On August 24, an armored U.S. embassy SUV was attacked in the mountains south of Mexico City. Gunmen pursued the vehicle at high speeds, riddling it with bullets and wounding two of the occupants. Now the mysterious attack has become even more troubling.
It was the fourth significant attack in the past few years on U.S. government personnel stationed in Mexico. In March 2010, Lesley Enriquez Redelfs, an employee of the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juárez, was shot to death in her car along with her husband, Arthur, in broad daylight after leaving a children’s party sponsored by the U.S. consul. The husband of another consular employee was killed and their two children seriously wounded on the same day in a separate drive-by shooting. Jaime Zapata, a special U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on assignment to the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, suffered a similar fate in February 2011. Zapata and another ICE agent were returning to the capital after meeting with law-enforcement officials in the northern state of San Luis Potosí when they were ambushed.
But while those previous attacks clearly were carried out by hitmen employed by the violent Mexican drug cartels, the perpetrators of this assault appear to be twelve members of Mexico’s federal police. The circumstances of the pursuit and attack seem to rule out the scenario of mistaken identity. Although the exact reason for the attack has yet to be established, the most likely explanation is that the incident is the latest case of penetration of Mexico’s police forces by the cartels. Indeed, the New York Times reports that the “embassy personnel” in the SUV were CIA agents assisting the Mexican Navy in antidrug efforts, giving the cartels an obvious motive for ordering an attack. And the Washington Post quotes President Felipe Calderón as believing that the federal police involved had “ties to criminal organizations.”
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