[THS] Mexico: Drug War Causes Wild West Blood Bath

[Peter Webster]

Pubdate: Wed, 16 Apr 2008
Source: New York Times (NY)
Page: 10, Section A
Copyright: 2008 The New York Times Company
Contact: letters at nytimes.com
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: James C. McKinley, Jr.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Juarez
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Felipe+Calderon
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Mexico (Mexico)

DRUG WAR CAUSES WILD WEST BLOOD BATH, KILLING 210 IN A MEXICAN BORDER TOWN

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- One sign of the desperation to end organized 
crime in this border town is that the good guy on the police 
recruitment posters is not a clean-cut youth in a smart police cap, 
but a menacing soldier in a black mask and helmet carrying a heavy machine gun.

The poster is the government's answer to a different sort of sign 
left in late January at the bottom of a monument honoring fallen 
police officers: a hand-scrawled list of 22 officers, 5 of whom had 
already been gunned down in the street. The sign warned that the 
others would also be killed "unless they learn." In all, eight police 
officers have been assassinated here this year and three are missing.

Even by the Wild West standards of this dusty desert town, where drug 
dealers have long smuggled their cargo across the Rio Grande and the 
unsolved killings of women drew international attention, the last 
three months have been a blood bath, officials say.

A turf war among drug cartels has claimed more than 210 lives in the 
first three months of this year. Many of those killed were young 
gunmen from out of town. The number of homicides this year is more 
than twice the total number of homicides for the same period last 
year. Several mass graves hiding 36 bodies in all have been 
discovered in the backyards of two houses owned by drug dealers.

At the height of the violence, around Easter, bodies were turning up 
every morning, at a rate of almost 12 a week. Desperate, the mayor 
and the governor of Chihuahua State asked the federal government to intervene.

"Neither the municipal government, nor the state government, is 
capable of taking on organized crime," Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said 
in an interview.

So in late March, President Felipe Calderon sent in 2,026 soldiers 
and 425 federal agents. They continue to patrol in convoys of Humvees 
and pickup trucks. But even they are intimidated. None dare show 
their faces, wearing ski masks instead.

"The mortuary is full of more than 50 unclaimed and unidentified 
bodies, proof that the soldiers in the underworld war come from other 
states, the mayor said.

Information about who is fighting whom is hard to come by.

The local police chief, Guillermo Prieto Quintana, professed 
ignorance of the conflict, despite having been an officer here for 30 
years. He acknowledged that the 1,600-member force was riddled with 
corrupt officers, a consequence, he said, of low pay and a lack of 
opportunity for advancement that led them to seek other sources of 
money. "As long as freelancing exists, this corruption is going to 
exist," he said.

Since the late 1980s, drug smuggling in Ciudad Juarez has been 
controlled by a group known as the Juarez Cartel, led by Vincente 
Carrillo Fuentes since the death of his brother Amado in 1997.

The recent violence ripping apart Ciudad Juarez stems from a gang war 
between former allies. On one side is the Carrillo Fuentes family and 
its point man here, Jose Luis Ledezma, known as J. L. On the other 
are several traffickers based in Sinaloa State, chief among them 
Joaquin Guzman, known as El Chapo, and Ismael Zambada, known as El 
Mayo, said a federal prosecutor, who, like some others interviewed, 
spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons. Their uneasy 
alliance has been strained since one of the Carrillo Fuentes 
brothers, Rodolfo, was assassinated in September 2004, officials say. 
Mr. Guzman is widely believed to have been behind the killing.

One theory holds that the tension reached a breaking point in 
December when Mr. Zambada refused to pay the Juarez Cartel a tax for 
smuggling drugs through its area.

Since then, Mr. Zambada and Mr. Guzman have begun an offensive 
against the Juarez Cartel, and Mr. Ledezma, the local crime boss, has 
fought back fiercely, prosecutors and city officials said. "Mayo and 
Chapo's people wanted to invade, and J. L. was not going to let them, 
and so the battles started," the prosecutor said.

But a Mexican intelligence officer, also speaking on the condition of 
anonymity, said that since the assassination of Rodolfo Carrillo 
Fuentes, the Juarez Cartel has forged an alliance with the Gulf 
Cartel, led by the jailed kingpin Osiel Cardenas Guillen and his 
lieutenants in Tamaulipas State, across the border from South Texas.

Over the last year, arrests and pressure from federal troops have 
weakened the Gulf Cartel. Sensing an opportunity, Mr. Zambada, Mr. 
Guzman and other Sinoloa drug traffickers who had fallen out with the 
Carrillo Fuentes clan have tried to take over the town, the official said.

"What you have is one cartel that is leaving an open space, and it's 
a takeover attempt by another," the intelligence official said, 
speaking on the condition of anonymity.

John Riley, the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement 
Administration office in El Paso, said the fighting in Ciudad Juarez 
stemmed from the same battle for territory among various Sinaloa 
traffickers, the old Carrillo Fuentes family and the Gulf Cartel that 
has shaken the entire country over the last two years, costing 
thousands of lives.

He added the alliances among various factions shifted constantly, 
creating a chaotic situation for law enforcement. "A lot of these 
lines have been blurred since the first of the year," he said. "It's 
extremely confusing."

City officials said that before the recent gangland war, Mr. Ledezma 
had tried to establish himself as a gangster in the American sense, 
controlling extortion rackets, prostitution and gambling, as well as 
the cocaine traffic.

Officials say he has also recruited local street gangs like Los 
Aztecas as gunmen and drug distributors. The Gulf Cartel has brought 
in a corps of hired hit men, known as the Zetas.

Federal prosecutors and city officials say Mr. Ledezma has also 
infiltrated the local police department to an alarming degree. Most 
of the officers killed in the recent violence had links to drug 
dealers, prosecutors said.

For residents, the federal police and military patrols have brought a 
brief respite from the state of terror they have been living under. 
But in interviews several said they remained afraid to leave their 
homes at night or to let their children play outside as they did when 
they were young. Gunfire was a common sound after sunset, they said.

"Before, there was not much pressure on those who sell drugs, but 
with the army, things are changing," Janeth Ponce, 21, a homemaker, 
said as she sat in the sun last Saturday in the central square. "Now 
one doesn't feel so much fear, because there is more policing."

But other residents said the federal intervention was only a 
temporary fix. The local police are outgunned, underpaid, prone to 
corruption and lack the authority to investigate drug dealers, they noted.

It has escaped no one's attention that the federal authorities 
arrested nine city police officers in late March on charges of drug 
dealing, and the former police commissioner, Saulo Reyes, was 
arrested in El Paso in January, on charges of marijuana trafficking.

"The police were doing nothing," said Janet Morales Castellanos, who 
was tending her father's herbal store in the market last Saturday. 
"One can't walk around here at night. I can't take her to the parks 
at night or even to the movies," she said, referring to her toddler 
daughter. "One stays at home."

The mayor and the police commissioner, who took office last October, 
agree that the only long-term solution is to clean up the police 
department and to give police officers the legal power to investigate 
drug trafficking, which only federal officers have now.

To that end, they have toughened standards for recruits and are 
beginning to use a battery of tests to weed out drug addicts and 
others prone to corruption. They have bought 100 patrol cars and have 
permitted the officers to carry semiautomatic sidearms and machine 
guns, instead of service revolvers.

However, the force has changed little. Only about 30 officers have 
resigned or retired in the wake of federal arrests and the new tests. 
The first batch of 150 new recruits came out of the academy in 
January, but they entered a force where most officers either feared 
drug dealers too much to move against them or lived on their payroll.

"A municipal policeman knows everything but cannot act," said Jaime 
Torres, the spokesman for the department. 
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