Student becomes new police chief in Mexican town
Marisol Valles, 20, who is studying criminology, has yet to make an arrest but is being called Mexico's bravest woman
She is a petite 20-year-old college student who paints her nails pink, has an infant son and believes in non-violence: meet Marisol Valles, the newest police chief in Mexico's drug war cauldron. The town of Praxedis Guadalupe Guerrero on the Texas border has astonished Mexico by appointing Valles to head a police force in the heart of a traditional centre for narco-traffickers. The criminology student has yet to make an arrest but has already been hailed Mexico's bravest woman for taking such a post in Juarez valley, a strip of about a dozen towns and villages where shadowy groups slaughter and mutilate police and civilians with impunity [...] The new police chief heads a force of just 13 agents, nine of them women, with one working patrol car, three automatic rifles and a pistol. Gunmen killed a local official and his son last weekend as Valles prepared to start her job... Guardian