Every Cop in Mexican Town Quits After Station Attack

[spookyturtle 9,465]

I'm still a bit confused as to how legalizing drugs in the US will stop the violence in Mexico.

(Oct. 28) -- The entire 14-man police force in a northern Mexican town has resigned en masse after their station came under fire from suspected drug traffickers.

The police headquarters in Los Ramones, a rural town about 40 miles east of Monterrey, is pockmarked with bullet holes after gunmen drove up to the station and unleashed a torrent of automatic weapons fire that also included barrages from grenade launchers. More than 1,000 bullet casings littered a yard where local officials had held a ceremony to inaugurate the new station just three days earlier.

No one was injured, but six police vehicles were destroyed. "Fortunately, those who were inside the building threw themselves on the ground and nobody was hurt," Mayor Santos Salinas Garza told the Mexican newspaper Noroeste.

He also confirmed that all 14 officers have since fled out of terror. "They resigned because of this situation," Garza told the Financial Times.

The incident comes after a wave of massacres in Mexican towns over the past week. On Wednesday, gunmen killed 15 people at a car wash that employed recovering addicts. In two other shooting sprees, 13 former drug addicts were gunned down at a rehab center, and 14 other people died at a birthday party in a border town.

For now, Mexican soldiers and state police are heading to Los Ramones to cover the beat until new policemen can be hired. But with drug-related violence on the rise and police salaries still low, volunteers are scarce.

Several mayors have been killed in the surrounding state of Nuevo Leon, and nearly 30,000 people have died nationwide since Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war on organized drug gangs in December 2006.

About 90 percent of Mexico's police forces have fewer than 100 officers, and 61 percent of municipal police officers earn less than the equivalent of $322 a month, the Financial Times reported.

"To be a police officer in Mexico continues to mean having a very poorly paid, highly risky job with negative social stigma," Calderon was quoted as saying. His government has proposed legislation to reorganize the command structure of municipal police forces, putting them under the control of state governors.

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