By IPS Correspondents
MEXICO CITY, Mar 27 2009 (IPS)

Pilar identified seven drug traffickers who allegedly gunned down 12 young people and a baby on a street in the picturesque tourist town of Creel in August in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. The authorities also know who they are. But not one of the suspects has been arrested.

And now, the father of one of the victims of last year's shootings, who was pressing for justice, has been murdered.

Pilar, who lost a family member in the attack, told IPS that "the narcos make their power felt, and the authorities are accomplices."

"That means they could kill me," added the woman, who did not use her real name, or the names of the suspects she had identified.

Daniel Parras, the father of one of the victims of the Creel killings, had taken part in several protests held to demand justice. His body was found with two bullets to the head in a car stopped along a highway in Chihuahua on Mar. 20.

The August killings in the sleepy mountain town of Creel, population 6,000, where heavily armed men got out of three cars and opened fire as they approached a group of locals chatting on the street, made international headlines.

In that state on the U.S. border, some 1,700 people were killed last year, 26 percent of the 6,500 drug-related killings around the country.

And so far this year, there have been around 400 murders in Chihuahua, of the more than 1,500 in Mexico as a whole.

But in the overwhelming majority of drug-related murders, no one is arrested, let alone convicted. Suspects were arrested in less than a dozen of the cases in Chihuahua.

In a show of defiance and power, a group of presumed drug traffickers attacked the motorcade of Chihuahua Governor José Reyes on Feb. 22. A security agent was killed in the shootout, and a wounded gunman was captured.

The government of Felipe Calderón has sent some 5,000 soldiers and 3,500 federal police to the northern state to attempt to establish law and order and fight drug trafficking. But neither the violence nor the impunity has been curbed.

The families of the victims of the Creel killings gave the state prosecutor’s office – which answers to the government of Chihuahua, in the hands of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) – the names and even the addresses of the alleged killers last year.

"But the authorities, because of fear or corruption, have not arrested them," Jorge Espino, a member of an investigative commission in the Chihuahua state legislature, told IPS.

According to the state lawmaker, who belongs to President Calderón’s National Action Party (PAN), the corruption among the police and officials in Chihuahua "is at record levels," which makes it impossible to eradicate the violence.

Along with fellow legislators from other parties, with the exception of the PRI, Espino is demanding that the investigation of the Creel killings be put in the hands of the federal prosecutor’s office.

Deputy Espino "is one of the few who have taken an interest in our case, but we have lost trust in the state prosecutor’s office, and we have little confidence in the federal prosecutor’s office," said Pilar. "No one seems to want to bring about justice."

Pilar said the killers were after a rival who was not even in the group of people they gunned down.

"Things were always so peaceful and calm here, but the massacre changed the town a little. People no longer go out at night, and the number of tourists has dropped," the local parish priest, Javier Ávila, told IPS on the telephone from Creel.

Creel, 170 km from the city of Chihuahua, the state capital, is near a mountain lake and a valley with strange rock formations, and is a tourist destination as well as a stop on the way to other attractions that draw mainly foreign visitors.

The police had disappeared from the streets of Creel a few hours before the 13 victims – mainly young men between the ages of 18 and 20 – were caught in a rain of bullets.

When he heard the gunfire, Ávila cut short the mass he was celebrating and went to see what was happening, less than 10 minutes from his church.

The Jesuit priest saw the bodies in an enormous pool of blood. Not a single police officer was present. One of the older victims, age 30, was holding a dead baby in his arms.

Ávila filmed the scene and counted the bodies, amidst the screams and cries of the victims’ families, friends and neighbours.

"I had to act as prosecutor and crime scene investigator; there was no other alternative, since the police were not there," said the priest.

According to witnesses, the local police had left town after receiving death threats.

"Now we have federal police officers, not like on that occasion, but the fear is still in the air," said Ávila, who lamented Daniel Parras’s murder.

In Pilar’s view, the killings in Creel are one more example of the violence that has Chihuahua in its grip, and of the incapacity of the police, prosecutors and judges to solve crimes and bring the perpetrators to justice.

"The criminals took away our loved ones, and because we reported them, they can also kill us. Who will help us?" she asked.

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