Fears after deadly attack

Mormons vulnerable and unprotected in drug cartel-controlled northern Mexico

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 not there to protect them. It took them about eight hours just 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 pecan and alfalfa farmer who serves on a community security committee in the American-dominated village of Colonia LeBaron. “You see it all over. It’s getting worse.”

The lack of law enforcement in rural areas like the northern states of Chihuahua and Sonora once led the dual US-Mexican residents of places like Colonia LeBaron to form their own civilian defence 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 the large “L’’ for “LeBaron” on a hillside above the town.

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

This week, he said, the military told him that the town of Zaragoza had been about 50% abandoned.

Army chief of staff General Homero Mendoza said on Wednesday that Monday’s ambush – which killed three American mothers and six of their children – started at 9.40am, but the nearest army units were in the border city of Agua Prieta, about 160km and more than three hours away.

Soldiers didn’t start out for the scene until 2.30pm and didn’t arrive until 6.15pm – even while five surviving children lay hiding in the mountains with bullet wounds.

“There are areas where the government’s control is very fragile,” said Mexican security analyst Alejandro Hope.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador created the militarised National Guard after he took office last December to help law enforcement, but its 70000 troops have to cover a vast territory.

“The government’s main policy tool, the National Guard, is not where it should be,” Hope said, noting that Sonora and Chihuahua states, with over 420000km² between them, have only about 4100 National Guard officers stationed there. “It should be in the mountains, and it’s not there.”

Questions have also arisen over whether the army can do its job even when it is present. On October 17, soldiers were forced to release the captured son of drug lord Joaquin

“El Chapo” Guzman to avoid further bloodshed after Sinaloa cartel gunmen counter-attacked in greater numbers in the city of Culiacan.

Colonia LeBaron is a place where the US influence is evident everywhere you look: pickup trucks with license plates from California, Idaho, Colorado, Washington, and English-speaking customers eating hamburgers at Ray’s Restaurant, Coffee & Grill. Many of the dual citizens were born here, and their families have been here decades.

Stubbs predicted that some people would move their families to the US out of fear, but would ultimately come back, as happened after the 2009 killing.

He seemed dubious about Lopez Obrador’s “hugs, not bullets” security strategy of trying to solve underlying social problems instead of battling the drug cartels with military force.

“I’m really shocked actually of his way of thinking, and it ain’t going to solve the problems,” he said. |