PoliceLink

News >> Browse Articles >> Officer Down

Mexico's Top Police Official Assassinated

Chief Edgar Millan Gomez gives a press conference following a police raid in January. (AP)

MEXICO CITY – An assassin lying in wait Thursday gunned down a top police commander, one of the architects of Mexico’s bloody battle against paramilitary cartels.

Police patrol the hospital where Mexico’s acting federal police chief died Thursday in Mexico City. Mr. Millán was the third police official killed in the capital this week.

Edgar Millán Gómez, the acting head of the federal police, was the third senior official of the newly integrated force to be shot to death in a week in Mexico City.

Mr. Millán, who held a news conference May 1 announcing arrests and cash seizures against the Sinaloa cartel, was shot 10 times as he entered his apartment in a modest Mexico City neighborhood in the early morning hours, police said.

His killer lay in wait inside Mr. Millán’s home and opened fire at point-blank range as the policeman entered, police told the Mexico City newspaper El Universal. Two bodyguards were shot and wounded as they detained his accused killer, Alejandro Ramírez Báez. Police said they suspected Mr. Ramírez had been hired by the Sinaloa cartel.

Analysts said the rash of police killings in the Mexican capital represented an escalation in the drug war by the cartels.

“This is a demonstration of their power,” said Arturo Yañez, a Mexico City police trainer and former adviser to the federal attorney general’s office. “Never in the history of Mexico have police been targeted in this way, least of all in Mexico City, which had mostly been spared from the violence. But once it starts here, no one is going to stop it.”

While the government points to the rising death count as a sign that it is winning the drug war by provoking more drastic actions by the drug traffickers, Mr. Yañez said the mounting body count shows just the opposite.

“How many people have to die before we know that we have won the war?” he said.

Mr. Yañez said the killings of three federal police commanders in a week show how disorganized and ineffective law enforcement agencies have become.

The ongoing integration of the Federal Preventative Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has created rivalries that have distracted them from the drug fight, he said. “The institutional weakness is pathetic; they can’t even protect their own people.”