Word: san
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Garza went to a children's art exhibit that night at a church in San Pedro, a wealthy suburb of Monterrey. As he stepped out for a moment with his daughter to take a cell-phone call, a gunman shot him repeatedly in the head with a semiautomatic pistol. A witness testified that the triggerman was left-handed--leading investigators to suspect Israel Ibarra, a rogue member of the suburb's élite SWAT unit, police sources say. But before police could arrest Ibarra, he was eliminated by another narco gunman. Like most of the more than 100 other drug...
...have long held the view that drug traffickers kill only one another, but the latest surge in violence is claiming a broader range of victims, including police, businesspeople, journalists and politicians. "Now people realize these animals finish off innocent lives as well as one another," says Fernando Margáin, San Pedro's mayor...
Nowhere is the drug war's resurgence more stunning than in Monterrey, a city of 3 million where 1,200 U.S. businesses have major operations. As recently as 2005, the global consulting firm Mercer ranked it Latin America's second safest city (behind San Juan, Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory). But then the Zetas arrived. They terrorized the border by day and retired by night to garish mansions in Monterrey and suburbs like San Pedro, not far from the city's business nobility. "No one wanted to admit that we'd become a dormitory for drug lords," says Monterrey publisher...
Even in affluent places like San Pedro, where police salaries are double those of most local and state cops in the rest of Mexico, drug kingpins can be attractive employers. Some San Pedro officers have been spotted moonlighting as security guards at Zetas' homes, police sources say. A rival cartel, the Sinaloa mafia, has countered by recruiting members of San Pedro's SWAT unit. More than 200 police officers in Monterrey and Nuevo León have been either arrested or investigated for involvement in organized crime this year. "We never imagined the penetration of drug trafficking in our society...
...Security Secretary Genaro García Luna, who recently replaced 284 federal police commanders, ordered federal and state officers to undergo training courses with U.S., Canadian and European experts. Many cities and states have announced pay raises of as much as 40% to dissuade cops from joining the narcos. In San Pedro, Margáin has created trusts to finance better housing and benefits for police, and he'll spend $500,000 this year to give them heavier weapons, like AR-15 automatic rifles. "Mexico has no choice," he says, "but to start treating police with more human dignity...