Mexico rejects truce with drug cartels

Mexican officials have rejected calls by a state prosecutor for truce between the government and drug cartels operating in the Latin American country. Mexico's federal security spokesman, Alejandro Poire, ruled out any type of armistice with drug-trafficking groups in the country on Monday, stressing that they must be detained and dismantled, the Associated Press reported. "Regarding calls by authorities for the criminals to change their behavior, I think it couldn't be clearer that peace is not going to be achieved by asking the criminals for something," Poire said. "Peace is going to be achieved by bringing the criminals to justice ... that their thinking will not be influenced by appealing to their interests by calling on them to change their ways, but by giving them no choice but to submit to the law and stop their crimes," the Mexican security official added. The comments come after Alberto Lopez Rosas, the attorney general of Mexico's southern state of Guerrero, pleaded with the country's powerful drug cartels to join some kind of truce and "to respect the life of a city, the life of the populace, the life of society." Early in August, Mexican federal police officials captured Jose Antonio Acosta Hernandez, a former police officer and a key drug cartel leader, in the city of Chihuahua in northern Mexico. Hernandez was charged with ordering the murder of 1,500 people during a campaign of terror as a gang chieftain along the US border. Violent clashes among rival drug cartels have claimed the lives of over 40,000 people in Mexico since December 2006. Mexican government findings show that 2010 was the bloodiest year so far, with 15,273 drug-related murders. Mexican President Felipe Calderon has successfully pushed the United States to acknowledge its own responsibility for the violence in Mexico, since it is the American market that fuels drug-trafficking in the Latin American country. The guns used by Mexican drug gangs are mostly smuggled in from the US. In March 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton offered the clearest acknowledgment regarding the role the United States plays in the violent narcotics trade in Mexico.