The third Mexican mayor in a month was slain by suspected drug gang hitmen on the same day the US secretary of state raised hackles in Mexico by saying the country is “looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago.”
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other US officials pointed to Mexican drug cartels’ use of three car bombs, a tool once favored by cartel-allied rebels in Colombia, as evidence that the gangs “are now showing more and more indices of insurgency.”
While the Mexican government quickly condemned the killing of the mayor of the northern town of El Naranjo, it rejected the comparison with Colombia, where the Medellin drug cartel waged a full frontal assault on the state, endangering its very integrity with attacks on police, politicians and judges and terror attacks against civilians.
More worrisome to Mexican legislators, Clinton suggested the US was looking to implement some type of Plan Colombia for Mexico and Central America, referring to a US anti-drug program in which US special forces trained Colombian troops and US advisers are attached to Colombian military units.
Mexico — which has suffered at least three US invasions — has always rejected allowing US troops on its soil.
“Starting right now, we have to say this clearly. We are not going to permit any version of a Plan Colombia,” said Senator Santiago Creel, a member of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s National Action Party. “We cannot permit a Plan Colombia in Mexico.”
Clinton made her statements on Wednesday in Washington at the Council on Foreign Relations, where she said drug cartels are “morphing into, or making common cause with, what we would consider an insurgency in Mexico and in Central America.”
Hooded gunmen burst into Mayor Alexander Lopez Garcia’s office in the northern Mexico state of San Luis Potosi on Wednesday and shot him to death.
Calderon’s office issued a statement condemning the killing — the third mayor slain in less than a month — calling it a “cowardly and criminal” act.
There was no immediate information on the motive for the attack.
The San Luis Potosi state prosecutors’ office said Lopez Garcia was killed by a squad of four hitmen. The rural township of about 20,000 people borders the violent-wracked state of Tamaulipas, where 72 migrants were massacred by drug gunmen last month.
On Wednesday, the Mexican government announced that marines had arrested seven gunmen suspected in those killings
Four of the suspects were arrested after a Sept. 3 gun battle with marines and the other three were captured days later, spokesman Alejandro Poire said at a news conference.
Poire alleged the seven belong to the Zetas drug gang, but he gave no further details on their identities or what led to their arrests.An eighth suspect was already in custody.
In addition, marines last week found the bodies of three other men suspected of participating in the massacre after an anonymous caller told authorities where to find them. Officials say they have no information on who made the call, but in the past drug gangs have handed over suspects in especially brutal killings that draw too much attention.
A Honduran man who survived the slaughter and is under police protection in Mexico later identified the three dead men as having been among the killers.
The latest arrests were announced one day after authorities found the bodies of two men believed to be those of a state detective and a local police chief who participated in the initial investigation of the massacre.
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