Pubdate: Fri, 09 Apr 2010
Source: AlterNet (US Web)
Copyright: 2010 Independent Media Institute
Website: http://www.alternet.org/
Author: Thomas Kellner and Francisco Pipitone
Note: Tomas Kellner and Francesco Pipitone are senior directors at
Kroll Associates. Kellner previously spent eight years as staff
writer at Forbes magazine, writing investigative articles focusing on
government program abuse and fraud in the corporate and non-profit
sectors. Pipitone formerly worked for Mexico's Ministry of the
Interior, the Office of the President of the Republic, and the
National Human Rights Commission as an analyst on numerous political
and social issues.
THE TRUE INSIDE STORY OF THE CATASTROPHIC MEXICAN DRUG WARS
AGUASCALIENTES, Mexico -- Just before noon on February 15, 2007, four
municipal police officers in Aguascalientes, the picturesque capital
of the central Mexican state bearing the same name, were called to a
mundane road accident. An overturned, black Chevy Suburban with
out-of-state license plates was blocking traffic on the quiet
Boulevard John Paul II that runs through the city's sleepy western suburbs.
When local police commander Juan Jose Navarro Rincon and his three
colleagues arrived, they saw two men who did not appear to be hurt,
removing AK-47 assault rifles and police uniforms from the crashed
vehicle to a white Nissan sport utility vehicle (SUV) parked nearby.
Navarro Rincon called for reinforcements. He was about to arrest the
pair when two other cars came to an abrupt stop just up the road.
Three gunmen climbed out and opened fire with automatic weapons.
Navarro Rincon was killed instantly. Three other officers also died.
The killings, dubbed "Black Thursday" by the local press, were the
first shootings of police officers in Aguascalientes by drug gangs.
Until then, Aguascalientes had been a quiet place, immune to the
violence that was raging in cities along the U.S.-Mexico border and
elsewhere in the country. The firefight sparked a manhunt throughout
the state's rocky plateaus, involving some five dozen federal police
patrol cars and a military helicopter. Later that day, with the
gunmen and the drivers of the escape vehicles captured and in police
custody, Aguascalientes State Attorney Xavier Gonzalez Fisher tried
to reassure the rattled public. He told the media that the burst of
violence was an isolated incident. "Aguascalientes is quiet, is at
peace... this does not happen every day." For a long time, his words
might have served as an accurate description of the state of affairs
in Aguascalientes. But the incident was a telltale mark that the
bloody, corrosive nexus of drugs, crime, and corruption growing
malignantly along the Mexico-U.S. border has metastasized to regions
previously immune to this cancer.
The Drug War Moves North
In some respects, the Mexican problem is the result of Colombia's
successful war on the Cali and Medellin drug cartels in the 1990s.
Pablo Escobar Gaviria, the notorious leader of the Medellin Cartel,
was gunned down by police commandos in 1993. Brothers Gilberto and
Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, who formed and ran the Cali Cartel, were
captured in 1995, and later extradited to the United States to serve
30-year prison sentences. Although the Cali and Medellin cartels
continued to operate, the removal of their leaders weakened them and
created an opening for Mexican organized crime groups, such as the
Guadalajara Cartel led by Miguel "El Padrino" ("the Godfather") Angel
Felix Gallardo and his successors, to seize control of the lucrative
North American drug trade.
The Guadalajara Cartel and similar groups had traditionally moved the
Colombian drugs north. Felix Gallardo cultivated friendships with
politicians, businessmen, and journalists, as well as with other drug
lords. Distributing power and spoils, he built a nationwide
trafficking network whose members rarely resorted to violence. Under
Felix Gallardo's system, territories were carved out for local
chieftains, and whenever another group needed access to his region, a
tribute was paid. Though he was captured by the Mexican government in
1989, Felix Gallardo remained in charge, orchestrating meetings and
dividing territory from prison. It was ultimately a failing effort.
With the Guadalajara Cartel's ringleader locked up and the Colombians
under attack, others started developing their own drug operations
from scratch -- covering transportation, warehousing, and,
eventually, the sale of the product itself.
Barry R. McCaffrey, former director of the U.S. Office of National
Drug Control Policy, testified before the Senate that the "Colombians
paid the Mexican trafficking organizations $1,500 to $2,000 for each
kilogram of cocaine smuggled to the United States." But during the
1990s, as a more chaotic arrangement began to take shape, the
Colombian and Mexican trafficking groups established a new deal
allowing the Mexicans to receive a percentage of the cocaine in each
shipment as payment for their transportation services. "This
'payment-in-product' agreement enabled Mexican organizations to
become involved in the wholesale distribution of cocaine in the
United States," McCaffrey observed. This also ended the Colombians'
monopoly and set the stage for the war that followed.
As the Mexican cartels expanded their control over the drug supply
chain, revenues exploded. There are no precise historical figures
describing the size of the business. But, by any account, there was
an enormous amount of money to be made. In 2002, former U.S. Attorney
General John Ashcroft described the size of the U.S. drug market,
reporting that Americans spent $62.9 billion on drugs in 2000. More
than half ($36.1 billion), was spent on cocaine -- of which an
estimated 90 percent transits through Mexico. In 2009, the U.S.
National Drug Intelligence Center estimated that Mexican and
Colombian drug trafficking organizations generated somewhere in the
range of $17 billion to $38 billion annually in gross wholesale
proceeds from drug sales in the United States. By comparison,
Google's worldwide revenue in 2009 was $23.6 billion.
As earnings shot up, so did violence. Starting in the mid-1990s, drug
gangs in Mexico grew more independent and began fighting for more
control and larger territories. A decades-long war, which has claimed
some 20,000 lives so far, broke out between Felix Gallardo's
lieutenant, Joaquin "El Chapo" ("Shorty") Guzman, currently Mexico's
most wanted person, and rival drug lords. Gone was Felix Gallardo's
divide-and-conquer approach, replaced by intimidation, brazen
violence, and the executions of officials and anyone else who dared
stand in the way. By 2004, the war had reached a simmer: the first
mass graves started to appear in Mexico, and newspapers carried
accounts of gruesome killings involving beheadings and acid. In the
border town of Nuevo Laredo, more than 100 people were murdered from
January to August, 2005.
President Vicente Fox had taken a relatively soft approach to
combating the violence, but all that changed when President Felipe
Calderon took office on December 1, 2006. Within weeks, some 6,500
troops were dispatched to the state of Michoacan (along the country's
mid-Pacific coast) to curtail drug violence. It was of little avail.
McCaffrey testified in 2009 that "squad-sized units of the police and
[Mexican] army have been tortured, murdered, and their decapitated
bodies publicly left on display." Media accounts appeared describing
instances where police auctioned their loyalty to the highest bidder.
Today, some 45,000 Mexican troops -- about a quarter of the standing
army -- are engaged in a domestic war with drug cartels, which shows
no signs of abating anytime soon.
Rise of the New Cartels
Amid such seemingly indiscriminate violence, it's critical to
understand who is fighting whom, and to have a little history of the
major players today. The Mexican drug wars have seen the rise of two
dominant cartels, which have elevated indiscriminate violence and
coercion to levels previously unimaginable. The Sinaloa gang is the
country's largest cartel, based on the volume of drugs it moves. It
grew out of the coastal state of Sinaloa, once known for its poppy
fields and opium gum produced by Chinese immigrants. Now it is
produced by hundreds of thousands of Mexican campesinos. The Sinaloa
Cartel operates up Mexico's Pacific coast and along the U.S. border
- -- from Tijuana in the west, to Ciudad Juarez and Nuevo Laredo in the
east. Since a different chief, or capo (the Mexican cartels have
adopted the same terminology as their mafia counterparts), controls
each territory, the Sinaloa Cartel has also become known as "The
Federation." But at the top of the chain sits Felix Gallardo's former
lieutenant, "El Chapo" Guzman; Forbes magazine estimates his wealth
at $1 billion. The U.S. government is offering a $5 million reward
for his capture.
The second group is the Gulf Cartel, founded in the 1970s in the
northeastern border state of Tamaulipas, along the Gulf of Mexico.
The Gulf Cartel grew dramatically during the chaos of the early
1990s, expanding its territory and moving from drug trafficking into
direct sales, while engaging in a host of other nefarious rackets.
The growth inevitably brought them into conflict with "El Chapo"
Guzman and the Sinaloa Cartel. But while the Sinaloa Cartel tried to
maintain the veneer of a legitimate business enterprise, the Gulf
Cartel burnished a bloody, violent image.
At its core was Los Zetas, originally a small group of deserters from
the Mexican Special Forces, hired in 2000 by the Gulf Cartel's former
leader, Osiel Cardenas Guillen, to serve as his bodyguards. But Los
Zetas was not content to run merely security. Following the capture
of Cardenas Guillen in 2003 by Mexican authorities (sentenced to 25
years in prison by a U.S. federal court in Feburary 2010), Los Zetas
started to branch off from the cartel and began independently
building capacity in the drug trade and violent crime in general,
engaging in kidnapping, extortion, and killings.
In a short time, it had evolved into an armed group with some 1,200
members, both men and women, capable of deploying significant
fighting forces across Mexico. A 2008 government raid on the Gulf
Cartel seized a cache of anti-armor weapons, cluster grenades,
anti-aircraft missiles, armored HUMVEES, and even chemical protective
suits. Los Zetas has also developed ties with American and other
foreign criminal and paramilitary groups. According to the U.S.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Los Zetas is now connected to U.S.
gangs and has a presence in Dallas, Houston, and other American cities.
Today, it is not clear who runs the Gulf Cartel; but Los Zetas
appears to play an important role. Though most experts seem to
ascribe a unique decentralized structure to the cartel, in 2009, the
U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control
named Cardenas Guillen's brother, Ezequiel "Tony Tormenta" Cardenas
Guillen, and Jorge Eduardo "El Coss" Costilla Sanchez as the nominal leaders.
Much of the current violence in Mexico can be attributed to a war
raging between the Sinaloa Cartel and Los Zetas, among other smaller
participants. The war erupted in 2003 over control of the city of
Nuevo Laredo, the home of Los Zetas and the country's largest inland
port, just across the Rio Grande from Texas. It provoked a wave of
violence that is still cresting today. As the war ticked up in
intensity, powerful groups pacified by "El Chapo" Guzman, such as the
Tijuana and Juarez Cartels, re-emerged along the U.S.-Mexican border.
The truce between the Sinaloa and Juarez was shattered when Rodolfo
Carrillo Fuentes, a Juarez leader, was gunned down in the city of
Culiacan, in Guzman's home state of Sinaloa in 2004.
Perhaps the most ominous rift was the departure of Arturo "El Barbas"
Beltran Leyva and his brothers, former allies of Guzman, from under
the Sinaloa umbrella. They allied themselves with Los Zetas with the
idea of forming a new cartel. Matters escalated when Alfredo "El
Mochomo" ("Red Ant") Beltran Leyva was arrested in 2008. The Beltran
Leyva family blamed the Sinaloa Cartel and reportedly ordered the
killing of Guzman's 22-year old son, Edgar Guzman Lopez, in a
Culiacan shopping mall. And the seemingly endless cycle of violence
continues unabated. No one is keeping an official score, but
according to the prominent Mexican newspaper Reforma, there were
6,587 drug-related murders in 2009 in Mexico, up from 5,207 in 2008
and 2,275 in 2007. During January and February 2010, there were more
than 1,500 executions according to Reforma. At this pace, Mexico may
end this year with 9,000 drug-related murders.
Indeed, the question lingers: just who is in charge across broad
stretches of Mexico? On December 16, 2009, Mexican Navy special
forces killed "El Barbas" Beltran Leyva in a raid. Though apparently
a big law enforcement success, the aftermath highlighted Los Zetas'
loyalty, brazenness, and brutality -- and the difficulty of
curtailing the ability of drug gangs to wage this war. The Navy lost
one man, Ensign Melquisedet Angulo Cordova, in the raid on Beltran
Leyva. President Calderon hailed Angulo Cordova as a hero and gave
him a state funeral. But hours after he was laid to rest, gunmen went
to his grieving family's home, killing his mother, two sisters,
brother, and aunt as they slept. Only one sister survived the attack.
The Plague Spreads North
Until Black Thursday, Aguascalientes was immune to such violence.
Nestled high on Mexico's central rocky plateau some 300 miles north
of Mexico City, the city and the state had remained a haven of
relative stability and prosperity. As recently as 2004, the
University of London published a study that ranked Aguascalientes "as
one of the only few [Mexican] states that has a well-functioning
judicial system." An earlier survey ranked Aguascalientes first in
terms of confidence in the judicial system, and indicated that it had
the lowest levels of corruption in the country. Business flowed into
the state. Aguascalientes' skilled labor attracted some $4.3 billion
in foreign direct investment from companies like Nissan, Bosch, and
Texas Instruments. Its colonial heritage, baroque-inspired
architecture, and prodigious hot springs made it a tourist magnet.
It did not last. Eventually, the drug gangs arrived in
Aguascalientes, attracted by its tranquility and promise of a good
place to hide. While most of the rest of the country was already
staked out by warring drug gangs, Aguascalientes was still up for
grabs. The local police were ill-prepared for what came next.
Los Zetas arrived in Aguascalientes and plunged the city into
violence with alarming speed. By August 2007, six months after "Black
Thursday," 11 Aguascalientes police officers had been murdered. One
of the victims was a deputy police chief who was shot, execution
style, in the nearby town of Pabellon de Arteaga while he was eating
in a restaurant. After the attack, Mexican media speculated that he
was killed in reprisal for the drug-related arrests of seven
suspected gunmen several weeks earlier.
In early 2008, a wave of kidnappings spread across the state
targeting the children of prominent businessmen. By this time, Los
Zetas had perfected the art. Kidnapping, especially in wealthy and
relatively drug-free states, can be a more immediate source of liquid
funds than trafficking in drugs. In May 2008, Nicolas Martinez Reyes,
the son of a wine distributor, was kidnapped from El Pescador del
Pargo, a busy seafood restaurant in downtown Aguascalientes where he
was dining with a group of friends. Martinez Reyes was held for 35
days. His kidnappers tortured him and cut off one of his fingers
before his father agreed to pay the ransom.
The police and the public have tried to stand up to the gangs in
Aguascalientes, but with little success. Take the example of Gerardo
Medrano Ibarra, who ran a family-owned trucking business called Frio
Express. Launched in 1980, the Medranos built a two-truck delivery
shop into a large shipping business shuttling perishables like meat,
strawberries, and prepackaged guacamole between Mexico City and
Laredo, Texas, with a fleet of several dozen Freightliner and Volvo
tractor trailers. Medrano's business boomed after the North American
Free Trade Agreement came into force in 1994. His trucks moved
quickly in and out of the United States because they were certified
through the U.S. Customs and Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, a
voluntary government-business program that pre-screens cargo for
bombs and other contraband. In the spring of 2008, Medrano Ibarra
received a distress call from one of his drivers traveling north. The
driver said that he was attacked in the city of Guadalajara by an
unknown assailant who cracked open the doors of the trailer, inserted
a load of drugs, and instructed the driver to keep going to Laredo.
Medrano Ibarra told the driver to unhook the trailer and turn back.
He did so, abandoning the trailer and the drugs on the side of the
road. Within days, Medrano Ibarra was receiving threatening telephone
calls from a gang of drug traffickers thought to be Los Zetas. They
made it clear that Medrano Ibarra would allow the future transit of
narcotics to the United States in his trucks. He reported the calls
to the police, but they were powerless to prevent what came next.
On July 2, 2008, as he was leaving his suburban home in his gray
Volvo, Medrano Ibarra noticed that he was being followed by three
SUVs. When he failed to lose his pursuers in the maze of city
streets, he made a U-turn over the median of the busy Avenida Miguel
de la Madrid east of downtown Aguascalientes, jumped out of his
moving car, and tried to flee on foot. Two gunmen opened fire.
Medrano Ibarra was killed on the spot, just ten feet from a police
post. No one came to his aid; the killers got away. Federal forces
arrived on the scene an hour later. In August 2008, state authorities
arrested six suspects, including two women, all members of Los Zetas,
and charged them with the kidnapping of Martinez Reyes and the murder
of Medrano Ibarra.
By early 2009, Aguascalientes had become a terrifying place to live
in. Awash in unsold drug inventory due to stepped-up enforcement
along the U.S.-Mexican border, a local retail market has sprung up.
Indeed, the city now has one of the highest rates of drug abuse among
youth in all of Mexico. Home invasions and assaults by drug addicts
have skyrocketed.
Not surprisingly, the police find themselves regularly overpowered by
the criminals, who have become increasingly brazen in bringing the
fight to the state. In December 2009, some 40 gunmen opened fire with
automatic weapons and threw grenades at a police station in San
Francisco de los Romo, a small town ten miles north of
Aguascalientes. The mayor was inside at the time, attending a
security meeting. After a ten-minute firefight, the attackers climbed
into their SUVs and drove away, leaving two officers dead and three wounded.
Private Security Enters the Drug Wars
With the police strained and outgunned, the crisis created an opening
for a motley group of private security companies and armed bands that
offer services not only to wealthy individuals and companies, but
also to local governments and municipalities. In 2008, the municipal
president of Aguascalientes hired the State Police Intelligence Corps
(CIPOL) to help combat the increasing violence. Founded in 2005 in
the state of Chihuahua by one-time local politician and public
security chief Raul Grajeda Dominguez and Jesus Manuel Garcia
Salcido, the former head of Chihuahua's municipal police, CIPOL has a
murky, quasi-governmental status. Despite its ties to the Chihuahua
state government, CIPOL behaves like a private police force, even
driving its own distinctive red-and-white patrol cruisers. When CIPOL
arrived in Aguascalientes, Garcia Salcido quickly was appointed by
the mayor as the municipal chief of police. His tenure was short. In
August 2009, he was arrested by agents from the federal attorney
general's Office for the Specialized Investigation of Organized Crime
(SIEDO) for supposed ties to drug cartels. Charges that CIPOL
overcharged Aguascalientes for equipment, including the purchase of a
helicopter, were also raised. His trial is pending.
While CIPOL operates in the open, other extra-judicial groups prefer
to remain in the shadows. In May 2009, Mexico's Milenio Diario
newspaper interviewed the leader of a secretive outfit called El
Grupo ("The Group"), whose existence until then had never been
confirmed. El Grupo was set up to hunt down and punish kidnappers who
prey on the wealthy. In lieu of state protection, vigilante justice
has an understandable appeal, but the hefty fees make this little
more than a tool of the wealthy and powerful. The Mexican government
avows no knowledge of the group, but the Milenio Diario interview
disclosed that the entity was established 12 years ago and now has
the ability to carry out investigations, capture suspects, and
conduct interrogations.
Outside of Aguascalientes, ordinary Mexicans have tried peaceful
tactics as a way of standing up to violence. In May 2009, an armed
group kidnapped a 17-year-old Mormon youth, Erick Le Baron, in the
town of Galeana in the state of Chihuahua, and demanded a $1 million
ransom. It was the eleventh kidnapping the Mormons had endured in
just eight months. (The community, which numbers some 1,000 members,
was perceived as relatively well off, which made it a target.) They
decided to push back. Led by Erick's outspoken older brother,
Benjamin, they marched to Galeana's central square and demanded that
the state authorities find and free Erick. The Mormons were joined in
their public protest by local Mennonites, another religious group
that has suffered from extortion and violence. Together, several
thousand people spent the night protesting on the square. They
publicly declared that they would not pay the ransom. Erick was
released several days later, without any money being paid. But such
examples of public bravery are rare and their outcome far from
certain. Two months later, Benjamin was taken from the home he shared
with his wife and five children, along with his brother-in-law. They
were both shot and killed.
Leading from the Top
What is President Calderon to do? If Mexico's drug wars have their
origins in Colombia, perhaps part of the solution might come from
there as well. Though the Colombian government beheaded the Cali and
Medellin cartels in the 1990s by arresting the Rodriguez Orejuela
brothers and assassinating Escobar, the hydra simply grew, spawning
hundreds of smaller organizations, penetrating deeper into and
corrupting more profoundly the Colombian government and bureaucracy.
The Cali cocaine cartel, for example, penetrated deep into the
country's economy, taking ownership stakes in legitimate businesses,
including the National Coffee Corporation and the professional soccer
team, America de Cali. Troublesome legislators, law enforcement, and
judges were bought off, threatened, or killed. Meanwhile, Colombia's
guerilla and paramilitary groups -- such as the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN), and
the United Self Defense (AUC) -- became the main suppliers of heroin
and controlled the farming of coca, which provides the base material
for cocaine production.
The way out of that nation's morass appeared in 2000, when the
Colombian government implemented measures designed to isolate and
cripple the influence of the guerillas and the cartels. It passed a
draconian "disengagement" decree, which gave authorities the power to
dismiss any police officer or soldier for alleged corruption without
the need of legal proceedings. Over the next seven years, hundreds of
persons in the police and the military were discharged over suspected
links to criminal groups. The decree was rolled back in 2008 by
Colombia's Constitutional Court, which ruled that all discretionary
dismissals of military personnel must be substantiated. But, by then,
the policy had already had its salutary effect, purging the armed
forces of corrupt officials and implanting a culture of professionalism.
The government also centralized its police command, retrained the
police and the military in anti-narcotics tactics, and increased
their salaries -- removing the temptation to take petty bribes. The
extra funds for these initiatives came from a "peace premium,"
essentially a tax on businesses and the wealthy to finance the fight
against armed groups. Though controversial, the past two Colombian
governments have supported this legislation. The results have been
encouraging. In 2000, Colombia reported 3,000 kidnappings. By 2008,
the number dropped to 600. Cases of extortion shrank from 2,000 in
2004 to 830 in 2007.
Indeed, some of Calderon's recent initiatives are remarkably similar
to Colombia's approach to stemming its rampant cartels. He has tasked
Secretary of Public Security Genaro Garcia Luna with implementing
plans for a sweeping police reform. Luna, a stocky 41-year old with
short cropped hair, introduced rigorous new standards for testing new
police hires and screening officers already on the force, and carried
out arrests of federal, state, and municipal officers. In June 2007,
some 284 federal police officers were purged, but this was just the
tip of the iceberg. The following year saw more high-profile arrests:
Fernando Rivera Hernandez, deputy director of intelligence at the
attorney general's organized crime unit, SIEDO, and the acting
federal police chief, Gerardo Garay Cadena. Both were accused of ties
to drug gangs. The attorney general's office charged that Rivera
Hernandez received large cash bribes from the Beltran Leyva cartel in
exchange for tipping them off about upcoming federal drug raids.
According to a November 2009 account in the Los Angeles Times,
Mexican cadets and veteran cops are now "forced to bare their credit
card and bank accounts, submit to polygraph tests and even reveal
their family members to screeners to prove they have no shady
connections." A new piece of legislation, called the General Law of
the National System of Public Security, proposed by Calderon and
passed in January 2009, imposes a prison sentence of up to eight
years for hiring police officers with dubious backgrounds and has
created a National Register of Public Security Personnel. All the
while, the federal forces have grown, swelling by 30 percent, from
25,000 to 32,000 personnel, in one year. Luna is now reportedly
pushing for the elimination of the country's 2,022 municipal police
agencies, with the intention of folding them into the state police
forces, which would (in theory) have greater oversight of training
and tactics. The fact that this step is highly controversial and
would likely require an amendment to the Mexican constitution shows
how high the stakes are.
Help from Washington?
Despite the proximity to the United States, the Obama administration
has been providing only modest support to its southern neighbor.
Mexico will largely have to make do with $1.4 billion in funds over
three years appropriated under the so-called Merida Initiative, a
program launched by President George W. Bush aimed at buttressing
border, maritime, and air control from the U.S. southern border to
Panama. But some officials are concerned that this will not be nearly enough.
In October 2009, former drug czar McCaffrey told Congress that
Merida, was "a drop in the bucket." "The stakes in Mexico are
enormous," McCaffrey said. "We cannot afford to have a narco-state as
our neighbor... It is not inconceivable that the violent, warring
collection of criminal drug cartels could overwhelm the institutions
of the state and establish de facto control over broad regions of
Mexico... [The Mexican government] is not confronting dangerous
criminality -- it is fighting for survival against narco-terrorism."
Indeed, most of the Merida funds earmarked for Mexico have yet to
find their way there. Instead, they have ended up funding American
defense and security contractors -- who have refused to disclose how
they are being used in the drug interdiction program.
In the end, as in most democracies, it falls to the public to call
for change. And the Mexican electorate, caught in the cross-fire and
terrorized by the rising tide of violence, is now openly challenging
Calderon to fix the problem. In one week this February, the president
twice traveled to Ciudad Juarez, after gunmen sealed off a street in
this city on the U.S.-Mexico border and opened fire on a house where
high school students were having a party. Fifteen people were killed,
and at least a dozen wounded. Ciudad Juarez's mayor, Jose Reyes
Ferris, told the press that police officers could ascertain no motive
for the crime, that the victims were innocent civilians, and that the
gunmen may have been acting on mistaken information.
This was too much even for Ciudad Juarez, where the murder rate has
been reported at 165 deaths per 100,000 residents -- nearly four
times higher than in Baghdad. Angry crowds spilled out onto the
streets and lashed out at the president. "I told them that I
understood perfectly the discomfort, irritation, and
incomprehension," Calderon said later. "I promised the parents...to
give a new meaning to this fight, to join together the different
levels of government, law enforcement, civil society...to face this
challenge we have yet to overcome." Just what the nature of this
action -- or indeed how effective it will be -- remains to be seen.
But the Mexican people are losing their patience.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake