Mexican Security Minister, Police Chief Among 9 Killed in Copter Crash

Mexico’s top federal law enforcement officer, a longtime ally of President Vicente Fox who led the war against a rising tide of national violence, was killed Wednesday along with eight others in a helicopter crash.

Ramon Martin Huerta, secretary of public security, was traveling to a ceremony for new prison guards at Mexico’s maximum-security La Palma prison when the Bell 412 helicopter crashed into a mountain about 30 miles west of the capital, authorities said.

“I profoundly regret the terrible accident,” Fox said in a nationally televised address Wednesday night. “I have lost an associate, but above all, a dear friend.”

Bad weather reduced visibility, causing the pilot to crash into the rocky hillside, said government officials in a preliminary assessment. The helicopter did not carry cockpit voice or flight data recorders, officials said.

Rescue worker Juan Carlos Cruz Martinez said fog appears suddenly in the mountains of San Miguel Miniapan, where the helicopter crashed sometime before noon. It took several hours to find the wreckage in the wooded area.

“It was destroyed completely, completely,” he said. “When we got there, around 6:30 p.m., there was still white smoke coming out from the aircraft.... The guys from the defense department wouldn’t let us get close. They told us they were investigating.”

Huerta, who ran Fox’s campaign for governor of Guanajuato and then took the seat himself as interim governor when Fox won the presidency in 2000, was a close friend of the president.

Fox appointed Huerta to his Cabinet post in August 2004, just weeks after an estimated 250,000 Mexico City residents marched to demand an end to the kidnappings, killings and robberies that have beset the country.

In the year since, Huerta, 48, faced even bigger troubles: an apparent war among cartels for control of Mexico’s marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine trade.

More than 1,000 people, including scores of police officers, have been shot, burned and tortured to death in killings attributed to the drug war. Some of the more brazen attacks include the assassination of Michoacan’s head of public safety last week and the slaying in June of a police chief in Nuevo Laredo just hours after he was sworn in.

Drug killings in Nuevo Laredo and other cities along the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as the use of hand grenades and rocket launchers by drug cartels, prompted Fox to put Huerta in charge of a crime prevention program called “Safe Mexico.”

As the head of federal police, Huerta sent teams of officers to several states beset by drug violence, but the killings continue. Most are attributed to a battle between fugitive Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, alleged leader of the Sinaloa cartel, and Osiel Cardenas, imprisoned head of the so-called Gulf cartel.

Also killed in the crash Wednesday were federal Police Chief Gen. Tomas Valencia; public security staff members Francisco Javier Becerra Gomez, Jose Antonio Martinez Ramirez, Silvino Chavez Hernandez and Jorge Alberto Estrella Romero; Jose Antonio Bernal of the National Human Rights Commission; and pilots Habacuc de Leon Galicia and Rafael Esquivel Arreguin.

Times researchers Cecilia Sanchez and Carlos Martinez contributed to this report.