FEAR RULES IN MURDER-RIDDLED BORDER TOWNS

The top cop in this unhinged border city has 300 openings on a
600-member police force, and his fearful greeting gave a big clue why.

"Please, please don't use my name or take a photograph," the interim
chief begged.

One police chief was killed last year, a second quit in the spring,
and no one else appears brave enough, or foolhardy enough, to work
this side of the law in Nuevo Laredo.

Mexican President Vicente Fox quietly withdrew the federal police
that he had dispatched with great fanfare last year to bring peace,
leaving the city virtually unprotected in a smuggling war that's
claimed 170 lives since January.

This isn't the only border city where law and order are on the ropes.

In Tijuana, the rate of kidnappings ranks among the world's worst and
some state police have refused postings after the killings of more
than a dozen officers in paramilitary-style ambushes.

Organized crime is out of control, Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon said
after a police commander was ambushed this month. The killing of
police officers, he said, "speaks to the impunity of organized crime,
that they think they're above the law, or protected."

As Mexico prepares for the inauguration of Felipe Calderon on Dec. 1,
the president-elect must take stock of the country's 2,000
drug-related slayings this year, residents and officials say.

"Calderon needs to apply the law or reform the law," said Nuevo
Laredo resident Ana de la Cruz, mother of two teenage daughters. "We
urgently need help."

The drug problem that bridges the United States and Mexico neither
starts nor ends in these two border cities. But a healthy chunk of
U.S.-bound dope lumbers past each day, leaving behind the footprints
of a monster.

"The number of addicts is growing," said Adan Rosa Ramos, 24, a
recovering methamphetamine user who works at a rehabilitation house
in Nuevo Laredo. "There's a lot more drugs on the street."

The proximity of these cities to the United States is a blessing and
a curse. The Tijuana-San Diego frontier is the busiest border
crossing in the world. At Nuevo Laredo, trucks and trains ferry more
than 40 percent of the goods traded between the neighboring countries.

The two cities also account for the most lucrative smuggling routes
in the hemisphere. The tons of cocaine, marijuana, heroin and
methamphetamine seized by authorities each year make up a fraction of
what barrels past -- in trucks, cars, planes and underground tunnels.

Here's the arithmetic, said Daniel Covarrubias, the director of
economic development in Nuevo Laredo: "The U.S. checks maybe 10
percent of the trucks that pass. Any more than that and it slows
commerce. You run 10 trucks and take your chances."

Battle for control of the Nuevo Laredo corridor pits the Pacific
Coast Sinaloa cartel against the Gulf cartel, whose top gunmen
defected from an elite Mexican army task force. The conflict has
spread to the states of Michoacan and Guerrero, where nearly 600
people were believed killed in drug-related homicides this year.

In Tijuana, the August arrest of alleged drug-cartel leader Francisco
Javier Arellano Felix escalated a battle among rivals believed
responsible for many of the killings in that city this year.

With government all but ceding control of the border, civil society
has fallen into disarray or been cowed into silence. Newspapers in
Nuevo Laredo have stopped reporting drug killings under pressure from
advertisers, government and drug dealers.

Residents learned a lesson from former Police Chief Alejandro
Dominguez, who was gunned down in June 2005 within hours of taking
office. He'd pledged to stand up to drug traffickers.

Dominguez's replacement quit, and the interim chief closed his office
door during a recent interview and said he wouldn't speak a word
about the drug business and didn't want to be identified.

His name isn't important, and apparently neither is his job. Nearly
the entire police force of nearly 800 was fired last year for
corruption. About 300 recruits are now working, but they spend their
days mostly staying out of sight and out of trouble.

Even after out-of-town recruiting trips, there are no takers for 300
police jobs, including the chief's slot. Starting salaries of $600 a
month apparently aren't worth it. "Last year was bad," said the La
Paz funeral home's assistant director, Alvaro Ordanez Sanchez. "A lot of cops."

Tallying the 170 people shot, burned and garroted so far in the drug
war, Sanchez estimated the murder toll in Nuevo Laredo would approach
200 this year. That would make up about nearly 10 percent of the
drug-related homicides in Mexico, even though Nuevo Laredo, a city of
380,000, accounts for about 0.4 percent of the nation's population.

Sanchez -- whose firm performs autopsies for the city -- is one of
the few people willing to talk about the drug violence.

Elizabeth Hernandez, a state prosecutor responsible for deciding
whether a homicide in Nuevo Laredo should be investigated by state or
federal authorities, said she didn't know how many people had been killed.

"I've only been on the job nine months," said Hernandez, who
suggested a visit to the federal prosecutor's office.

Assistant federal prosecutor Jose Enrique Corona rolled his eyes an
hour later. "Of course she knows," he said.

When asked whether his office was investigating the murder of
Dominguez, the 56-year-old father who served six hours as chief,
Corona said the case was being handled by federal investigators in
Mexico City. Prosecutors in Mexico City said it wasn't theirs. The
truth is, few killings are investigated and almost none is solved.

"This is a city of lies," said one of the local reporters whose daily
newspaper no longer covers drug killings. He was afraid to be
identified by name. "Last year we reported on all the killings, and
business and government officials blamed us for disrupting commerce.
Now police say nothing happens here. What a paradise."

Residents take pains to dodge the menace of drug trafficking. Some
deny it exists. Look at the peaceful plazas, say boosters, and the
thousands of trucks that ferry commercial goods daily to and from the
United States.

"If you behave on the streets, you won't get into trouble,"
Tamaulipas Gov. Eugenio Hernandez Flores told potential investors
during a recent business forum in Nuevo Laredo. An unofficial tally
by the newspaper Milenio showed that a dozen of the 145 Mexican
police officers reportedly killed this year were in his state.

When the Tijuana mayor favorably compared Tijuana's crime rate with
that of San Diego, some residents were stunned.

"Apparently, he's living somewhere else," said Genaro de la Torre,
leader of a citizens' safety group that helped organize a recent
anti-violence march. "He needs to suffer what the people have
suffered to realize what is really going on."

Calderon has proposed better police training, consolidating federal
law-enforcement units and creating a national crime database.

"During the last few years, and really the last months, violence and
organized crime has grown in an alarming way," Calderon told a
business group last week. "We can't accept that as the image of
Mexico. We can't have a daily image of executions and other bloody
acts that go unpunished."