Violent police deaths impairing Acapulco image
Tourism officials wondered about the impact as murder and mayhem continued in Acapulco with a new incident where gunmen dressed as soldiers attacked police stations and killed seven people.
Authorities said they found a link to drug cartels.
Mexican Tourism Secretary Rodolfo Elizondo told newspaper El Universal the killings “without a doubt are events that have a negative impact” on tourism and that his office was working to get the word out that these were isolated events.
A city of more than 720,000, Acapulco has always been concerned with crime. But until recently the violence occurred mostly in the poor neighborhoods far from the five-star hotels along the coast.
Since last April, however, the attacks have become more blatant: The smugglers have carried out at least six beheadings. Several officers’ heads were spiked on a railing in front of a downtown building
The most recent killing episode was apparently videotaped, said police and media reports in the LA Times.
Police officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the police stations had been at the center of a dispute between reform-minded state law enforcement officials and Acapulco police suspected of ties to drug traffickers.
Each attack was carried out by about eight men wearing olive-drab uniforms and berets, media reports said.
The assailants simultaneously entered the two stations, less than a mile apart, said a police official who requested anonymity.
All those killed were employees of the state police; five were officers and two were secretaries.
Media reports said the assailants were armed with assault rifles, including AK-47-style weapons known in Mexico as “the goat’s horn,” a signature gun of drug cartels.
“They used Green Beret-type uniforms as a disguise, apparently,” one police official said. “They caught the police completely by surprise.”
Acapulco and other cities and towns on the Pacific Coast of Mexico are way stations in an illegal drug trade worth several billion dollars, US officials said.
Rival drug operations have been fighting each other for months over control of smuggling routes through Acapulco and other cities in Guerrero state and adjacent Michoacan state.
Since taking office in December, President Felipe Calderon has sent troops into both states and to Tijuana and Sinaloa state in an effort to control violence.
There were more than 2,000 drug-related killings in Mexico last year, according to some reports.
Mr Calderon also ordered the extradition of 15 alleged drug bosses to the United States last month. But the violence appears to have continued unabated.
The two police stations were about two miles from Acapulco’s tourist center and near the port, an impoverished area notorious as a center for drug shipments.
Videos showing drug-related slayings in Mexico, complete with captions and soundtracks mocking rivals, have become a fixture on the Internet in the last year.
Report by David Wilkening
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