Women on the front line of Mexico's drugs war

HER uncle, the mayor who gave her the job nobody else wanted, warned her to keep a low profile, to not make too much of being the last remaining police officer in a town where the rest of the force had quit or been killed.

But in pictures for local papers, rika Gndara, 28, seemed to relish the role, posing with a semi-automatic rifle and talking openly about the importance of her new job.

"I am the only police in this town, the authority," she boasted. Then, two days before Christmas, a group of armed men took her from her home, residents say, and she has not been seen since.

It was an ominous punctuation mark on the wave of terror that has turned this cotton farming town near Texas into a frightened outpost of the drug war. Nearly half of its 9,000 residents have fled, local officials say, leaving block after block of scorched homes and businesses and, now, not one regular police officer.

Far from infamous cities like Ciudad Jurez, one of the most violent places in the Americas, the war with organised crime can batter small towns just as hard, if with less notice.

The cotton towns south of Jurez sit in territory disputed by at least two major drug trafficking groups, leading to deadly power struggles. But the lack of adequately-trained police officers, a long-standing crisis that the government has sought to address with little resolution, allows criminal groups to have their way.

Some towns consider themselves so vulnerable that they have gone out of their way not to antagonise criminals. Believing that those involved in organised crime would be less inclined to harm women - and because fewer men are willing to take the job - local officials have appointed women in the past year to senior police ranks in small cities and towns here in Chihuahua, the country's most violent state. After a spate of violence in a neighbouring town, Praxdis Guerrero, local officials selected a 20-year-old college student in November as police chief to run the force of nine women and two men, hoping that criminal networks would see her as less threatening.

Marisol Valles, the young police chief, has made it clear that she leaves major crimes to state and federal authorities to investigate. Really, she said, she just reviews civil infractions and rarely leaves the office. "I am more like an administrator," said Valles, who does not carry a gun or wear a uniform.

But the criminals have not discriminated. Hermila Garca, the woman appointed police chief of Meoqui, a small city in central Chihuahua, was killed on 30 November after only a month in the job.

Guadalupe tried to put a non-threatening face on law enforcement by appointing Gndara chief in October. But it appears that she tried - or at least talked about - taking the job more seriously, to the regret of her uncle, Mayor Toms Archuleta. He had good reason to counsel a low profile: He took office after his predecessor was killed last summer, part of a wave of assassinations of local officials across Mexico.

"I told rika, ‘Be careful,' to not make waves," Archuleta said, openly frustrated by the picture of her with the rifle. Like Valles, her role is more to issue citations, leaving serious crimes to state and federal authorities.

Guadalupe has plenty of them to investigate. There are as many abandoned homes and businesses - several of them gutted - as occupied ones.

One recent morning, four homes smouldered from an attack and two people had been shot dead with high-powered weapons, the bullets leaving several gaping holes in cinder-block walls.

Few people leave their homes after 5pm, and see soldiers and police officers only briefly after a major crime or when they are guarding the monthly delivery of government pension cheques for retirees.

"We lock ourselves in most of the time," said Eduardo Contreras, 26, as he watched residents douse and pick through the embers of their smouldering homes.

Townspeople complain that the soldiers or state and federal police officers were rarely seen except after major violence had occurred.

"There is no police, no fire department, no social services, nothing here," said a middle-aged matriarch from one burned-out home, declining to give her name for fear of reprisals. "People get away with everything here. Nothing gets investigated, not even murders."

Archuleta said that he had turned to his niece when nobody else would take the job. She had experience as a security guard and appeared not to be involved in any criminal activity.

He added: "Who knows what people do in their private lives but I did not think she was involved in anything."