Colleagues not surprised by ICE agent attacks

With violence escalating at the border, they say it was inevitable

By DUDLEY ALTHAUS and DANE SCHILLER
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Feb. 20, 2011, 6:15PM


MEXICO CITY — For many U.S. law enforcement officers experienced in working against Mexico's gangsters, the deadly attack on two Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents hardly came as a surprise.

"People say this was a long time coming," said Peter Hanna, a recently retired FBI agent who spent years handling cases against the Gulf Cartel, the narcotics trafficking gang based in cities along the South Texas border. "It's getting so crazy down there."

Jaime Zapata, a 32-year-old ICE agent assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, was shot to death Tuesday in a highway assault on his official vehicle in the northern state of San Luis Potosi. Agent Victor Avila, who was riding with Zapata, was wounded in the attack.

Zapata's killing has outraged his colleagues and senior U.S. officials. But it's also underscored both the uneven human toll of President Felipe Calderon's war on organized crime and the stark divide between police cultures on both sides of the border.

Zapata is the only fatality so far among U.S. officials actively involved in the campaign. And he is the first to be killed here by gangsters since the February 1985 torture-slaying of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena.

In contrast, gangland violence has killed as many as 2,000 Mexican police officers and soldiers in little more than four years — and claimed nearly 35,000 lives overall.

'Mexico supplies the dead'

Nearly every new day carries word of fresh atrocity. Gunmen massacre groups of people at parties, in mechanics' garages, during beach visits. Gangsters maraud cities like barbarians of another era. Headless and dismembered bodies line roadways and hang from highway bridges.

"The United States provides the money, Mexico supplies the dead," is one variation of a complaint uttered by those rankled by the disparity.

U.S. and Mexican officials repeatedly have said that they are allies in the crackdown launched by Calderon upon taking office in December 2006. Some $1.4 billion in U.S. aid is helping Mexico with that effort. And scores of U.S. agents operating throughout Mexico provide intelligence information, equipment, training and logistics to Mexican security forces.

But several Mexican opposition senators publicly complained this week that promises by senior U.S. officials to avenge Zapata's killing smacked both of naiveté and undue interference in Mexico's affairs.

A political cartoon published last week in Reforma, a leading Mexico City newspaper, depicts a surprised Uncle Sam recoiling from drops splattering from a large pool blood lying south of the border.

But U.S. officials, from Cabinet-level secretaries to shoe leather agents, have vowed to bring Zapata's killers to justice, regardless of the obstacles. Such zero tolerance for attacks and threats against U.S. personnel long has provided powerful deterrence that has kept agents safe, they argue.

"We don't leave anybody behind," Hanna said. "If we don't move heaven and earth to catch them, the gangsters will understand they can get away with it, and then everything is fair game.

"They are not going to kill one of our agents down there and get away with it," he said. "It's the nature of who we are."

That nature seldom is mirrored in Mexico, either by the public or within police forces themselves.


Worn down by violence

Gangsters attack police stations with grenades and rocket launchers; gun down officers in the street or abduct and behead them; assassinate police chiefs soon after they take office.

Citizens and officials alike usually meet the slaughter with a collective shrug.

"In the United States and other countries the government immediately reacts," said Arturo Arango, a Mexico City public security analyst. "Here nothing happens. We don't take notice of the blood of fallen police officers."

In part, Arango and other experts said, that's because of the poor pay, training and efficiency on many police forces, especially those at the local and state levels.

But many Mexicans also view their police as deeply corrupted, with more than a little justification. When officers are killed, especially if they're assassinated, public opinion often brands them as dirty.

"The first perception is that they were involved," said Antia Mendoza, a Mexican police reform expert who works as a consultant with local and state forces. "Mexico's culture towards the police has been one of very little respect."

Hoping for change

The distrust and disregard permeates even police officers' relations with one another, Mendoza said. Colleagues of the murdered "can't say anything because you don't know who is involved" with the gangsters who killed them, she said.

Now, some hope that the drive to capture Zapata's killers - early suspicion has fallen on the Zetas, assassins turned organized crime empressarios now rampaging across much of Mexico - might force positive changes to that culture.

U.S. agents' single-minded pursuit of Camarena's murderers eventually led to the imprisonment of Mexico's most powerful drug bosses of the day, the dismantling of the country's feared secret police force and the unmasking of senior politicians colluding with the gangsters.

"Hopefully his death will not have been in vain," Arango said of Zapata. "If they achieve half of what the Camarena investigation did, it will be a good thing for Mexico."

dudley.althaus@chron.com

dane.schiller@chron.com

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