MEXICO CITY — Hooded gunmen killed the mayor of a small town in the northern Mexico state of San Luis Potosi on Wednesday, and prosecutors announced the arrest of seven suspects in the massacre of 72 migrants in August.
President Felipe Calderon’s office issued a statement saying he condemned the slaying of El Naranjo Mayor Alexander Lopez Garcia, who was killed Wednesday after four hitmen pulled up in a vehicle. He was the third mayor to be killed in Mexico in less than a month.
Amid the violence, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Mexico is “looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago, where the narco-traffickers control certain parts of the country.”
Her remarks raised hackles in Mexico.
“Of course, we do not agree . . . given that there are very important differences between what Colombia faced then and what Mexico faces today,” Mexican government security spokesman Alejandro Poire said. Officials say drug cartels are not allied with domestic rebel insurgencies, do not have political influence or following, and do not control of large swaths of the country.
In Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s, the Medellin drug cartel waged a full assault on the state. It used bullets and bribes against police, politicians and judges, and turned to terror attacks against civilians.
Attacks such as Wednesday’s shooting death of Lopez Garcia suggest Mexico’s cartels are indeed targeting civilian government, using both violence and corruption.
On Aug. 29, the mayor of a town just across the state line in Tamaulipas was shot to death. The mayor of Santiago, a town in the neighboring state of Nuevo Leon, was found dead Aug. 18; local police allied with a drug gang are suspected.
Clinton made her statements Wednesday in Washington at the Council on Foreign Relations, where she said drug cartels are “morphing into, or making common cause with, what we would consider an insurgency in Mexico and in Central America.”
She said “we need to figure out what are the equivalents” for Mexico and Central America of the U.S. Plan Colombia, in which U.S. special-forces teams trained Colombian troops and U.S. advisers were attached to Colombian military units.
Also Wednesday, the Mexican government said marines had arrested seven gunmen allegedly belonging to the Zetas drug gang in the killings of 72 Central and South American migrants last month. The arrests were announced a day after the bodies of two men who participated in the initial probe of the massacre were found.
