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Troubling Patterns of Violence in Chihuahua
The northern border state of Chihuahua remained the top focus this past week, in part due to several high-profile attacks on police officials. In the first, the police chief in the town of Villa Ahumada was shot to death just a few hours after he was sworn in. The next day, the chief of the anti-kidnapping unit in the border city of Ciudad Juarez died outside his home after being shot multiple times by four gunmen who had chased him for several minutes.
Chihuahua state also was the scene of an incident that we reported last week, in which at least 13 people were gunned down at a family gathering in the town of Bocoyna on Aug. 16. Several banners appeared this past week in Bocoyna and in Chihuahua city that threatened further violence against Bocoyna residents — including the mayor — and attributed the attack to La Linea, a network of corrupt police officers alleged to work for the Juarez cartel. The banners were signed by the Gente Nueva, an enforcement arm of the Sinaloa cartel.
In the propaganda-rich world of the Mexican drug trade, we are hesitant to take such public claims at face value. And while many details of the attack remain murky even a week later, such as the identity of the family targeted, the claims made in these banners nevertheless raise an interesting possibility. Namely, they raise the prospect that the Aug. 16 killings were not intended to target any particular family, but rather were meant as indiscriminate killings designed to terrorize the town into keeping quiet about the activities of local thugs.
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