If anything, this was just to send a message. If these guys really wanted to do some damage, they could have. That is the next level of violence with the drug cartels in my opinion, and wait until we start seeing the whole IED game initiated. With that said, I certainly hope we are doing the things necessary to protect Americans working at the consulates. –Matt
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U.S. Mexican Consulate Attacked
April 11, 2010
By NICHOLAS CASEY
Unknown attackers threw explosives into the U.S. consulate in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, breaking windows and producing a disturbing blast but injuring no one, the consulate said Saturday night.
The attack happened around 11 p.m. on Friday evening and involved a “device which landed in a patio and exploded,” said Brian Quigley, the consular spokesman. “No employees were injured and nobody was there,” he said. But he called the incident “a serious matter.”
The incident marks the second attack against consular employees in Mexico in as many months.
On March 13, three people associated with the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juárez were killed when hit men chased their vehicles through the city’s streets and gunned them down. The trio included a woman who was a consular employee, her husband and a third man in a separate car whose wife was a consulate employee.
Mr. Quigley said there was no indication that there was any connection between the March killings and the weekend attack.
The spokesman said the consulate in Nuevo Laredo and the consular agency in nearby Piedras Negras would be closed until officials are satisfied that staff in the two areas were safe. Authorities from the Mexican attorney general’s office were investigating the incident, he said, and the consulate was conducting its own internal investigation.
The new attack exposes rising security risks for U.S. government employees along the U.S.-Mexican border, a region increasingly mired by violent wars between drug cartels and the Mexican government. Nuevo Laredo, which lies across the border from Laredo, Texas, has been the site of vicious gunbattles between the Gulf and Zetas cartels as they fight to control the passage of cocaine and other drugs across the border.
This is the first big attack on the consulate in Nuevo Laredo, which is one of Mexico’s largest U.S. consulates with around 80 employees, Mr. Quigley said. However in 2008, attackers threw a grenade—which didn’t explode—into the U.S. consulate in Monterrey, about 200 miles south of Nuevo Laredo.
Story here.