Pubdate: Mon, 28 Sep 2009
Source: Houston Chronicle (TX)
Copyright: 2009 Houston Chronicle Publishing Company Division, Hearst Newspaper
Contact:  http://www.chron.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/198
Author: Dudley Althaus, Houston Chronicle
Bookmark: http://mapinc.org/topic/Juarez

HOW TO END THE SLAUGHTER IN JUAREZ?

Some Look to Medellin As a Model, and Others Say Decriminalizing 
Drugs Is the Answer

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO --- Seemingly impervious to any treatment, 
murder has settled into the sinews of this border city like a pestilence.

The thousands of federal soldiers and police injected into Ciudad 
Juarez haven't proved a cure. Neither have the remedies of 
sociologists, economists, criminologists or psychologists. Nor have 
the prayers, potions and petitions of its haggard citizens.

Gunmen claim dozens, sometimes scores, of new souls each day, 
hundreds by the month. There's no end in sight.

Bolstered by U.S. encouragement and money, President Felipe Calderon 
has made Juarez a laboratory of his strategy to militarily end the 
bloodshed and the drug trade alike. But rather than a showcase of 
success, Juarez has become, by many accounts, the poster child of failure.

"We saw the army come in and not finish anything," Hugo Almada, an 
economist who's written books on Juarez's haphazard growth, said of 
this year's military offensive to end the slaughter. "So the question 
is now what?"

Almada and some 2,600 other citizens last week packed a hall to hear 
the prescription of a former mayor of Medellin, the pacified 
Colombian city that half a decade ago was as famous for narcotics 
violence as Juarez is today.

The crowd murmured and applauded as the confident and convincing 
Sergio Fajardo --- a U.S.-trained mathematics professor turned 
politician --- sketched the formula by which he and other 
civic-minded colleagues reclaimed their streets. Once one of the 
Earth's most violent corners, Medellin's murder rate has been slashed 
to a level that would be acceptable in many U.S. cities.

"Oooh," the transfixed citizens gasped as Fajardo flashed pictures of 
gleaming new schools, libraries and parks planted on what had been 
Medellin's poorest and deadliest terrain. "Ahhhh!"

Use the police and army to close the door to organized crime, Fajardo 
counseled, but open a window of opportunity through education, 
respect and public honesty. Otherwise, he stressed, the frustrated 
poor have no option but perfidy.

"How do we take that momentary enthusiasm and transform it into a 
genuine civic movement?" asked Lucinda Vargas, a onetime U.S. federal 
reserve economist who directs the Juarez foundation that sponsored 
the speech. "That is our challenge." Will it translate?

But Fajardo's gospel left much unsaid. Before he took office in 2003, 
right-wing killers already had scraped leftist militias from 
Medellin's teeming slums, government jobs and money had bought off 
those gunmen, and a single crime boss had gained control of the 
narcotics trade.

Fajardo could employ his recipe of redemption precisely because a 
semblance of order had been forged through fire and blood.

"Here in Juarez we don't have that," said Almada. "There is no control."

Add to that a wealth of poverty, a dearth of education and a scarcity 
of living wage jobs. Parents lucky enough to have work are rarely 
home, leaving even the youngest children to fend for themselves.

In one squat 6-year-old community of factory laborers, a single 
junior high and one high school serve nearly 7,000 families. Scores 
of the homes have been abandoned as families flee Juarez's violence 
or head to southern Mexican towns after losing their jobs in the 
city's mostly U.S.-owned factories, said Alfredo Aguilar, 28, who 
runs a day-care center.

Gunmen have slaughtered some 3,200 of Juarez's 1.3 million people in 
the past 20 months --- more than 10 a day so far in September --- as 
a local crime syndicate battles another (from the Pacific Coast state 
of Sinaloa) for narcotics smuggling routes to U.S. consumers and the 
city's own drug users.

As the fighting grinds along, several thousand Juarez families, 
including the mayor's, have fled across the Rio Grande to El Paso.

People have been gunned down by the handful in bars and car washes, 
by the dozens in drug rehabilitation centers. Dirt-poor addicts, 
street performers and gang-banger teens have been targeted. War on drugs

Many on both sides of the border argue that as long as narcotics 
remain outlawed in the U.S., the world's biggest illicit narcotics 
bazaar --- Juarez --- much of Mexico and the Texas borderlands will 
serve as a blood-soaked trampoline.

"Drug prohibition is causing all of this," said Terry Nelson, a 
retired U.S. anti-drug agent who spoke at a conference last week at 
the University of Texas --- El Paso that called for narcotics 
decriminalization as a means to end the violence. "The global war on 
drugs is probably the greatest public policy failure of all time."

The latest atrocities include the Sept. 15 attack of a rehab clinic 
on Juarez's poor southeast side. Gunmen tossed grenades through the 
front gate of the low-slung compound and charged in firing.

Ten of the 38 people inside the small dormitories and meeting rooms 
were killed, including the center's director and a doctor who was 
treating a patient. It was the fourth such massacre in 13 months at a 
Juarez rehab center; more than 40 people have been killed.

Days after the assault, the clinic stands empty, its victims' blood 
whitewashed over, the streets of its once boisterous working class 
neighborhood deserted.

But among the refuse strewn on the clinic's floor lies a small plaque 
bearing the prayer that long has encouraged addicts and others 
without hope: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can't 
change," the prayer goes, "the courage to change the things I can and 
the wisdom to know the difference."
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake