Mexican drug cartels have declared open-season on police officers

In October 2010, police headquarters in Los Ramones in the state of Nuevo Leon was hit with more than 1,000 bullets and six grenades. The attack lasted a harrowing 20 minutes. Incredibly, no officers were injured in the assault.

Los Ramones Mayor Santos Salinas told the Noroeste newspaper: “Fortunately, those who were inside the building threw themselves on the ground and nobody was hurt.”

However, the attack resulted in the resignation of the town’s entire 14-member police force.

While such an attack on a police headquarters at the hands of organized crime would be front-page news and cause for great alarm in the United States, high-profile murders of police officers by the powerful Mexican drug cartels have become commonplace.

-In April 2010, two police vehicles were ambushed by gunmen at a busy intersection in Juarez, leaving seven police officers shot to death and two more seriously wounded.

According to Chihuahua authorities, officers stopped to speak with a street vendor who had flagged them down for help when gunmen suddenly appeared and opened fire.

-On one day in December 2010, cartel gunmen killed four police officers in three coordinated attacks in and around the northern Mexican city of Monterrey.

One of the attacks was carried out on a police station, where a doctor who was giving exams to officers was also killed.

Shortly after the police station was hit with a hail of bullets, two more officers were murdered in separate attacks in the Monterrey suburb of Guadalupe.

-In July 2009, the bodies of 12 police officers were found in the western state of Michoacan. All of the officers had been tortured before being shot to death.

The murders were committed by the La Familia Cartel notorious for their attacks against law enforcement.

According to Monte Alejandro Rubido, a senior federal security official, the 11 men and one woman were actually off duty when they were ambushed.

-In June 2008, husband and wife police officers Gabriel Padilla Perez and Claudia Tovar Carreon were shot to death in front of their Juarez home, as they left for work. The couple left behind two small children. A day earlier, a 25-year-old pregnant woman was killed outside a shopping mall a few miles away, as a shootout broke-out between rival gang members.

-Also in 2008, Villa Ahumada Police Chief Jesus Blanco Cano was shot to death after only one day on the job. The town is located in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua which is the territory of the very violent and powerful Juarez drug cartel.

The town had been without a police chief since for months, after a band of 70 gunmen raided the town and murdered the previous chief, two of his officers along with several civilians. After the attack, the rest of the town´s 20-officer police force resigned.

-In May 2008, the chief of Mexico´s federal police force was assassinated entering his home in Mexico City. Commander Edgar Millan Gomez and his bodyguards were gunned down by several men in an ambush-style attack. He was shot nine times and died a short time later, after being taken to a hospital.

Commander Gomez was to date, the highest-ranking law enforcement official to fall victim to the current drug war. Many believe that his murder was in retaliation for the January arrest of Sinaloa Cartel leader Alfredo Beltran Leyva.

Since 2006, nearly 500 police officers, soldiers, and prosecutors have been killed by cartel gunmen.

In May 2008, Homeland Security officials announced to the press that there were, at the time, three Mexican police chiefs seeking asylum in the U.S.

Numbers of Mexican police officials have been seeking safety in the U.S. for over two years now.

Former Deputy Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection Jayson Ahern told the Associated Press: "They´re basically abandoned by their police officers or police departments in many cases."

Ahern went on to say: "It´s like a military fight. I don´t think that generally the American public has any sense of the level of violence that occurs on the border."

Last week, Jose Alarcon, a former Mexican police officer who fled Juarez, was denied asylum by a federal immigration judge in Dallas. That decision could very well amount to a death sentence for the former officer.