Word: mexico
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...then there's witness protection in Mexico - which may as well be called witness detection, since it seems the country's violent drug traffickers are having little problem locating, and assassinating, the informants whom the government is supposed to be shielding. In less than two weeks, in fact, two of the country's most valuable soplones, or stool pigeons, have been killed in Mexico City. On Dec. 2, Edgar Bayardo - a former high-ranking federal police official whose information led to last year's indictment of Mexico's federal police chief and other top cops for alleged narco-corruption...
...Mexico is in the throes of its bloodiest drug war ever. There have been almost 11,000 narco-related slayings in the past two years. Because the nation's police forces are so corrupt - many cops moonlight for Mexico's $25 billion drug-trafficking industry - informants are especially important to interdiction efforts. (They helped cops last week locate a sophisticated, 260-yard narco-tunnel beneath Tijuana that almost reached the U.S. border.) Despite that, Mexican officials concede they have an utterly inadequate witness-protection system in place. "There is a vacuum regarding the rules and how to operate a witness...
...source adds that "it's of the utmost importance that new and specific rules" be adopted in Mexico for witness protection - and Bayardo's murder could prompt that reform. Described by officials as a "collaborating witness," Bayardo was arrested last year for allegedly taking $25,000 a month from the powerful Sinaloa cartel (headquartered in Mexico's northern Pacific state of Sinaloa) in exchange for information about police operations. Since then he had been providing crucial testimony not only regarding drug trafficking, but also about links between federal police bosses and Sinaloa capos...
...conviction.) He was also an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. So it's all the more astonishing that he was allowed to roam as freely, as openly and as unprotected as he was at noon on Wednesday, when he was sitting in a Starbucks in Mexico City's middle-class Del Valle neighborhood with a family friend. Two men with machine guns nonchalantly entered, walked to Bayardo's table and fired more than a dozen rounds, killing him and wounding the friend and a nearby customer. They just as calmly walked out and drove away...
Attorney General Arturo Chávez says he'll review Mexico's witness-protection program. But it will be difficult to build a proper protection apparatus when the Mexican cops assigned to do the protecting can so rarely be trusted. The Mexican government has vowed to investigate Bayardo's murder; presumably one of the key focuses will be whether any officers inside the witness-protection program itself tipped off cartel bosses as to his movements and whereabouts...