“I am the law,” Erika Gandara tells Reporters back in November of last year. In December, a group of armed men took her from home and she hasn’t been seen since. Given the position of police chief in October, the 28-year-old female police chief was the only officer left standing to protect the small cotton farming Mexican town near Texas called, Guadalupe Distrito Bravos after other officers have either been killed or have quit the force.
Although it is the 21st century and a woman can do anything a man can do, Mexico is forced to place women into high ranking law enforcement positions hoping not to antagonize criminal organizations. Mexican officials are left with no other choice, with fewer men willing to join the police force they hope that the presence of a female police chief would sway drug cartels from harming female officers.
However, members of the drug cartel aren’t discriminating against female police chiefs. On November 30th, Hermila Garcia a woman officer appointed to police chief in Meoqui , a small city in Chihuahua, was killed after only being on the job for a month. Since the drug war has started officials have been appointing handfuls of female officers to police ranks in small towns and cities located in Chihuahua which has been identified as the country’s most violent state.
In Praxedis Guerrero, 20-year-old Marisol Valles was selected by local officials to become the town’s police chief and run the police force of only nine women and two men. Valles has made it clear that she will be leaving major crimes to state and federal authorities and will utilize the police department to focus on social issues. “I am more like an administrator, who does not carry a gun or wear a uniform,” Valles has said, promising to simply review civil infractions issued by other officers.
Since Gandara’s disappearance, the town of Guadalupe Distrito Bravos has fallen into a state of disarray. Once populated around 9,000, numbers have dropped leaving behind abandoned houses and businesses with many of them being heavily gutted. People still living within the town do not leave their homes after 5pm and are barely protected since soldiers and police officers visited only on monthly basis. With no one to lead a barely manned police force, how long will the people of Mexico last in bearing the grunt of this drug war?
