U.S. consulate aide, husband die in Mexico border violence

LA UNION, Mexico — Gunmen believed linked to drug traffickers shot and killed an American consulate worker and her husband in the violence-racked border town of Ciudad Juárez over the weekend, leaving their baby wailing in the back seat of their car, authorities said Sunday.

Gunmen also killed the husband of another consular employee and wounded his two young children.

The shootings appeared to be the first deadly attacks on U.S. officials and their families by Mexico's powerful drug organizations. They came during a particularly bloody weekend when nearly 50 people were killed across Mexico in drug-gang violence, including attacks in Acapulco as American college students began arriving for spring break.

The killings came after threats against U.S. diplomats along the Mexican border and complaints from consulate workers that drug-related violence was growing untenable, U.S. officials said.

Even before the shootings, the State Department quietly had made the decision to allow consulate workers to evacuate their families to the United States.

President Obama expressed outrage at the "brutal murders." Mexican President Felipe Calderón said he would press forward with "all available resources" to control the lawlessness in Ciudad Juárez and elsewhere.

The FBI was sending agents Sunday to the city to assist with the investigation, and U.S. diplomats also were en route to meet with their Mexican counterparts, said Roberta Jacobson, the deputy assistant secretary of state who handles Mexico.

"We take very seriously when our employees are harmed, whether the intention was to harm U.S. employees or not," she said via telephone. "The question of whether this represents some ratcheting up of the drug war will depend on the reason behind the killings."

The coordinated nature of the attacks, the automatic weapons used and the locations in a city where drug cartels control virtually all illicit activity point toward traffickers as the likely suspects, said Mexican and U.S. officials who declined to be identified.

But one Mexican law-enforcement official said he suspected the consulate employees might have been singled out because of their work as providers of visas, not as an attack by the cartels against the United States.

U.S. interests in Mexico have been attacked by drug traffickers previously, but never with such brutality. Attackers linked to the Gulf Cartel shot at and hurled a grenade, which did not explode, at the U.S. consulate in Monterrey in 2008, Mexican authorities said.

Obama was quick to laud the anti-drug offense launched three years ago by Calderón, which is backed up with more than $1 billion in U.S. funds. But a growing chorus of critics of Mexico's drug war, which has led to spiraling levels of violence, have begun calling on Calderón to find a new approach.

One, former Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda, said Sunday "it is surprising that this has not happened before." The tragedy, he said, should prompt the Obama administration to rethink its support for what he said was Calderón's failed strategy.

The government shifted course recently after three years of its military-led crackdown on drug cartels and acknowledged it has to involve citizens in the fight and deal with the social breakdown fueling the violence.

As killings have multiplied in Mexico, with Ciudad Juárez as the epicenter, the government long has argued that the overwhelming majority of drug-war casualties are in the narcotics business.

The shootings in Ciudad Juárez took place in broad daylight, within minutes of each other Saturday afternoon as the victims were on their way home from a social gathering at another consulate worker's home.

Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros, 37, the husband of a Mexican worker in the U.S. consulate, was found dead in a white Honda Pilot, with bullet wounds to his body, the authorities said. Two wounded children, ages 4 and 7, in the back seat were taken to a hospital.

Another call came in exactly 10 minutes later, several miles away.

This time it was a Toyota RAV 4 with Texas plates that had been shot up, with two dead adults inside and a baby crying from a car seat in the back. A relative identified the couple to The Associated Press as Lesley A. Enriquez, 35, a consulate employee, and her husband, Arthur H. Redelf, 34, U.S. citizens from across the border in El Paso, Texas.

Enriquez was shot in the head. Her husband was shot in the neck and left arm.

Alarmed by the brazen shootings, the State Department announced Sunday that employees at a string of U.S. consular offices along the Mexican border — Tijuana, Nogales, Ciudad Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey and Matamoros — could evacuate their families to the United States.

The consular agency in Reynosa was temporarily closed in recent weeks after violence in that city grew.

Strengthening its travel warning for Mexico, the State Department said, "While most crime victims are Mexican citizens, the uncertain security situation poses serious risks for U.S. citizens as well."