The power of corruption, the lure of fortune.
Gunmen assassinated the acting chief of Mexico’s federal police early Thursday morning in the most brazen attack so far in the year-and-a-half-old struggle between the government and organized crime gangs.
To a softie like me, this is incomprehensible.
The police chief, Edgar Millán Gómez, was ambushed by several men wearing rubber gloves and carrying weapons as he entered his apartment building in the Guerrero neighborhood of Mexico City with two bodyguards at 2:30 a.m. He was hit nine times in the chest and one hand. He died a few hours later at Metropolitan Hospital.
Imagine: hit nine times. The violence.
His death was the tenth assassination of a federal police official in the last two months. Last week, gunmen also shot and killed the head of the organized crime division in the public security ministry, Roberto Velasco Bravo.
The lure of the millions.
One of Mr. Millán’s bodyguards, though wounded, managed to wrestle an attacker to the ground and arrest him. The man, Alejandro Ramírez Báez, 34, was wearing rubber gloves and carried a pistol with a silencer, the police said. Shells from an assault rifle were also found at the scene. The police said Mr. Ramírez has a criminal record, having been convicted twice for stealing cars. Still, it remained unclear who, if anyone, had hired him as an assassin, they said.
That is amazing: the bodyguard, amidst this mayhem, managed to wrestle one of the attackers, to pin him, and arrest him. My sense, and this is way out of my league, is that the killers are low-level dirt that are paid what for them is a small fortune -- and to those who hire those who hire them is a pittance.
For me, who adores Mexico, it is a sad day. For Mexicans themselves ...
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