Cartels bully Mexico police

Mark Stevenson - CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AP) — It’s a warning note written in blood as Mexico’s powerful drug cartels increase the pressure on police and security officials who vow to break their power.

The campaign of murder and intimidation appears to have reached a new peak in recent months, with at least four high-ranking police officials among the drug lords’ victims, including the country’s acting federal police chief.

Over the weekend, the Mexican police chief here quit his post across the border from El Paso, Texas, after receiving death threats from drug gangs that are resisting a crackdown on smugglers, officials said.

Ciudad Juarez’s top policeman Guillermo Prieto resigned just days after suspected cartel hit men killed the city’s No. 2 police officer.

And four people thought to be Americans were shot in the head and dumped in a notorious drug-smuggling area in northern Mexico near the border with California, Mexican police said yesterday.

Police in the beach town of Rosarito, across the border from San Diego, said they discovered the bodies of three men and a woman Sunday in an abandoned car in a remote patch of scrubland near the Pacific coast.

Mexican police who take on the cartels feel isolated and vulnerable when they become targets, as did 22 commanders in Ciudad Juarez when drug traffickers named them on a handwritten death list left at a monument to fallen police this year. It was addressed to “those who still don’t believeâ€