Pubdate: Sat, 27 Aug 2005
Source: Houston Chronicle (TX)
Copyright: 2005 Houston Chronicle Publishing Company Division, Hearst Newspaper
Contact:  http://www.chron.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/198
Newspaper
Author: Dudley Althaus
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

Nuevo Laredo

WEARIED RESIDENTS APPEALING FOR PEACE

Unlike Effort In Monterrey, Border City's Movement Fails To Curb Violence

NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO - White doves of peace have been appearing across this 
border city since spring, pale symbols of the fragile hope that residents' 
resolve can succeed where government force has failed in ending a gangland war.

Emblazoned on flags, bumper stickers and storefront posters as the most 
visible sign of a budding citizens movement, the doves carry the simple 
message that the struggle for calm in Nuevo Laredo is worth the trouble.

"The idea is to create a consciousness in society that we have to demand 
security," said Carlos Martinez, principal of a private high school and a 
founder of the movement.

"How? That's what we're asking ourselves," he said. "The only formula that 
we've found is to broadcast messages of peace."

In addition to distributing the doves, Martinez and others - business 
executives, teachers, clerics and assorted community activists - have 
organized marches, written politicians and gone on radio and television 
calling for nonviolence in a city that has become notorious for drug-gang 
warfare.

Like the organizers of other Mexican civic movements against crime, the 
Nuevo Laredo activists have had little success so far in stemming the 
violence that has left nearly 120 people dead here this year. They say they 
have stitched together their movement as best they can, copying no other.

Monterrey Pressures Police

The activists, however, perhaps could find a role model in Monterrey, the 
industrial city 120 miles to the south in neighboring Nuevo Leon state, 
where officials credit citizens for keeping underworld violence in check by 
pressuring police.

"People here require that the government acts," said Luis Carlos Trevino, 
attorney general of Nuevo Leon state, noting that all but one of the 26 
murders committed statewide in June and July have been solved.

Rather than simply hope for peace, citizens across Mexico must denounce 
suspected mobsters, avoid doing business with them and shun them socially, 
said Marcelo Garza y Garza, the head of Nuevo Leon's state police 
investigations unit. Local, state and federal police, he added, must crack 
down in whatever way they can.

"We need everyone to contribute their grain of sand," Garza y Garza said.

With about 4 million people, the Monterrey area sees some of the same 
narcotics-related problems that plague Nuevo Laredo, officials acknowledge. 
Cocaine and other drugs pass through the region on the way to the United 
States. Local residents increasingly use drugs themselves. Corruption 
permeates the police forces. Mobsters live in some of the wealthier 
neighborhoods.

But the gangsters largely have respected an unwritten rule that the area is 
off-limits to the kind of violence carried out elsewhere, officials say. 
Law enforcement officials credit pressure from business leaders and 
residents for government actions that make sure the rule is upheld.

After a three-month investigation aided by U.S. agents and tips from 
residents, state police earlier this month arrested 19 suspected gangland 
gunmen in a Monterrey restaurant.

The detainees included at least a half-dozen former and current state 
police detectives who are accused of belonging to a gang active in Nuevo 
Laredo. Two of them - brothers-in-law Jose Luis Carrizales and Jose 
Guadalupe Guzman from Laredo - were wanted in connection with the May 
gangland-style killing of a pair of men at a popular family restaurant in 
Monterrey's most fashionable suburb.

But effective citizen pressure remains the exception in Mexico.

In more than seven decades of one-party, authoritarian rule that ended with 
President Vicente Fox's election in 2000, many Mexicans came to expect 
solutions from the central government, not local officials or themselves, 
some analysts say.

"People here haven't understood that by being organized they can more 
effectively pressure the government," said Sigrid Arzt, of Democracy, Human 
Rights and Security, a Mexico City think tank.

At least 250,000 people marched last summer in Mexico City to protest a 
wave of kidnappings and other crimes. The protest brought government 
promises of a crackdown and several weeks of additional police checkpoints 
but, seemingly, not much else.

Nuevo Laredo has been on the front line of Mexico's narcotics wars for more 
than two years, with rival gangs battling to dominate smuggling routes into 
Texas and beyond.

Killings On The Rise

Through the long months of escalating bloodshed, many Mexicans shrugged off 
the violence as a media exaggeration, a fight that didn't concern them or 
an evil hoisted upon them by American narcotics consumers. But that was 
before the June assassination of Nuevo Laredo's police chief, a July gun 
battle involving rocket-propelled grenades and the August killing of a city 
councilman.

The city has become the focal point of a nationwide crackdown on gangland 
violence, dubbed Operation Secure Mexico. Nonetheless, Nuevo Laredo's 
murder rate accelerated this summer despite the presence of 1,200 federal 
paramilitary police, 460 municipal police and several hundred troops.

Some people are moving out. Others have hunkered down, waiting for the 
plague to pass.

But a growing few are speaking up, however quietly, however ineffectively 
so far.

"We are responsible for the city in which we live," said Ninfa Cantu, a 
director of El Manana, Nuevo Laredo's leading newspaper, which has become 
involved in the peace movement. "What you can't do is simply cross your 
arms when this is affecting the community where your children live. At 
least we can sleep well at night, knowing we are doing something."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Elizabeth Wehrman