By Daniel Borunda
El Paso Times
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — The only police officer in the village of Guadalupe had still not surfaced Monday, four days after being abducted by gunmen who stormed into her home.
Erika Gándara, 28, was the Mexican border village’s entire police force, taking a job no one else wanted in the farming communities in the violent Valley of Juárez.
The rural valley is across the border from the Fabens area east of El Paso. It is a busy smuggling corridor.
A spokesman for the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office said Monday that authorities were aware of the Gándara incident but there was still no official report of the kidnapping.
Narco-violence is so rampant in the Valley of Juárez that police there have short careers.
Nearly two years ago, three severed heads were left in an ice chest in the plaza in Guadalupe. One of the heads belonged to a police commander. Several town council members have also been murdered.
Gándara joined the then eight-officer department as a dispatcher in June 2009. One officer was killed in her first week and the other seven resigned within a year. By this summer, Gándara was the last officer left.
There have been two homicides in Guadalupe since Gándara’s disappearance.
Chihuahua state police said Gerardo Chavez Nu?ez, 54, was shot and killed Christmas Eve inside a boot shop in town. On Sunday, the body of Rigoberto Reyes Silva, 46, was found in an arroyo. He appeared to have been stabbed.
Gándara was not the only woman running a police department in the valley. Marisol Valles Garcia, a 20-year-old college criminology student, became police chief in October in the nearby town of Praxedis G. Guerrero.
Copyright 2010 El Paso Times, a MediaNews Group Newspaper