In Mexico’s drug war, she is one town’s lone ranger focus 11/23/2010

In Mexico’s drug war, she is one town’s lone ranger

focus

11/23/2010
CIUDAD JUAREZ — In the bloodstained chaos that is Mexico’s drug war raging on the doorstep of the United States, Erika Gandara, 28, is standing tall, and alone. As her town’s only police officer “I am the law,” she says.

Gandara’s town of Guadalupe, population 9,000, is near Ciudad Juarez, Ground Zero in Mexico’s endless bloodletting between rival drug cartels battling for control of distribution routes to the lucrative US markets. Juarez sits across the border from the US city of El Paso, Texas.

And the toll the sustained violence has taken even on little Guadalupe is big: All of her fellow cops either have fled or been killed.
“Yes, I am a police officer,” the fresh-faced Gandara, who might be mistaken for a high (secondary) school student in her purple hoodie if she were not packing an R-15 rifle, told AFP in an interview in her sparsely furnished office.

“I am this town’s only cop. I am the law,” she said.

And she meant it.

It has been months that Gandara has been going it alone on her quixotic drive to keep her town safe..... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20101123com7.html