Female police chief killed by drug cartels in Mexico

A female lawyer who took over as chief of police in a Mexican town and pledged to take on the drugs cartels has been gunned down two months after she took the job.
 
Hermila Garcia was shot dead by gunmen as she drove to work in the town of Meoqui, outside Chihuahua City in the north of the country, earlier this week.
 
Garcia was one of several women who have come forward in recent months to run police departments, because many men are too frightened to challenge the activities of the drugs cartels.
 
Among them are two housewives and, most famously, a 20-year-old student called Marisol Valles Garcia, who took over the police department in the town of Praxedis, also in the lawless state of Chihuahua.
 
Hermila Garcia, known as 'La Jefa', was a 38-year-old single woman with no children. She claimed not to be afraid of the murderous narcotics smugglers who have killed thousands in the violence that has engulfed Mexico in recent years.

She did not carry weapons or have bodyguards. Her motto was: "If you don't owe anything, you don't fear anything". But her assassination is being interpreted as a warning that women are also considered fair game by the drugs lords.
 
On the same day as she was killed, Mexican soldiers found the bodies of 18 people buried on a ranch near the Texas border, where the discovery of mass graves is becoming a regular occurence.
 
More than 28,000 people have died in the escalating drugs wars that have gripped Mexico since 2006, when the government launched a military crackdown on organised crime. ·