Mexican Police Chief, 20, Advocates All-Female Patrols

(Oct. 26) -- Amid a wave of bloodshed in Mexico's northern borderlands, there's a new cop in town. Marisol Valles Garcia, a 20-year-old college student studying criminology, beat 20 other contenders to become police chief of Praxedis, a rural community across the border from Fort Hancock, Texas, that has been rocked by drug-gang violence in recent months.

After all, somebody had to do it.

"Of course I'm afraid, as anyone would be," Valles Garcia told AOL News. "But I really had the desire to do something for my community."

Her approach has raised eyebrows and some hopes even outside her town, one of a string of farming and manufacturing centers in the Juarez Valley, about 35 miles southeast of Mexico's murder capital, Ciudad Juarez.


In spillover violence, rival drug cartels have burned down homes and churches and assassinated local political leaders in the Juarez Valley as they struggle for control of a lucrative trafficking route into the United States.

Valles Garcia got the Praxedis job because she offered a radically new police strategy: emphasize crime prevention and community development and let state and federal forces take on the cartels. Until now, city cops were seen as backup for the federal police and frequently got sucked into the violent tit-for-tat killings that have made the region so dangerous. Under Valles Garcia, the force will have a more proactive role, building social development programs, rather than just simply doing patrols and responding to shots fired.

She intends to send out all-female patrols -- because women "tend to be more sensitive and less intimidating," she said -- backed up by two male officers at the station, along with one patrol vehicle, a rifle and a shotgun. The chief herself freely acknowledges that she doesn't know how to shoot a gun.

"We're not going to walk around armed because we don't want people to be afraid," Valles Garcia said. "We're creating youth programs and we're going to go door to door to meet with people and give them some confidence." She said a musician in the town told police he would like to teach young people how to play the guitar, so Valles Garcia found him a place to hold lessons in the town's library. She also wants to restore the civic activities the town enjoyed before the cartels starting using it as a staging ground, such as sports and public dances.

Praxedis is in one of Mexico's toughest regions. Intense fighting has erupted around Ciudad Juarez as the local capo, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, fights off Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, Mexico's most wanted fugitive. A massacre Friday at a party in Juarez left 13 young people dead, underscoring the danger of gathering in public places in the city.

The surrounding region has been deeply affected. Gunmen tracked down and killed the regional president of nearby El Porvenir and his son on Oct. 17 in Ciudad Juarez. That crime echoed a June slaying, in which the mayor of the small community of Guadalupe was shot to death in Juarez, where he had sought refuge after receiving death threats.

A flare-up of violence in the Juarez Valley in March left 50 people dead. An armed commando shot up the Praxedis police station and set houses on fire. Narcomantas, or threatening messages left by drug traffickers, were hung around the city, warning residents to flee by April 4. A Catholic church in El Porvenir was torched on Good Friday.

Almost 7,000 people have been killed in and around Juarez since early 2008, while more than 29,000 people have died across Mexico since President Felipe Calderon unleashed federal forces to take on the cartels in December 2006.

"We have to try something new," said Valles Garcia, who lives in Praxedis with her husband and newborn.

About 150 federal police officers entered Praxedis late last year, but Valles Garcia says she will leave the gun battles to them.

Town officials in Praxedis are willing to try Valles Garcia's approach, since all previous strategies to temper organize crime have so far been unsuccessful.

"The approach is not to go after bad guys but rather to promote good behavior," Andres Morales, the city's No. 2 official, told AOL News. "This is a completely new program because the traditional approach hasn't delivered the hoped-for results."

Valles Garcia's unorthodox appointment comes amid a nationwide debate over whether to streamline the country's 2,400-plus municipal forces into 32 state-run departments.

Calderon is in favor of such a streamlining, and he's proposing raising the new state police salaries from as little as $300 per month, which is what some municipal cops receive, to more than $1,200 per month. Former President Vicente Fox is among other top Mexican figures calling for municipal forces to be dissolved. (Right now, Morales acknowledges, no one on the Praxedis payroll is getting paid, since the town budget has dried up.)

The central Mexican state of Aguascalientes began a three-month process to hand over local police authority to the state, CNNMexico reported Oct. 6, and to "purge the police of inefficient or corrupt elements," the state's secretary of security, Rolando Hidalgo Eddy, told the channel.

Cesar Duarte, the newly elected governor of Chihuahua, which includes Ciudad Juarez and has one of the nation's highest levels of bloodshed, will meet with the state's 67 mayors to consider a similar project. And one other approach Duarte has his eyes on is the kinder, gentler policing Marisol Valles Garcia promises to bring to Praxedis.