E-mail Story
Print Friendly
Send E-mail
Reprint story
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Ciudad Juárez Is A City Under Siege
By Rene Romo
Copyright © 2009 Albuquerque Journal
Journal Southern Bureau
CIUDAD JUÁREZ — The recent arrival of 3,200 soldiers in this teeming industrial city appears to have suppressed its furious murder rate, but it wasn't enough last Wednesday to save a Juárez lawyer from assassination at 10 o'clock in the morning in an upscale commercial district.
The 52-year-old man had stopped his Mercedes-Benz at a busy intersection when another car pulled in front of his and a man jumped out, firing a handgun repeatedly.
The Wednesday morning shooting occurred as a Journal reporter and photographer prepared to meet with Enrique Torres, spokesman for Joint Operation Chihuahua, the name for a big, new contingent of federal troops in the city.
"Someone's just been shot," Torres said after answering his cell phone.
It was a reminder to a city numbed by more than a year of steady and shocking violence that, while heavily armed troops may control the streets, they are not yet in control of warring drug cartels.
"They kill where they want," said Roberto Martinez, a 39-year-old Juárez native and waiter who heard, from inside the restaurant where he works, the steady popping of gunfire that killed the lawyer.
Martinez said it was good to see the troops arrive, but added: "It seems like it's not going to stop. They keep killing people."
Drug cartels battling for control of trafficking routes into their most lucrative market, the United States, killed more than 6,000 people across Mexico in 2008. More than 1,600 of those murders occurred in Ciudad Juárez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso and Sunland Park, N.M.
More than 380 people were killed in the sprawling Mexican industrial city in the first two months of 2009, before President Felipe Calderon announced the deployment of additional troops and federal police to quell the violence.
The police chief resigned last month after the killings of officers and the threat of more. Its mayor lives in El Paso. Nine more bodies were found on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez on Saturday.
And, even as the federal troops start standing guard in the city, U.S. congressional members and government officials have stepped up their talk about the potential for the Mexican violence spilling into the United States or floods of refugees heading north across the border to escape it.
Military force
This week, trucks and Humvees bristling with Mexican soldiers cruised around the sprawling city. The troops manned checkpoints, searched vehicles, and eyeballed visitors and locals.
The soldiers are an intimidating presence — clad in body armor, faces masked, armed with assault rifles and grenade launchers. Mounted machine guns stand out on some of their vehicles, which move through the city in pairs.
At the Stanton Street Bridge from El Paso to Juárez, soldiers inspected vehicles in search of weapons. On the busy Avenida 16 de Septiembre, they took defensive positions on two corners while fellow troops inspected a Camaro that one soldier said looked suspicious.
The beefed-up security now totals 5,500 soldiers — 2,300 of them deployed to the city a year ago — and 2,300 federal police, who are also heavily armed and wear dark blue uniforms. One of their tasks is to temporarily replace 1,800 municipal police until new officers can be hired, Torres said.
How long Juárez's security will be the responsibility of the military is unclear.
"The military force is an extraordinary presence," said Torres, noting that never before in Mexico's history has such a large military presence been deployed in one city against criminal gangs.
"They will leave when the presence of the cartels is exterminated," Torres said. "They are only trying to keep the peace, but their main role is to confront the cartels."
Compared with the frenetic pace of killing, which averaged more than eight victims per day in February — including 21 during a Feb. 10 shootout in the farming community of Villa Ahumada south of the city — March has been relatively calm.
Outside of a prison fight in early March between members of rival drug gangs that left at least 20 inmates dead, there have been fewer than a dozen killings this month.
"The murders have decreased in the last few days," Daniela Gonzalez Lara, spokeswoman for the Chihuahua state Attorney General's Office, said last week. But, she added, "It's premature to attribute the decrease to the presence of the military."
Living in fear
Juárez residents said they were hopeful the violence will diminish and life may return to normal. Some, like Arturo Ruiz, a vendor at the downtown mercado, which was devoid of tourists Wednesday afternoon, repeated a sentiment common in Juárez: "If you're not involved in (the drug trade), it's not going to affect you. ... You can't be afraid, because if you are, that's how you'll live."
But others, while expressing cautious optimism, said it is too hard to shake the anxiety of a city under siege.
"It's a nightmare," said Juárez resident Modesta Aguirre. She said she had started to feel a little safer with the extra troops roaming the city, but then Wednesday's assassination went down less than two blocks from her work. "It feels like all that violence happens right under their noses."
"It's like a horror film," said Martinez, the waiter. "If I didn't have to, I wouldn't go out of my house."
Mexican and Colombian drug trafficking organizations generate and launder between $18 billion and $39 billion from wholesale drug sales annually, according to a U.S. Justice Department National Drug Threat Assessment.
Ninety percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States and much of the marijuana is believed to come through Mexico. More than 40 percent of illegal drugs coming into the U.S. flow through the El Paso corridor, said Andrea Simmons, spokeswoman for the FBI's El Paso office.
Loads of cocaine and marijuana are hidden in some of the 834,000 commercial trucks and 16 million passenger cars that pass through El Paso area ports of entry, according to Customs and Border Protection.
The violence in Juárez reflects a struggle largely between members of the established Juárez cartel and the Sinaloa cartel from the Pacific Coast, which is trying to wrest control of the shipping route.
Calderon has deployed more than 45,000 soldiers across the country in an effort to cripple the drug cartels and has taken drastic steps to clean up the ranks of law enforcement.
But, in recent months, American analysts and policymakers have focused on the possible response if drug violence spills across the border. A report late last year by the U.S. Department of Defense's Joint Forces Command warned that Mexico, in a worst-case scenario, could fall victim to "rapid and sudden collapse."
But the Mexican president, stung by bleak assessments from U.S. officials, scoffed last week at talk that Mexico is losing control of parts of the country.
"To say that Mexico doesn't have authority over all of its national territory is absolutely false and absurd," Calderon told Bloomberg News Service.
While a recent Justice Department analysis said Mexican cartels pose the greatest "drug trafficking threat" to the United States, with distribution networks in at least 230 U.S. cities, for now the bloody part of the business has played out overwhelmingly in Mexico.
Juárez, where beheaded corpses have become almost commonplace, has been the epicenter of the mayhem.
"At first, you kind of react to it. You say, 'This can't be happening,' " said Juárez native Lorenzo Ramirez, a pharmacy employee. "But it happens so much, you get used to it."
No spillover
Across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juárez, the city of El Paso remains one of the safest in the nation.
In February alone, Juárez, a city of about 1.3 million, logged 230 killings. El Paso, a city of about 700,000, saw 18 murders in all of 2008, and there has been one homicide so far this year.
"There have been people transported to El Paso hospitals for gunshot wounds from Mexico, some of whom required law enforcement resources" for security at the medical center, said El Paso police spokesman Chris Mears. "But no direct spillover of violence from Juárez into El Paso."
David Cuthbertson, special agent in charge of the FBI's El Paso office, wrote in the El Paso Times recently that the agency was involved in two investigations of kidnappings with ties to Mexican drug traffickers in 2008. In both cases, the victims were recovered alive, and one case resulted in a conviction.
"We're not seeing it," said FBI spokeswoman Simmons of a spillover of violence, while acknowledging that about half of the nation's illegal drug supply passes through the El Paso corridor, which includes West Texas and New Mexico.
'Juárez is a lab'
The reliance on the Mexican military as a crime-fighting force has its skeptics.
Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, supervising attorney for the Chihuahua state Human Rights Commission, said his agency has received scores of complaints of abuses by police and troops, including assaults and torture.
Soldiers routinely inspect vehicles simply because they appear suspicious, and there are reports that troops search homes without warrants.
Former El Diario newspaper reporter Emilio Gutierrez Soto said he sought asylum in El Paso in June after he was threatened by military officials for past articles.
Another, Jorge Luis Aguirre, the editor of the Web site LaPolaka.com who fled to El Paso in mid-November after receiving an anonymous telephone threat, said corruption within the government will undermine the troops' crime-fighting effort.
"They can't clean up drug dealing if they can't clean up dirty politicians," Aguirre said this week from El Paso.
Tony Payan, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Texas at El Paso, said "if Mexico aspires to be a democracy," using the military as the spearhead against drug cartels is not a viable long-term solution.
Payan also said Mexican officials will have to decide on a realistic goal for the war on the drug war. The cessation of drug trafficking altogether is "impossible," Payan said, but a more realistic goal might be the restoration of a less-violent status quo, in which police corruption is substantially reduced, security forces are enhanced and the illegal commerce continues in a less bloody fashion.
"One thing I can say is that Juárez is a lab," Payan said. "It is unprecedented in the level of violence ... and in the level of federal intervention. But if it works, there will be more, and we should brace ourselves."
Martinez, the 39-year-old waiter, was skeptical that the latest government effort to quell the violence in his city will work.
After Wednesday's fatal shooting outside the restaurant where he works, Martinez said he saw a motorcycle police officer drive up to the lawyer's bullet-riddled car, as the shooters passed him, fleeing in the opposite direction. A pedestrian frantically pointed at the shooters' vehicle speeding away, he said.
Instead of giving chase, the motorcycle officer dismounted and began putting up crime-scene tape.
You also can send comments via our comment form
|
|
