Brutal realities of drug war finally arrive in Mexico’s capital city as marines deployed to confront gang members
Traditionally authorities have said the city’s traffic is too congested, and there are too many police officers – more than 80,000 – for drug traffickers to move in convoys as they do other states
Burnt-out vehicles. Road blockades. A raging gun battle between armoured marines and gang members that left eight dead. Such scenes have been common in border cities like Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo, and figures released Friday show the death toll from Mexico’s drug war has reached new heights this year. But residents of the capital were stunned this week to see that kind of mayhem in their own city.
Thursday’s shoot-out, along with the recent emergence in a working-class neighbourhood of an apparent group of “vigilantes” – styled after self-defence militias that rose up against a drug cartel in the western state of Michoacan – have left authorities scrambling to maintain their long-held claims that drug cartels don’t operate in Mexico City.
Thursday’s shoot-out led to some 1,300 police and marines being deployed on the streets of Tlahuac, a poor borough on the southeastern outskirts that was a rural area until a few years ago.
The narco-blockades come to Mexico City
Photos from the scene showed the slain suspects were carrying assault rifles instead of the pistols usually used in most armed crimes in Mexico City.
Perhaps most shocking was the appearance of organised roadblocks put up by gang members or sympathisers to impede the movements of police. City officials said gang members hijacked about five buses or trucks, and video images showed teams of motorcyclists parking their vehicles to shut down an expressway and then setting fire to a bus after the passengers fled.
“The narco-blockades come to Mexico City,” the newspaper El Universal wrote in a front-page headline on Friday.
The nation’s capital once looked on the drug war as a battle fought in outlying states. Not anymore. The capital’s violence is still far from the worst, although its murder rate went up by 21 per cent in the first six months of this year, according to the newly released government security statistics.