Border violence all too common

Wednesday’s killings just south of Arizona of Mexican police officers by suspected drug smugglers is reminiscent of a similar attack last February a little closer to home.

Wednesday’s shootings started in Cananea, Sonora, about 20 miles south of the border, southeast of Nogales.

Sixteen assailants, including one whose body was found Friday, were killed in the ensuing gunbattles in the rugged desert mountains outside Arizpe, 60 miles south of the U.S. border.

Authorities said Friday they have arrested four suspects.

In February, the highest ranking public safety official in Agua Prieta, Sonora, immediately south of Douglas, died in a gangland-style killing.

Ramon Tacho Verdugo, Agua Prieta’s secretary of public safety, was ambushed as he and a bodyguard left his office Feb. 26.

Tacho Verdugo had been police chief at Cananea before going to Agua Prieta, where he won a reputation as a get-tough cop.

At the time, his death proved he was getting results, said the Mexican consul in Douglas, Oscar De la Torre.

The death showed “that the positive results of his work were indeed having a negative impact on criminal activity in Agua Prieta,” said De la Torre.

Reporter Jonathon Clark, writing in the Sierra Vista Herald, said that under Tacho Verdugo, the Agua Prieta force had solved kidnappings, reduced home robberies and “taken 39 drug dealers off the streets.”

But drug violence in Agua Prieta persisted, wrote Clark, noting that in the week before the chief’s death “in an especially brutal incident, a couple aged 55 and 51 were found dead in their home with their faces carved off.”

Clark also reported that on March 6 and again March 22, two Federal Preventive Police officers were killed in Cananea and on April 17, two Cananea municipal police officers were murdered.

Wednesday’s events unfolded as a convoy of 10 to 20 vehicles loaded with gangsters rolled into Cananea. They were dressed in Mexican uniforms.

They killed five police officers and two civilians, then headed south with four civilian hostages toward the Sierra Madre mountains.

The area is desolate desert and rocky mountains, covered with cactus and mesquites, much like Southern Arizona’s desert, only hotter.

When federal and state forces arrived in Cananea Wednesday, they found no municipal police there. They had all fled, and state police were assigned to protect the community.

A Sonora state police helicopter spotted the fleeing caravan near the town of Arizpe, 60 miles south of Douglas.

About 80 state police and federal agents and soldiers converged on the area and shot it out.

The battle lasted five hours.

Sixteen of the drug bandits were killed. Ten more were arrested, and the hostages were freed. They were unharmed.

Sonora’s Public Safety Secretary Genero Garcia blamed Wednesday’s mayhem on a war between the rival Gulf and Sinaola drug cartels.

A map printed on page 1 of El Imparcial newspaper from Hermosillo, the Sonora state capital about 200 miles south of Cananea, showed the gangsters had driven west from the midsized city of Caborca. It’s west of Magdalena, a tourist destination about an hour south of Nogales.

The map showed the convoy proceeded on la ruta del miedo, “the scary road,” to Cananea.

Sonora Gov. Eduardo Bours said Wednesday he has asked for a federal investigation into the Cananea police department for possible ties to one of the drug groups.

jlamb@gvnews.com | 547-9749