Pink crosses memorialize women murdered in Ciudad Juarez. (Image by iose.)

According to an article from an Australian news service, a 20-year-old criminology student has been named Chief of Police in a Mexican border town near Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s most violent city, simply because no one else wanted the job. It may sound like an offbeat human-interest story, but the violence in that city, particularly against women, has long been horrific. An excerpt:

“A 20-YEAR-OLD female criminology student has been named police chief of a northern Mexican border town plagued by drug violence because no one else wanted the job.

Marisol Valles became director of municipal public security of Guadalupe ‘since she was the only person to accept the position,’ the mayor’s office of the town of some 10,000 people near the US border told local media yesterday.

Ms Valles is studying criminology in Mexico’s most violent city of Ciudad Juarez, some 60km west of Guadalupe.

Raging turf battles between rival drug gangs have left some 6500 people dead in Ciudad Juarez alone in the past three years.

Much of Chihuahua state has suffered from the spiral of drug violence, including in Guadalupe, where the mayor was murdered in June and police officers and security agents have been killed, some of them beheaded.”