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Mexico & Nafta - April 2015 (ISSN 1741-444X)
Scale of security challenge exposed in Tamaulipas
The sometimes murky division between criminals and police in Mexico was laid bare in March in a series of incidents in the northern state of Tamaulipas. A score of federal police (PF) officers were arrested in the space of a week in the border municipality of Matamoros, suspected of belonging to a kidnapping and extortion racket. One of the men they kidnapped, however, has himself been accused of complicity with kidnappers. Meanwhile, armed men fired upon a convoy escorting the mayor of Matamoros, Leticia Salazar Vázquez, who claims she was targeted for her efforts to crack down on organised crime. Salazar herself has been accused of bearing some responsibility for the kidnapping and murder last October of three US youths, who eyewitnesses claim were killed by an elite police group she created.
