Mexico Under Siege

CITIZENS IN CROSS HAIRS OF DRUG WAR MAYHEM

A Girl's Violent Death Strikes a Nerve in a Chaotic Border Town.

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO -- Scooped up by gunmen as she walked near her
home, 12-year-old Alexia Moreno hardly had a chance. The gangsters
were driving straight into a shootout. Within minutes, she was dead,
shot in the head as she cowered in the back seat.

It was two weeks before her sixth-grade graduation.

Alexia's death in a city so accustomed to death struck a nerve
because she was, in this city tortured by killings, broad-daylight
gun battles and rampant kidnappings, an innocent victim.

That description isn't redundant in a country in the grip of a raging
drug war: The vast majority of the thousands of dead are thought to
have some connection to the cartels. They have been hired hit men,
drug runners, corrupt police officers.

Suddenly, however, this rough-and-tumble town and other Mexican
cities have become citadels of fear even for many who thought they
were safe from the mayhem: a pregnant woman washing her car, a
4-year-old, a father and son in their home. And Alexia, who was
killed last month.

"Over the years you get used to the violence, but then, in 10
minutes, everything changes," said Alexia's aunt, Cecilia Rodriguez, 37.

In the last few days, the neighboring state of Sinaloa has been
shocked by a wave of violence that has taken the lives of many
innocents, including another 12-year-old girl. Authorities said
Tuesday that more than 1,200 additional federal police were deployed
to Sinaloa as part of a nationwide government offensive involving
about 40,000 soldiers and 5,000 federal police officers.

Ciudad Juarez has become a singular symbol of Mexico's drug war, a
concentration of everything that can go wrong. About 3,000 troops of
the Mexican army arrived here after President Felipe Calderon
launched an all-out offensive against drug traffickers, yet the
killings have soared.

Gun battles interrupt traffic in the middle of the day along Triumph
of the Republic Boulevard and the city's other main drags; corpses,
sometimes mutilated or headless, turn up at shopping centers and
fast-food joints; hospitals come under machine-gun fire. Ominous
voices break into emergency-frequency radio traffic, warning
paramedics not to pick up bodies, journalists not to approach the scene.

Nearly a third of Mexico's drug-related killings in this record year
have been registered in Juarez and its surroundings.

Take last month, for example: In one not particularly unusual
weekend, 17 people, including a journalist, were killed; the
sister-in-law of a U.S. congressman was kidnapped; and a dozen
businesses were set ablaze after receiving threats.

The month before that, Juarez's top police commander resigned and
fled after his second- and third-in-command were assassinated along
with a dozen or so other officers, some named on a hit list. In a
setback to basic democracy, civilian authorities have essentially
been supplanted by the army. Retired artillery officer Roberto Orduna
Cruz took over public security, pledging tough measures to crack down
on violent organized crime.

In Juarez, as in much of Mexico, the drug war boils down to a turf
battle between rival drug gangs, often referred to as cartels. Here,
one faction led by the notorious Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman from the
neighboring state of Sinaloa is trying to wrest control from the
consortium of gangs that has traditionally dominated the drug trade,
the so-called Juarez cartel.

Both groups have well-armed private armies that mercilessly eliminate
enemies and potential impediments such as police detectives. Mayor
Jose Reyes Ferriz says he believes people can still live a normal
life in Juarez, and that most residents support the government's
actions. But he also evinces the kind of resigned fatalism that
breeds despair. The drug war, he suggests, will end only when both
sides have ended up killing each other.

"It is more probable that a decision by the two groups ends this than
does intervention by the government," Reyes said in an interview.
Like many residents of Juarez, he also maintains a home across the
border in El Paso.

Reyes acknowledged that the performance of the police has not
inspired confidence. Last year's police commander was arrested in
February on charges of attempting to smuggle a ton of marijuana into
the U.S. through El Paso. He pleaded guilty in a U.S. court. Reyes
said the police are being overhauled and screened in an effort to
remove the corrupt and the drug users among them.

Up to 20% of the police force is corrupt and will be fired, said a
senior official who requested anonymity because the purge is ongoing.

It is true, as the mayor insists, that the number of "innocent
victims" is minuscule in the grand scale of things, which is why
there isn't much public outrage at a sustained or national level.

But as the violence becomes more widespread, and the number of
innocents caught up in it grows, support for Calderon's campaign could erode.

In Juarez, according to a tally by the Excelsior newspaper, 52
innocent men, women and children have been killed this year, though
in some cases the victims were the offspring or spouses of targets.
It may be that the cartels are breaking with their tradition of
avoiding civilian casualties in order to put pressure on Calderon.

Father Mario Manriquez, a parish priest, said the spillover violence
was infecting a population that preferred to look the other way and
say the bloodshed didn't touch it because it wasn't involved -- a
posture adopted either out of survival instincts, or self-deception.

"We have been pretending that we were living just fine, but in
reality we chose a bad path," Manriquez said. "It's time to look in
the mirror and correct the makeup."

As a young activist priest, Manriquez is determined to save his
working-class parish from the drug war. But he is losing the battle.
The teams he sent out to survey residents, in hopes of identifying
needs and providing better social services, had to be pulled back. It
has reached a point where no one would open their doors because of
fear and alienation.

Or, as the priest put it, because of a hardening of the soul.

Juarez still has a somewhat ambivalent reaction to the violence.
People are killed every day and fear is pervasive, yet residents
don't lock their car doors when they park, and City Hall, though it
looks like a fortress, has no metal detectors or other ways to screen
visitors. Mariachi musicians and the cowboy-hatted singers of norteno
ballads, guitars in hand, gather along Juarez Boulevard at dusk, even
though tourists have all but vanished.

Alexia's family thought of itself as immune, even if the young girl
was disturbed by the daily news reports and longed to go away.

She was walking with two other girls, a cousin and her good friend,
to buy the insurance that border Mexicans need to cross into the U.S.
Her aunt was planning a trip.

By most accounts, the three girls were picked up by young men in a
dark SUV, which almost immediately came under gunfire. In the
back-and-forth shooting, Alexia was killed; the other two girls
escaped when the vehicle crashed.

Alexia was buried in her favorite color, pink. At the funeral, her
father, Hugo Moreno, found it necessary to proclaim that he in no way
worked for drug traffickers. One of the other girls was whisked away
to El Paso, and the third is in therapy, her family says.

To the horror of Alexia's family, one group of traffickers tried to
seize upon her death for its own propaganda. Using the traffickers'
preferred form of communication, they strung a banner across one of
the city's main thoroughfares, accusing their rival, Guzman, of
killing innocents.

Alexia had dreamed of escaping her tortured city, to flee across the
river to El Paso, where she longed to join her mother, the family recalled.

"I still can't believe I wake up and don't see her," said Alexia's
grandmother, Belen Reyes, 75. She raised the girl, after the mother
moved to El Paso, here in a gritty neighborhood of small houses
sitting side by side on dusty, cracked-asphalt streets, all named for
lagoons, though there isn't a body of water in sight.

"With everything that is going on here, you cannot live as you wish,"
she said. "They said it would get better with the soldiers, but it's
only gotten worse."

Reyes; Rodriguez, the aunt; and other relatives gathered on the
family's concrete porch laughed bitterly when asked if they thought
the authorities would find Alexia's killer.

There will be no justice, they said.

Despite more than 500 killings here this year, no one has been prosecuted.