| Photo: Borderland Beat |
| Trust me, you don’t wanna be police chief of Guadalupe. |
A 20-year-old female student majoring in criminology has been named police chief of a violence-torn northern Mexican border town — because nobody else wanted the job.
Marisol Valles became director of municipal public security of Guadalupe on October 18 “since she was the only person to accept the position,” according to the mayor’s office, reports AFP. Guadalupe is home to about 10,000 people.
Valles is studying criminology in Mexico’s most violent city, Ciudad Juarez, about 37 miles west of Guadalupe. Three years of ongoing turf battles between rival drug gangs have claimed 6,500 lives in Juarez alone.
Much of Chihuahua, the Mexican state within which Guadalupe is located, has suffered from the drug cartel-related violence. The mayor of Guadalupe was murdered in June and police officers and security agents have been killed, with some of them being beheaded.
There were at least eight murders last week alone in Guadalupe, in an area seen as a high-traffic transit point for drugs across the border into neighboring Texas.
More than 28,000 people have died throughout Mexico in suspected drug violence since December 2006, when the Mexican government launched an all-out offensive against drug cartels, deploying 50,000 troops.
Guadalupe has only one police patrol car, and receives security help from the Mexican army.