Mexico News-June 28

Posted by the Generals on June 28, 2011, 3:17 pm
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Subject: Mexico News DAILY June 28, 2011 LatinNews Daily - 28 June 2011 Gangsters kill police chief Development: In the afternoon of 27 June, between 10 and 30 masked gang members, possibly brandishing federal police credentials, burst into a police station and shot dead the police chief of Santa Catarina, a suburb of Monterrey, northern Mexico. Significance: This was the first time that a municipal police chief has been gunned down in his own office. The assassination is further evidence that the country’s drug gangs can do what they want in and around Monterrey, Nuevo León. So far the state government, headed by Rodrigo Medina of the traditional Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), is shouldering the political blame for the surge in violence in the city. The mayor of Monterrey, Fernando Larrazábal, of the nationally ruling Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), argues that his police force does not have the resources of the state force. Key points: • The police chief, Germán Pérez Quiroz, was deliberately targeted. The killers asked for the police chief’s office and upon arrival they asked Pérez whether he was the police chief. Once Pérez identified himself, the gangsters mowed him down in front of his four bodyguards, who apparently did not get a shot off. No-one else was killed or threatened in the attack. • Pérez Quiroz had been arrested by the federal authorities in 2002 when he was accused of selling information to groups linked to the Sinaloa gang, led by Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada and Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán. The Sinaloa gang is battling with its rivals, Los Zetas and the Golfo gang, for control of Monterrey. • Separately, gangsters yesterday attacked a federal court in Veracruz, killing a state police officer and wounding two others. The attack on the court came 48 hours after the state police arrested Franco Bueno Peña, the alleged commander of the Zetas in Veracruz. • President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa gave a radio interview on 27 June in which he revealed that two of the weapons used to kill Rodolfo Torre Cantú, the PRI candidate for the governorship of Tamaulipas murdered in 2010, were registered to the police: one to the state police force and one to the Reynosa municipal force.

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