Massacre of women, children occurred in unprotected area

When drug cartel gunmen opened fire on American women and children in northern Mexico, the Mexican Army, the National Guard and Sonora state police were nowhere nearby. It took them about eight hours to arrive.

To villagers and others, the bloodshed seemed to demonstrate once more that the government has lost control over vast areas of the country to the drug traffickers.

“The country is suffering very much from violence,” said William Stubbs, a farmer who serves on a community security committee in the American-dominated hamlet of Colonia LeBaron. “And it ain’t getting better. It’s getting worse.”

The lack of law enforcement in rural areas like the northern states of Chihuahua and Sonora once led the dual U.S.-Mexican residents of places like Colonia LeBaron to form their own civilian defense patrols.

Stubbs said that after the 2009 killing of anti-crime activist Benjamin LeBaron, residents positioned themselves each night for two years with high-powered binoculars to keep watch from a hillside above the town.

Since then, he said, the cartels have left LeBaron and the town of Galeana a few miles to the north alone. But he said they have watched the cartels get stronger in the past two decades, with nearby communities in the mountains suffering from violence and extortion.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Homero Mendoza said Wednesday that Monday’s ambush — which killed three American mothers and six of their children — started at 9:40 a.m., but the nearest army units were in the border city of Agua Prieta, about 3½ hours away.

Soldiers didn’t start out for the scene until 2:30 p.m. and didn’t arrive until 6:15 p.m. — even while five surviving children lay hiding in the mountains with bullet wounds.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador created the militarized National Guard after he took office last December to help law enforcement, but its 70,000 troops have to cover a vast territory.

“The government’s main policy tool, the National Guard, is not where it should be,” said Mexican security analyst Alejandro Hope. He noted that Sonora and Chihuahua states, with over 160,000 square miles between them, have only about 4,100 National Guard officers stationed there, or about one for every 40 square miles. “It should be in the mountains, and it’s not there.”

In a related development, Mexican officials say a suspect who was arrested in the border city of Agua Prieta with assault rifles was not involved in the ambush.

Alfonso Durazo, a public security official, said Wednesday that preliminary information indicates that the suspect who was detained Tuesday is not linked to the attack.

Criminal investigators in northern Mexico earlier said the suspect was under investigation for a possible connection to the killings.

RICK BOWMER / ASSOCIATED PRESS Austin Cloes of Herriman, Utah, points to photos of relatives Rhonita Miller and some of her children, who were among the nine killed Monday in Mexico in an ambush by drug cartel gunmen.