MEXICO:The municipal police force in this troubled border city has walked off the job after soldiers and federal agents ordered its members to turn over their weapons in connection with homicide investigations.
The surprising turn of events on Thursday came two days after Mexican president Felipe Calderon dispatched 3,300 federal troops and police to the city to combat violence linked to drug cartels.
Tijuana mayor Jorge Hank Rhon acknowledged in a radio interview on Thursday that local and state police were being compromised by narco-traffickers, and he said government salaries could not compete with the financial rewards offered by drug dealers.
Members of the 2,300-strong police force turned over more than 2,100 guns and semiautomatic assault rifles at police headquarters. But police officials decided it would be too dangerous to patrol unarmed, especially since more than a dozen officers have been killed recently in drug-related attacks.
"The police are not patrolling the city. They won't work without their weapons," said Fernando Bojorquez, a spokesman for the city's top police official, secretary of public safety Luis Javier Algorri Franco.
Among those whose weapons were taken were the bodyguards for the mayor and for Franco, a civilian who does not carry a weapon.
A spokesman for the federal attorney general's office said the military had ordered the confiscation of the police weapons to investigate whether any were used in suspicious killings. More than 300 people were killed in the city in 2006.
The soldiers and federal agents set up checkpoints on Thursday across the city and began patrolling downtown, in the commercial district, and in some tough neighbourhoods.
Tijuana and the communities surrounding it are a key battleground for control of drug smuggling routes into the US.
The city and the state of Baja California have suffered increased kidnappings and killings of drug traffickers, police officers, business owners and bystanders.
The federal enforcement effort, dubbed Operation Tijuana, comes three weeks after Calderon sent troops to his Pacific Coast home state of Michoacan, where more than 80 people were arrested, more than 1,300 acres of marijuana crops were destroyed and more than six tons of harvested plants were seized.
Calderon has said that federal forces are needed to combat Mexico's drug violence because of corruption and incompetence among local and state police.
In a television interview on Thursday, federal attorney general Eduardo Medina Mora said the campaign against drug violence would move to other states in coming weeks. - (LA Times-Washington Post service)