MEXICAN CARTELS OUTGUN TOWNS

Ill-prepared and often corrupt, rural and border city police and
officials are the weakest link in the war on drugs.

By Hector Tobar and Carlos Martinez Times Staff Writers

NACO, MEXICO -- The message came on police emergency radio: An army of
drug traffickers with machine guns mounted on their pickup trucks was
headed toward this town of 5,000 people on the Arizona-Mexico border.

Like a sheriff in a western, police chief and part-time schoolteacher
Juan Bracamontes gritted his teeth and assembled his 15 officers, who
had nothing better than old .38-caliber revolvers to face off against
the enemy.

"Those who want to leave can leave," the chief said. "Those who want
to stay and fight, line up behind me and we'll give it to them good."

One officer quit on the spot. The others deployed around the town, but
not before taking off their uniforms and abandoning their patrol cars
for unmarked vehicles.

In other Mexican towns, local authorities have not shown as much
courage in the face of threats from cash-rich drug traffickers.
Underarmed, under-prepared and often corrupt, small-town officials and
police are the Achilles' heel of President Felipe Calderon's offensive
against the nation's drug traffickers.

Calderon has made the battle to rein in Mexico's drug cartels the
centerpiece of his presidency, committing large portions of the army
and much of the federal police force to the effort.

The cartels have been fighting one another for control of smuggling
routes to the United States. The resulting violence claimed more than
2,000 lives last year, and the killings this year have been on a pace
to exceed that toll.

In the rural and border areas where smugglers operate, police
frequently find themselves on the front line of the drug wars.
Arresting a cartel operative might mean death. Even those who agree to
protect one band of traffickers risk being attacked by rival gunmen.

Municipal officers account for 60% of the police force in Mexico, with
state and federal police making up the rest. Mexican officials and
analysts say city police and city officials receive a big share of the
estimated $3 billion that drug traffickers pay in bribes each year.

Officials at Mexico's Public Safety Secretariat estimate that
traffickers pay police an average monthly bribe of $500 to $600,
roughly equal to a starting officer's monthly salary in towns such as
Naco and neighboring Cananea.

"The training these officers receive is very precarious, as is their
pay," said Raul Benitez, a professor at American University in
Washington and a specialist in Mexican security issues. In many towns,
Benitez said, the only requirement for becoming a police officer is
being a friend of the mayor: The police force is a prime political
plum.

These undertrained officers face an increasingly sophisticated enemy,
as Mexico's drug cartels form small armies in which many of the
"troops" have at least some military-style training.

Two days before the report of a "caravan of death" headed for Naco, as
many as 50 armed men attacked Cananea. Five municipal officers were
kidnapped and killed in the May 16 incident. Within hours, half of the
48-officer Cananea police force had turned in their guns and quit.

"We have no protection," several Cananea officers told reporters
gathered around the town's police station. With allegations of links
to traffickers swirling around the force, eight officers were fired,
as was the police chief.

"On the one side organized crime is killing police officers, and on
the other side the government is investigating and firing them," said
Jose Arturo Yanez, a researcher at the Professional Police Training
Institute in Mexico City. "No one is protecting them."

Security officials have resigned or been fired en masse in at least 18
states in nearly every region of Mexico.

Dozens have walked away from their jobs. A few have fled in the face
of arrest warrants. Others, such as Orlando Valencia of Cananea,
disappear from their offices.

Valencia was both the mayor's spokesman and the city emergency
coordinator. In late May, he disappeared, and officials announced that
they were seeking his arrest on suspicion of aiding drug traffickers
in their escape after the attack on Cananea.

Even for those brave enough to serve in the country's most dangerous
towns, discretion is usually the better part of valor. One
high-ranking police official in a town in Zacatecas state explained
the advice he gives his officers to keep them safe:

"I told them that if they see something suspicious, they should
withdraw," said the official, who asked not to be named. "It doesn't
matter what it is, just withdraw.... These people are well-armed and
we just have the basics."

After an encounter with suspected cartel hit men, many officers in his
town received telephone death threats. A good chunk of the force resigned.

"I don't know why they quit," the official said. "And you know what? I
don't care."

The estimated 50 cartel hit men who descended on Cananea had attended
a two-month camp to prepare for their assault, said Sonora state
authorities, who interviewed the surviving hit men. The training was
led by a former member of the Hermosillo city police department. And
federal officials said at least four of the gunmen were army veterans.

The hit men were working on behalf of a drug-trade organization allied
with a local trafficker, Francisco Hernandez Garcia, also known as
"The Two Thousand."

The Two Thousand had agreements with local police chiefs to protect
his shipments, according to news reports. Such agreements are called
compromisos here, a Spanish word meaning commitments or
obligations.

But the pacts were broken, setting off a series of violent incidents
that climaxed with the raid on Cananea.

Home to 30,000 people, Cananea is famous for a 1906 miners' strike
that helped spark the Mexican Revolution. Set amid the dun hills of
the Sonoran Desert, it is a place where the daily routine of police
work rarely involves anything more violent than a domestic dispute or
drunken fight at a party.

All that changed early on the morning of May 16. Cananea police
received word that a pair of officers had been attacked and beaten at
a checkpoint outside town. Five officers were dispatched to assist
them.

The five set off with shotguns and .223-caliber rifles recently
provided by state authorities, though the bulletproof vests promised
by the state had not yet arrived, officials said. When the officers
reached the scene, they encountered four dozen cartel hit men: The
officers surrendered without firing a shot; they were later tortured
and executed.

The mayor summoned help. State and federal officers tracked the gunmen
to a remote mountain settlement. In the ensuing gunfight, 15 suspected
cartel hit men were killed.

"There hadn't been a battle like that here since the revolution," said
Martin Ballesteros Rios, now Cananea's acting chief of police.

Gabriel Hurtado, the police chief at the time, was fired five days
later; sources say he had abandoned his post. Although he faces no
charges, there are rumors. He hasn't been seen in the town since he
left, officials said.

Ballesteros Rios stepped in.

The acting chief says he isn't worried about what might happen to him,
despite warnings from friends and relatives.

"My conscience is clean, because I don't have any compromisos with
anyone," he said.

Thirty miles away in Naco, Mayor Jose Lorenzo Villegas has fired six
police chiefs during his two terms in office. He fired Chief Roberto
Tacho in January; weeks later, U.S. officials arrested the former
lawman as he allegedly tried to smuggle about 60 pounds of marijuana
into the United States.

Tacho and his brother Ramon were part of a small circle that until
recently controlled the police in three neighboring towns -- Naco,
Cananea and Agua Prieta. Ramon Tacho, the police chief of Agua Prieta,
was assassinated outside his office in February by suspected cartel
hit men.

In Naco, a windblown town of squat buildings hugging the U.S. border,
there is a growing sense that the community is being drawn into a
larger conflict.

On the day the drug traffickers' army was reported to be headed their
way, town residents responded as though war had broken out.

Businesses and schools shut down. City Hall was evacuated, and some
officials fled to the United States.

U.S. Border Patrol agents with machine guns took up positions on the
roof of the border-crossing station in Naco, Ariz., which overlooks
the Mexican Naco's small downtown.

Mayor Villegas was in Hermosillo, Sonora's state capital, picking up
new 9-millimeter pistols and AR-15 rifles issued to his police force.

"We lived some very ugly moments that day," the 34-year-old mayor
said. "By phone, people were telling me I should declare a state of
siege."

But the report of the "caravan of death" headed for Naco turned out to
be a false alarm.

At the end of the day, after the crisis had passed, Villegas arrived
in Naco with boxes of pistols and rifles.

"Look at this beautiful thing," Police Chief Bracamontes said, taking
one of the new pistols from its holster. "And this one too," he said,
raising a sleek, black AR-15 rifle that was propped up against the
wall of his office.

Like most of the new weapons, it still hasn't been
fired.