Thousands protest violence in Mexico
Pastor Dale Morgan
Thousands protest violence in Mexico*
The Associated Press
Sunday, May 11, 2008; 7:30 PM
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- Thousands of white-clad people marched silently
Sunday to protest a surge of drug-related violence in a Mexican city
across from Texas where the No. 2 police officer was shot dead.
The crowd of several thousand students, church leaders, businessmen and
politicians walked for about four miles (six kilometers) across Ciudad
Juarez to a park near a border crossing, breaking the silence in a burst
of speeches, dancing and singing.
More than 200 people have been killed so far this year in Ciudad Juarez.
The city of 1.3 million across the border from El Paso, Texas, is home
base for the powerful Juarez drug cartel.
The assassination of police director Juan Antonio Roman Garcia on
Saturday came despite the deployment of more than 2,500 soldiers and
federal police to the city and surrounding Chihuahua state in March.
"We need to unite against this," said Julian Ochoa, an architecture
student at the march. "I hope we achieve something."
An increase in drug-related homicides, shootouts, kidnappings and car
thefts near the border prompted U.S. State Department to warn Americans
last month of rising violence in the region, though it stopped short of
advising against travel here.
On Saturday, police arrested six suspected gang members after a gunfight
in the northern state of Sinaloa. One of the six, Alfonso Gutierrez
Loera, 25, identified himself as a cousin of suspected Sinaloa cartel
chief Joaquin Guzman, according the Public Safety Department. Gutierrez
Loera and another suspect were wounded in the shootout.