Pubdate: Sat, 20 Feb 2010
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Page: Front Page, continued on page A9
Copyright: 2010 Los Angeles Times
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/bc7El3Yo
Website: http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Tracy Wilkinson, Reporting from Mexico City
Bookmark: http://mapinc.org/topic/Juarez
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Felipe+Calderon
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Mexico

Mexico Under Siege

A TIPPING POINT FOR MEXICO?

The January Killing of 15 Youths in Juarez Has Created a Furor, and 
Fear and Fatalism Could Be Losing Their Hold

The slaughter last month of at least 15 young people with no apparent 
criminal ties has galvanized the Mexican public in ways not seen here 
in more than three years of bloody drug warfare and has forced the 
government to enact long-resisted policy changes to combat violence.

Some in Mexico are wondering whether this is their nation's tipping 
point, a moment when public outrage that has bubbled along finally 
overcomes the fear and fatalism that largely silenced or intimidated 
Mexican society.

Led by parents of the victims in the Jan. 31 massacre, citizens of 
Ciudad Juarez have marched, protested, challenged Mexican President 
Felipe Calderon and demanded a new strategy for reducing the number 
of the gruesome crimes that have made their city one of the world's 
deadliest. Joining grieving parents in their wrath have been civic 
leaders, entrepreneurs, politicians, educators and priests.

"For the very, very first time, people, civil society as a whole, 
have come together and decided, this is enough," said Marcos 
Fastlicht, a prominent Mexico City businessman who heads an 
organization dedicated to the uphill task of promoting citizen 
participation in crime-fighting. "And they've said that to Calderon . 
. . to his ministers . . . that they are not going to take any more" 
neglect and broken promises.

Calderon, an often aloof leader seemingly impervious to criticism, 
has responded by apparently heeding the complaints and making the 
remarkable concession that his military-led offensive against drug 
cartels has proved insufficient.

He traveled to Ciudad Juarez twice in less than a week, amid noisy 
street demonstrations demanding that he resign and with key Cabinet 
ministers in tow, and received long litanies of grievances from the 
beleaguered public. He quietly took a tongue-lashing from a 
middle-aged maquiladora worker, mother of two of the teenagers killed 
in the massacre, who confronted him at a town meeting.

"President, I cannot welcome you here," Luz Maria Davila started, 
voice raised; Calderon waved off an aide who moved to whisk Davila 
away. "We are living the consequences of a war we did not ask for."

It was a highly unusual rebuke from a humble woman in a country that 
retains paternalistic tendencies and demands a certain reverence for 
presidential figures.

Almost since its inception when Calderon took office in December 
2006, the president's anti-drug policy has been roundly criticized 
for emphasizing military and police repression and largely ignoring 
other components of the multibillion-dollar drug-trafficking industry.

Poverty and lack of opportunity send thousands into the ranks of 
cartel foot soldiers in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El 
Paso. The Mexican city became the extreme, terror-gripped example of 
the policy's shortcomings.

Even as 10,000 army troops and federal police officers were deployed, 
Ciudad Juarez last year had a homicide about every three hours on 
average, and up to half a million residents fled, a quarter of the 
population. As early as last summer, authorities told The Times they 
were planning to make changes in the strategy for combating organized 
crime in the troubled city, a pledge made throughout the rest of the 
year, but never put into action.

Calderon has now been forced to offer a mea culpa and take action. 
Embracing the citizens' slogan, "We are all Juarez," he acknowledged 
that his strategy had neglected socioeconomic factors and established 
a $50-million fund for new schools, clinics and job-creation 
programs, while also promising to assign a large contingent of 
judicial investigators to the city.

"By hearing the demands and the indignation directly," political 
analyst Alfonso Zarate in Mexico City said, Calderon "has an 
opportunity to rectify and to act differently."

Skeptics accuse Calderon of moving now because it's an election year. 
Both the governorship of Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez is 
located, and the mayor's post in the city are held by Calderon's 
chief rival party and are up for grabs in voting scheduled in July.

Whatever his electoral calculations, however, Calderon is also keenly 
aware of the Ciudad Juarez disaster's corrosive political damage to 
his government, an erosion that goes far beyond the screaming crowds 
in the border city's streets.

A poll out this week showed a dramatic decline nationwide in support 
for Calderon's government. An overwhelming majority said violent 
crime had increased substantially in the last six months, and solidly 
half the nation said the president's war on drug cartels was failing. 
The poll by Buendia & Laredo surveyed 1,000 people in face-to-face 
interviews and has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

And there has been a busy confluence of voices of criticism from 
segments of society, such as the Roman Catholic Church, that had 
remained largely on the sidelines.

A member of Calderon's own National Action Party, legislator Manuel 
Clouthier Carrillo, accused the government of playing favorites in 
going after drug gangs, leaving the largest and most powerful of 
them, the so-called Sinaloa cartel led by fugitive kingpin Joaquin 
"El Chapo" Guzman, untouched. Clouthier was not clear about what 
Calderon's alleged motives might be, but the suggestion stung and his 
colleagues are demanding that he retract it.

So far the citizen outcry in Ciudad Juarez has been focused on 
demands that the government change course and withdraw the army 
(Calderon refused). It has not addressed residents' own 
responsibilities in challenging drug gangs.

Many Mexicans have in effect become complicit by failing to speak 
out. But there were signs of that changing too.

Heriberto Galindo, one of the dozens of community leaders petitioning 
Calderon in Ciudad Juarez this week, scolded his neighbors for 
consistently lashing out at the government and army but never the traffickers.

"We have to assume our own portion of blame as well," Galindo said. 
"It is not always the government that is responsible for the killing 
of a child."

The only other recent incident that provoked a level of outrage 
similar to that generated by the deaths of the young people in 
January was the 2008 kidnapping and killing of a boy from a wealthy 
Mexico City family, a tragedy that sparked angry marches across the 
country. But the response quickly lost momentum.

It is possible that once again, the furor -- this time over the 
killing of the youths in Ciudad Juarez -- could disappear in the 
ephemera of rhetoric absent concrete action. Already, several Juarez 
activists are complaining that the issue of human rights, much 
violated in recent months, was given short shrift in the talks with Calderon.

"The first step is to regain the public's trust," said Ciudad Juarez 
Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz, "and that is not done with a government decree." 
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