Feral Jundi

   This is just sad and my heart goes out to the families of the deceased. The infant daughter will now grow up without her parents, all because of the brutal acts of cowards.

   Now on to some thoughts with this.  We must do a better job at containing the border, and we must do a better job at protecting folks in Mexico.  This attack is a clear message by the cartels that they are not pleased with the U.S. It is my view that once we said ‘hey, we will help Mexico out’, then we just declared war on the cartels.  So when the cartels actually strike back and kill one of our own, we should now know that this is an act of warfare, and not some random killing.

    Obviously we have been assisting Mexico in their war down south for awhile, and I have talked about that here. The question I have is will this attack result in us ratcheting up our assistance, or backing off? I also expect more demand on the private side of the house, when it comes to protecting companies operating down there. Hell, we might even see an increase of WPPS folks for Mexico. And of course, there is always the idea I floated here on the blog about how to deal with these thugs.  Who knows, and I would like to hear what the readership thinks? –Matt

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A captured drug cartel cell and their tools of warfare.

Drug Slayings in Mexico Rock U.S. Consulate

March 15, 2010

By ELISABETH MALKIN and MARC LACEY

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — The married couple gunned down Saturday as they drove back from a children’s birthday party with their infant daughter in the back seat were concerned about the violence plaguing this border town, but they never believed they could be its next targets, the husband’s brother said in an interview on Monday.

The couple, Leslie Enriquez, 35, a pregnant American consulate worker, and her husband, Arthur H. Redelfs, 34, an officer at the county jail in El Paso, were within sight of the bridge leading to the United States border crossing when gunmen said to have links to drug traffickers drove up to their car and opened fire, killing them both.

“He was a wonderful man,” said the brother, Reuben Redelfs. “We just regret this as a senseless act of violence.”

Gunmen also killed the husband of another consular employee and wounded his two young children in a near-simultaneous shooting elsewhere in the city, in what appeared to be coordinated assaults on American officials and their families. The killings provoked outrage from Washington and raised new questions about whether employees of the United States and their family members were increasingly at risk of being swept into the cross-fire of Mexico’s bloody drug wars.

The couple had been married for a couple years and lived in El Paso, where they were raising their 7-month-old daughter, who was unharmed in the shooting. Mr. Redelfs said he was now caring for the girl.

Despite concerns about the security in Ciudad Juárez, the couple traveled frequently between Texas and Mexico, where they had friends and Ms. Enriquez worked in the visa section of the American Consulate, Mr. Redelfs said.

“They weren’t worried as targets,” he said.

Asked if he believed the couple were targets because of Ms. Enriquez’s consular job, Mr. Redelfs chose his words cautiously, saying, “I find it more than a coincidence that two separate incidents involving consular employees who were shot and killed occurred on the same day.”

Silvio Gonzalez, a spokesman for the United States Consulate in Ciudad Juárez, said the agency would be closed Tuesday “as we mourn the loss in our community.” The consular office was closed Monday for a holiday.

The killings came during a particularly bloody weekend when nearly 50 people were killed nationwide in drug-gang violence, including attacks in Acapulco as American college students began arriving for spring break.

The killings followed threats against American diplomats along the Mexican border and complaints from consulate workers that drug-related violence was growing untenable, American officials said. Even before the shootings, the State Department had quietly made the decision to allow consulate workers to evacuate their families across the border to the United States.

In Washington, President Obama denounced the “brutal murders” and vowed to “work tirelessly” with Mexican law enforcement officials to prosecute the killers. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the killings underscored the need to work with the Mexican government “to cripple the influence of trafficking organizations at work in Mexico.”

In a sign of the potential international reverberations of these killings, President Felipe Calderón of Mexico similarly expressed his indignation and condolences and said he would press forward with “all available resources” to control the lawlessness in Ciudad Juárez and the rest of the country.

The F.B.I. was sending agents to Ciudad Juárez on Sunday to assist with the investigation and American diplomats were en route to meet with their Mexican counterparts, said Roberta S. Jacobson, the American deputy assistant secretary of state who handles Mexico.

“We take very seriously when our employees are harmed, whether the intention was to harm U.S. employees or not,” she said in a telephone interview. “The question of whether this represents some ratcheting up of the drug war will depend on the reason behind the killings.”

The coordinated nature of the attacks, the automatic weapons used and the location in a city where drug cartels control virtually all illicit activity point toward traffickers as the suspects, said Mexican and American officials, declining to be identified. Officials with the state of Chihuahua issued a statement Sunday night saying that initial evidence, corroborated by intelligence from the United States, pointed to a gang known as Los Aztecas, which is linked to the major drug cartel in Ciudad Juárez.

American interests in Mexico have been attacked by drug traffickers before but never with such brutality. Attackers linked to the Gulf Cartel shot at and hurled a grenade, which did not explode, at the American consulate in Monterrey in 2008.

The shootings in Ciudad Juárez took place in broad daylight on Saturday as the victims were en route home from a social gathering at another consulate worker’s home. The first attack was reported at 2:32 p.m.

Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros, 37, the husband of a consular worker, was found dead in a white Honda Pilot, with bullet wounds to his body, the authorities said. In the back seat were two wounded children, one aged 4 and one 7. They were taken to the hospital.

Shell casings from a variety of caliber weapons were found at the scene.

Another call came in 10 minutes later, several miles away. This time it was a Toyota RAV4 with Texas plates that had been shot up, with Mr. Redelfs and Ms. Enriquez dead inside and their baby crying from a car seat in the back. Mexican officials initially gave Ms. Enriquez’s age as 25. Ms. Enriquez, an American citizen, was shot in the head. Her husband was shot in the neck and left arm. A 9-millimeter bullet casing was found at the scene.

Cmdr. Gomecindo López of the El Paso County Sheriff’s Department, who is acting as a spokesman for the family, said Ms. Enriquez had been pregnant.

In his statement, Mr. Obama was quick to laud the antidrug offense begun three years ago by Mr. Calderón, which is backed by more than $1 billion in United States money. But a growing chorus of critics of Mexico’s drug war, which has led to spiraling levels of violence in hot spots across the country, has asked Mr. Calderón to find a new approach.

One critic, former Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda, said in a telephone interview on Sunday that given the violence “it is surprising that this has not happened before.” The killings, he said, ought to prompt the Obama administration to rethink its support for what he called Mr. Calderón’s failed strategy.

In fact, Mr. Calderón is scheduled on Tuesday to make his third visit to Ciudad Juárez in the last five weeks as he tries to contain the disastrous public relations fallout from the killing of 16 people in January that Mr. Calderón first brushed off as “a settling of accounts” between members of criminal gangs.

It turns out the victims of the massacre were mostly students celebrating a birthday. By all accounts, they were just young people from a rough neighborhood trying to steer clear of the drug gang violence that has turned Ciudad Juárez into Mexico’s deadliest city. More than 2,000 people were killed there last year, giving it one of the highest murder rates in the world.

Those killings and Mr. Calderón’s blunder — he was in Japan at the time and later blamed mistaken information for his error — prompted the government to shift course after three years of its military-led crackdown on drug cartels and acknowledge that it has to involve citizens in the fight and deal with the social breakdown fueling the violence.

As killings have multiplied in Mexico, the government has long argued that the overwhelming majority of the casualties of the drug war are involved in the narcotics business. “The argument is absurd that the killings are a sign of his success,” Mr. Castañeda said, repeating an oft-heard refrain of both the Mexican and American governments.

Concerned about the rising violence, the State Department had decided that employees at a string of consular offices along the Mexican border — Tijuana, Nogales, Ciudad Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey and Matamoros — could temporarily evacuate their families to the United States. That decision was not formally announced until Sunday.

Elisabeth Malkin reported from Ciudad Juárez, and Marc Lacey from La Unión, Mexico. Ginger Thompson and Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington, Antonio Betancourt from Mexico City, and Jack Healy from New York.

Story here.