital in three months, with targets ranging from a famed TV host to the nation’s anti-drug czar, have stoked fresh fear and anger over increasingly brazen violence by criminal gangs.

City prosecutors said Thursday that they had arrested a suspect in the June 7 gangland-style slaying of talk-show personality Francisco “Paco” Stanley. But authorities declined to comment on a report Thursday in the respected daily Reforma newspaper that the suspect, Erasmo Perez Garnica, had been hired to carry out the Stanley hit on behalf of the Amezcua drug cartel because Stanley had refused to pay for drugs.

The slaying was the first in a series of recent bloody daylight shootings.

Violent crime flared again June 29, when gunmen opened fire on a car carrying four officers of the presidential guard who had just withdrawn $50,000 from a bank. The attackers killed two guard officials and stole the money within a few hundred yards of the presidential residence. Two alleged gang members have been arrested in that case.

The latest attack came Sunday afternoon, when gunfire engulfed the motorcade of Mariano Herran Salvatti, the nation’s special prosecutor for drug crimes. Whether it was an assassination attempt or an ordinary hijacking gone wrong, the incident focused renewed attention on rampant violence in Mexico.

Herran was driving from a restaurant with his wife, escorted by armed bodyguards on motorcycles and in an accompanying car, when four men on two motorbikes caught up with them. In the ensuing shootout, more than 40 shots were fired, and an assailant was badly wounded. Neither Herran nor his wife was hurt, and none of the bullets hit their car.

If drug gangs were indeed targeting Herran and Stanley, it would mark a major escalation in narcotics violence. So far the cartels have avoided such open confrontation with the state at high levels, limiting themselves to internecine executions between drug gangs and slayings of local police and prosecutors.

Herran said on the day of the attack that he had no doubt “organized crime” had shot at him “because the authorities have the drug traffickers in check, and this is a response from them.”

The wounded attacker, still in serious condition, has been identified as a 20-year-old local gang member who had been arrested recently for stealing Rolex watches. By midweek, some major newspapers speculated that the assailants had wanted to steal either Herran’s vehicle or a motorcycle, not attack him. The suspect’s condition was too fragile to allow him to be questioned, and his accomplices remained at large.

Police can claim some recent successes in the war on drugs. Herran was able to announce a major arrest the day he was attacked.

Police caught a former senior police official from Quintana Roo state who had been on the run since being accused of helping the Juarez cartel establish itself in Cancun. The former official, Oscar Benjamin Garcia Davila, is linked to former state Gov. Mario Villanueva, himself a fugitive.

Professor Jorge Chabat, a political scientist at the Center for Research and Economic Teaching, said of the Herran incident: “The fact that the case involved a really high-level official is what is new.”

Chabat noted that criminal-related violence, especially involving drug traffickers, has risen steadily in northern states such as Sinaloa. With violence more frequent and visible, a general sense of insecurity in the streets has grown, aggravated by “the deterioration of police and judicial systems in Mexico since the 1980s.”

Efforts by Herran and other anti-drug officials also appear to be putting more pressure on the cartels, Chabat added, “which creates an interesting paradox: The more successfully Mexico combats the narcos, the more violence there will be. It is probable the struggle will grow harsher.”

Jesus Blancornelas, a Tijuana-based editor who barely survived an assassination attempt by drug traffickers in 1997, said he would be surprised if the cartels tried to kill Herran--and thus incur the wrath of the state.

“The one doubt that persists in this strange assault is to know if these aggressors really belonged to a mafia or if this simply was just one more assault, like so many that occur in Mexico City,” Blancornelas wrote in a column. “If the latter, we wouldn’t be talking of organized crime but of disorganized crime.”