SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia — The shocking video, taken from a security camera, showed the killer in a backward baseball cap and dark glasses, stalking his terrified prey in broad daylight on a city street. His victim seemed to plead for his life and tried to stumble away before the killer, gripping the pistol in two hands, shot the man dead beside a parked car.

Played over and over on television here, the video has crystallized public outrage over a wave of killings in this city of 1.6 million, Bolivia’s most populous and a center of the country’s growing drug trade. It has become a stark example of increasing violent crime in a country that has long been safer than many of its neighbors.

The government response was blunt.

“Since they are so coldblooded when it comes to killing, I want them brought in immediately, dead or alive,” Carlos Romero, one of the top ministers in the cabinet of President Evo Morales, said in the days after the slaying, feeding a common perception that the man was killed by a hired assassin, perhaps because of a drug dispute. “We will not allow hired killers to become established in Bolivia.”

Rubén Costas, the governor of Santa Cruz Department, which includes the city of the same name, even warned that the wave of killings risked turning Santa Cruz into another Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican city infamous for a level of drug violence many times worse than what residents are facing here.