Mexico’s drug cartels have changed tactics and are turning more attacks on authorities, rather than focusing their fire on rivals gangs, the country’s top security official said on Sunday.
Mexican Interior Secretary Fernandez Gomez-Mont said at a news conference that two back-to-back, bloody ambushes of government convoys — both blamed on cartels — represent a new tactic.
“In the last few weeks the dynamics of the violence have changed. The criminals have decided to directly confront and attack the authorities,” Gomez-Mont said.
“They are trying to direct their fire power at what they fear most at this moment, which is the authorities,” he said.
Officials here have long said that more than 90 percent of the death toll in Mexico’s wave of drug violence — which has claimed more than 22,700 lives since a government crackdown began in December 2006 — are victims of disputes between rival gangs.
Mexican drug gangs have been known to target security officials.
The nation’s acting federal police chief was shot dead in May 2008 in an attack attributed to drug traffickers lashing back at Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s offensive against organized crime.
However, such high-profile attacks were rare in comparison with inter-gang warfare, but after the large-scale attacks on officials on Friday and Saturday, “casualties among the authorities are beginning to increase in this battle,” Gomez-Mont said.
On Saturday, gunmen armed with assault rifles and grenades attacked a convoy carrying the top security official of the western state of Michoacan, in what appeared to be a carefully planned ambush.
The official survived with non-life-threatening wounds — she was traveling in a bullet-resistant SUV — but two of her bodyguards and two passers-by were killed. Of the other nine people wounded, most were bystanders, including two girls ages two and 12.
Gomez-Mont said the attack was carried out by a group known as “The Resistance,” an outgrowth of the Michoacan-based La Familia drug cartel.
It came a day after gunmen ambushed two police vehicles at a busy intersection in the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez, killing seven officers and a 17-year-old boy caught in the crossfire. Two more officers were seriously wounded.
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