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Mexican police need bigger guns to fight increasingly violent
drug gangs, a federal police chief said, after drug hitmen killed
seven officers in the northern city of Culiacan.
"We need machine guns," said General Rodolfo Cruz, the federal
police force's link with the army in their joint 18-month-old war
on Mexico's powerful drug cartels.
"Pistols are just for showing off, they are good for nothing," he
told reporters in Culiacan, as 200 reinforcements arrived to
restore security a day after the seven officers died in a spray of
bullets while searching a drug hide-out.
Culiacan and other northern cities have seen a dramatic surge in
drug violence this year, marked by murders of police officers and
grisly decapitations.
Rival cartels are fighting over smuggling routes into the United
States.
Their elite and well-armed hitmen also shoot at the police and
troops that President Felipe Calderon has deployed against them
since December 2006.
Cartel hitmen are often arrested with the likes of grenades,
powerful machine guns and rocket launchers capable of bringing down
helicopters.
Those weapons dwarf the pistols and rifles usually carried by
police and the army.
"On the other side there are AK-47 rifles and automatic weapons
with steel points that can penetrate armour, even bullet-proof
vests," said Cruz.
Mexico has made several complaints to Washington that Mexican drug
gangs easily buy high-powered weapons legally in the United States
and smuggle them south across the border.
Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said the jump in violence
showed the crackdown was working but he saw no quick end to the
bloodshed, predicting the army would remain deployed in drug
hotspots for another two years.
"We have curbed the power of these organizations, reducing the
number of their hitmen, bosses and weapons," he told Mexican
television.
"This has broken down the structures and that is being expressed
with violence between gangs because they have to compete for a
smaller pie."
Calderon has made crushing drug cartels the centrepiece of his
presidency but violence has grown since he sent out some 25,000
troops and police officers against them.
Some 1,380 people have died in drug-related murders this year, a
faster pace than in 2007 when there were 2,500 deaths during the
entire year.
Medina Mora said higher prices for cocaine and methamphetamines on
US streets showed the crackdown was shutting off supply routes and
hurting cartel revenues.
