The young mother hailed as the bravest woman in Mexico when she became a small-town police chief on one of the bloodiest fronts of the country’s drug wars has reportedly fled to the US.
Marisol Valles attracted global attention last October when she took command of the municipal force in Praxedis G Guerrero on the Rio Grande border with Texas.
An unnamed relative told Agence France-Presse Valles had gone to the US with relatives to seek asylum after receiving death threats from a gang trying to force her to work for them.
Photo: EPA
The municipal spokesman, Andres Morales, however, said Valles had merely asked for a few days off to tend to her sick baby.
“We are expecting her to come back to work on Monday,” he said.
Praxedis has suffered acutely from the kidnappings, arson attacks and assassinations that plague Juarez valley, which stretches south-east from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s most violent city.
Valles’ predecessor’s head was dumped outside the police station days after he was abducted in August 2009. Of the 17 officers he commanded, 15 were killed in separate attacks.
Valles, a criminology student, had always stressed she would leave the job of addressing organized criminal violence to the state and federal authorities. Instead, she instructed her unarmed force of 10 officers to make house-to-house calls aimed at encouraging residents to do such things as send their children to play sports in the town square to rebuild a sense of community. Morales said since then, serious crime in the town was reduced.
Valles is not the only Mexican woman to take on law enforcement duties in a dangerous community. In the neighboring town of Guadalupe, Erika Gandara was the sole officer until she was kidnapped before Christmas. She has not been seen since.
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