Weary Juárez: Ground Zero in Mexico’s Drug War

On January 20 a squad of gunmen burst into a house and opened fire where dozens of teenagers were celebrating a birthday party.

In a few minutes, 24 people, most of them students, had been mowed down. They were the latest victims in this gritty border city across the river from El Paso, Texas, that has become ground zero in Mexico’s increasingly gruesome and bloody drug war.

The army and police, who between them have more than 10,000 members patrolling the streets of Juárez, were nowhere to be seen. Neither were ambulances. Desperate parents drove their dying children to hospitals. In the end, 15 people died, and another nine were wounded.

Within 48 hours, Mexican law enforcement officials said they had captured a lookout and killed one of the masterminds of the assault. The officials said the attack had been the work of Los Aztecas, a gang in the employ of the hometown Juárez cartel that for the last two years has been fending off a siege of this key drug gateway to the U.S. by the rival Sinaloa cartel, headed by Mexico’s top drug lord, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. It seems, the law enforcement officials said, that the Aztecas had mistaken the birthday party for a celebration of a drug gang allied to one of Guzman.

On the cold, windswept streets of Juárez, few people believed the official story. Angry citizens railed against President Felipe Calderón, the state governor and the mayor. Local civic and business leaders implored the government for help.

“Do something, for God’s sake, do something! Don’t let them murder our children with impunity,” one mother screamed at soldiers in the street after the killing.

Far from being linked to local gangs, the victims were law-abiding students. One had recently received a state prize for his straight A grades.

“Why are we not listened too?” asked Maria Soledad Mayez, head of Juárez’ powerful Maquiladora Association, who along with others went to plead the city’s case in the capital. “We are also Mexico.”

That night, the students’ killers—whoever they were—appear to have broken the back as well as the heart of this bloodied and embattled city, which has seen more than 4,000 drug-related murders in the last two years. In the process, the massacre has wounded, perhaps mortally, Calderón’s two-year-old anti-drug strategy—based largely on using the military to take back control of the country from drug cartels that have corrupted local police and politicians.

Within days, the governor of Chihuahua state, José Reyes Baeza, proposed moving state resources to Juárez to deal with the crisis. Calderón, who at first had shrugged off the killings as one more case of “settling of accounts” between gangs, has promised to unveil a new, “integral” drug war strategy, which would also stress education and human development.

In a meeting with grieving relatives, Calderón gave the families his “most heart-felt apology.” He acknowledged that the presence of troops and police was not enough. “We need stronger actions that strike at the root of the problem, which has to do with the nature of society,” he said.

Calderón promised to listen to suggestions and comments from civil society groups and to redesign a new strategy against crime and violence with community cooperation. But Calderón said he will not withdraw the troops. To do so, he told a recent military gathering, would “leave the citizenry totally abandoned and Mexican families in the bloody hands of criminals.”

He went on, “To those who want Mexico to surrender and go into reverse, we tell them today that the Mexican state is strong and remains firm.”

For the past two years, Juárez’s 1.5 million residents have seen their sprawling city of unpaved streets, U.S.-style strip malls and American-owned shopping centers transformed into a virtual war zone. As Guzman and the Juárez cartel battled for control of the city, Calderón sent some 7,000 soldiers and 2,000 federal police to try to stop the violence. The death toll has risen steadily from 320 in 2007 to 2,661 last year. According to most estimates, Juárez’s approximately 165 deaths per 100,000 residents make it the murder capital of the world. That compares to some 48 violent deaths per 100,000 residents of Baghdad.

There is a lot at stake. Over the last decade the North American Free Trade Agreement has turned Juárez into a major industrial city. Its Texas neighbor, El Paso, is a vital commercial route for freight between Mexico and the U.S.

Citizens are voting with their feet. The American government says some 100,000 have moved across the border; a similar number have settled elsewhere in Mexico, according to press reports. Perhaps 30 percent of the city’s businesses have closed, and 100,000 jobs have gone. “This war isn’t just killing people,” says Manuel del Castillo, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government, which is run by the opposition to Calderón. “It’s killing the city.”

At least 50 tons of cocaine and six tons of heroin enters the U.S. annually via the border area around Juárez, according to Alberto Islas, a Mexican security consultant and head of Risk Evaluation. That nets traffickers around $4.3 billion a year, not including revenues from marijuana and amphetamines, Islas says.

“It’s incredible that in a city occupied by 7,000 soldiers and state and federal police, not even a ton of cocaine has been seized in the last six months, nor has a single execution been solved. Those two acts are a reflection of the inefficiency of the strategy of President Calderón,” he adds.

Islas suggests a series of measures to reduce the flow of drugs and make law enforcement more efficient, such as city-wide use of closed circuit TV street monitors, installation of speed bumps and roundabouts to slow getaway vehicles, use of GPS devices to monitor police movements, a weapons buy-back program to get guns off the streets, and a major investment in drug education and rehabilitation.

Even before the January birthday party killings, the Calderón administration had quietly begun to alter its strategy, without publicly acknowledging failure. Perhaps most important, the federal police was given overall command of the anti-drug operation from the army. Army troops will soon cease their joint patrols with newly purged Juárez city cops. Soldiers are still expected to be in charge of operations against “high value targets,” namely the drug lords. They also will provide backup when needed by city cops and be in charge of perimeter security around the city. The government has hinted it will also shift resources into mending Juárez’s badly sundered social fabric by providing money for jobs for unemployed youths as well as drug rehabilitation for recovering addicts.

The government’s inability to control the violence emboldened criminals of all types—not only those linked to drug gangs—to launch a massive campaign of extortion and kidnapping that has further demoralized the city.

“The assassins have won,” says Bernardo Garcia, the white-haired owner of a tiny tortilla factory. His brother Refugio, who sold clothes at an outdoor market, was killed in December as he left a church service with his daughter by a drug gang who wanted to extort the vendor for protection money. Garcia has little faith the army or police can turn things around. “Only God can help us now,” he says.