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Official: Gunmen knew they were attacking US agents
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Gunmen who shot up an SUV carrying two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, killing one, knew they were attacking law enforcement officers judging from comments they made before opening fire, a U.S. official told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
The law enforcement official, who agreed to discuss the case only on condition of anonymity, refused to reveal the specific comments, but said the blue Suburban had diplomatic plates that also may have indicated who was on board.
But details emerging Wednesday indicated that while the gunmen may have known they were shooting law enforcement officers, they had not sought out the two agents.
Special Agent Jaime Zapata, 32, died and a second agent, Victor Avila, was wounded Tuesday when they were attacked on a four-lane federal highway after, according to a Mexican official, they stopped at a roadblock. The official wouldn't speak on the record because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the case.
The agents were most likely in the wrong place at the wrong time, driving a vehicle coveted by drug cartels, in what is now the most high profile attack on U.S. lawmen in Mexico since the 1985 torture and killing of DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena.
"That was clearly one of an agent being targeted," former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Antonio Garza said of Camarena in a statement. "Yesterday's murder appears to be lower-level cartel members acting with the intention of robbery or extortion."
President Barack Obama expressed condolences Wednesday to Zapata's family.
Photo gallery: Life of Jaime Zapata
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder announced a joint task force led by the FBI to help Mexico find the killers.
The State Department also expressed confidence in the ability of President Felipe Calderon's government to pursue the case.
"The Calderon government has stepped forward very courageously in recent years. They are, with the United States' help, taking aggressive action against the perpetrators of this kind of violence," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters in Washington.
Zapata and Avila, both assigned to the ICE attache office in Mexico City, were attacked in the northern state of San Luis Potosi — an area where violence is on the rise from drug cartels fighting for territory. Avila was shot twice in the leg and taken to a U.S. hospital, where he was in stable condition, according to an ICE statement Wednesday.
The two agents were driving between Mexico City and the northern city of Monterrey on routine business and not as part of an investigation, said a U.S. federal law enforcement official, who was not authorized to discuss the case publicly.
Al Pena, a senior ICE official until he retired in December, said the agents arranged to meet Monterrey-based ICE agents midway between Mexico City and Monterrey to pick up equipment. They were returning south to Mexico City when attacked. He didn't know what equipment the ICE agents exchanged.
Pena, who was the Homeland Security attache in Mexico City in 2008 and 2009, said the ICE office in Mexico works on many issues — from training customs investigators to investigating drug and human trafficking, gun running and money laundering.
Avila "was working on many, many issues," said Pena, who knows him well. "There's not much specialization when you have an office that small."
San Luis Potosi Gov. Fernando Toranzo told W Radio in Mexico that he has seen a dramatic rise in organized crime in his state, which borders two northern states where the Gulf and Zetas cartels have waged bloody battles over territory.
"It's had a major impact that we hadn't see before," Toranzo said. "Right now we're waging a direct fight with all our state resources to restore order."
Since Calderon launched a crackdown on organized crime shortly after assuming the presidency in December 2006, almost 35,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence.
Zapata, who joined ICE in 2006, served on the Human Smuggling and Trafficking Unit as well as the Border Enforcement Security Task Force. He also was a member of the U.S. Border Patrol in Yuma, Arizona. The agency didn't provide his age but said he was a native of Brownsville, Texas, who graduated from the University of Texas at Brownsville in 2005.
Though Mexico is seeing record rates of violence, it is rare for U.S. officials to be attacked. The U.S. government, however, has become increasingly concerned about the safety of its employees in the country.
In March, a U.S. employee of the American consulate in Ciudad Juarez, her husband and a Mexican tied to the consulate were killed when drug gang members fired on their cars after they left a children's party in the city across from El Paso, Texas.
The U.S. State Department has taken several measures over the past year to protect consulate employees and their families. It has at times authorized the departure of relatives of U.S. government employees in northern Mexican cities.
In July, it temporarily closed the consulate in Ciudad Juarez after receiving unspecified threats. Earlier this month, the consulate in Guadalajara prohibited U.S. government officials from traveling after dark on the road to the airport because of cartel-related attacks in Mexico's second-largest city.
Associated Press writers Alicia A. Caldwell, Eileen Sullivan, Matthew Lee in Washington, Martha Mendoza in Santa Cruz, California, Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Will Weissert in El Paso, Texas, contributed to this report.
