Mexican mayor's killers start revealing drug war secrets
MEXICO CITY - Members of the gang that killed a mayor in southern Mexico have begun revealing some of the secrets of their trade to officials.
Temixco Mayor Gisela Mota was beaten and shot to death just one day after taking office, on Jan. 2. She had entered office with a pledge to fight organized crime, and instead became one of an estimated 100 mayors assassinated over Mexico's decade-long war on drug cartels.
Following Mota's killing, two suspects were killed in a clash with police and three others arrested after a chase. Officials said those taken into custody were a 32-year-old woman, an 18-year-old man and a minor. They gave few other details, though state Attorney General Javier Perez Duron said the suspects had been tied to other crimes.
According to officials, the minor who was captured revealed the site of clandestine graves holding the remains of four other people.
An official of the prosecutors' office in the southern state of Morelos said Tuesday that investigators have found four bodies in two pits in a rural area. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he or she was not authorized to be quoted by name. The suspect was not named because he is a minor.
He told police he belongs to the Rojos drug gang that apparently killed and buried the four people, who remain unidentified.
Additionally, The Intercept reports one of those captured revealed they were paid $29,000 to carry out the job, although it's not clear if they were paid that sum individually or as a group. On top of that the person captured said that Mota's name was one of at least a half-dozen others on the team's kill list.
The mayor was apparently killed as a warning to other officials to reject state police control of local cops and let cartels co-opt low-paid local officers, the governor of Morelos state said Monday.
Gov. Graco Ramirez sent a post on his Twitter account blaming the slaying of Temixco Mayor Gisela Mota on the Rojos gang, which has been fighting a bloody turf battle with the Guerreros Unidos gang across the neighboring state of Guerrero in southern Mexico.
Their rivalry may have played a role in the worst mass disappearance in recent memory, that of 43 students in Guerrero in 2014. Some suspects told investigators that Guerreros Unidos mistook the students for members of the Rojos and used local police under their control to capture them.
Without going into details, Ramirez had said at a news conference Sunday that Mota's killing was tied to his efforts to unify state control of police forces in Morelos as a way to combat corruption in local police forces.
Mota had accepted state police control, though she had demanded traffic cops remain under local authority.
"This is a message and clear threat to the mayors who have recently taken office not to accept the coordination plan and police framework that we have been promoting," Ramirez said.
Ramirez said the state police plan has led to a decrease in the wave of kidnappings, extortions and drug gang killings that swept the state in recent years.
Many critics have questioned whether the unified command will be cleaner or more efficient than the local forces and the state government has struggled to persuade mayors to give up control of officers who are a source of influence, protection and often income from bribes.
A local newspaper, La Union de Morelos, cast doubt on Ramirez's motives in an editorial Monday that accused him of opportunistically using Mota's killing "to get around the growing opposition to a model of security whose effectiveness is belied by figures and facts."
The biggest holdout has been the recently installed mayor of the state capital, Cuernavaca, former soccer star Cuauhtemoc Blanco.
Despite Blanco's refusal, Ramirez announced he was imposing state command over Cuernavaca's police, and he suggested dark forces were influencing the pugnacious former athlete, who has never before held public office.
"Behind Cuauhtemoc Blanco there are people who want to take advantage of his lack of experience, to allow crime gangs to enter Cuernavaca," Ramirez tweeted Monday.
The Cuernavaca city government said Monday it would continue to oppose the state plan.
Public Security Commissioner Alberto Capella told The Associated Press that 25 of the state's 33 municipalities are now under unified command, including Cuernavaca. He said Morelos received a petition from officers against Blanco's decision to reject unified command that said, "Don't leave us out there alone."
Ramirez said some mayors in the state had complained that the two gangs had been extorting money from them.
"Some confessed that they had been pressured, some had been kidnapped," Ramirez said. "They (gang members) picked them up and said they wanted three things. They wanted to choose (municipal) police chiefs ... they wanted the public works contracts, and ten percent of the municipal budgets."
Temixco, with about 100,000 people, is a suburb of Cuernavaca, long a tourist haven famed for its colonial architecture, gardens and streets lined with bougainvilleas and jacarandas.
But the rise of drug and extortion gangs has driven away some tourists and residents.
The expressway - and drug routes - between Mexico City and the country's murder capital of Acapulco passes through Cuernavaca and Temixco.