MEXICO VIOLENCE SCARES KIDS FROM SCHOOLS

Kidnapping Threats Swell Amid Growing Lawlessness

JUAREZ, Mexico - The empty desks outnumber the students at Luis Urias
Elementary School these days, a stark measure of the fear that hangs
over this border city.

In a classroom usually filled with 40 fourth-graders, a single child
bent over a worksheet on a recent afternoon. The class next door had
36 students absent and only two present.

In all, parents are keeping about 90 percent of the school's children
at home because of a spate of kidnapping threats, Principal Berta
Rodriguez said - a sign that a wave of violence in Mexico is seeping
into one of the country's last refuges: its schools.

In cities across Mexico, there have been extortion threats against
students and teachers, gunfights in school zones, bodies dumped near
playgrounds and high-profile kidnappings of students on their way to
school. On Dec. 12, the nephew of a key anti-drug official was gunned
down outside his high school in Tijuana.

"People feel like the schools are no longer safe," Rodriguez said.
"They're scared."

The crime now lapping at schoolyard gates is part of a wave of unrest
that has swept over Mexico since President Felipe Calderon dispatched
troops to fight the drug cartels in December 2006. The crackdown has
turned border cities into battlegrounds as the cartels rush to fill
power vacuums, beat back the police and seize control of plazas, or
smuggling corridors.

Meanwhile, kidnappings not linked to cartels also have soared, with
the official rate doubling since 2004.

Authorities don't think the cartels are specifically targeting
schools, and it's unlikely that hardened drug traffickers are
involved in the extortion demands, said Sergio Belmonte, a spokesman
for the Juarez city government.

But the drug war has tied up police and created a sense of panic, and
petty criminals are taking advantage of it, he said.

"These are neighborhood delinquents, not traffickers," Belmonte said.
"But they know that if people think there is a general breakdown in
law, they're more willing to succumb to their demands."

Since mid-November, the Juarez city government has posted guards and
installed silent alarms at hundreds of schools after parents and
teachers received extortion threats.

At one kindergarten, a sign appeared on the fence threatening to
kidnap students if teachers did not pay up.

The Mexico City suburb of Cuautitlan Izcalli increased police patrols
around 420 schools this month after six private schools and five
public ones reported similar extortion threats.

At some schools, women dressed in red approached parents outside the
schools, Mayor David Ulises Guzman told The Arizona Republic. The
women said the Zetas - the hit men of the Gulf Cartel - would begin
snatching students if each family did not contribute 40 pesos, about
$3, to pay them off.

Two Cuautitlan schools closed early for Christmas vacation because of
the threats, Guzman said.

"It's more like terrorism than extortion," Guzman said.

Education on hold

Outside the Luis Urias School, parents were taking no chances. About
a dozen crowded around the school's front gate last Tuesday afternoon
as teachers handed out worksheets and homework assignments for them
to take home to their children.

"I'm not taking my granddaughter there anymore, for fear something
could happen to her," said Carlos Arellanes.

Teachers started getting telephone calls in mid-November demanding
that they pay protection money or their students would be kidnapped,
said Rodriguez, the principal. The school closed for a few days. The
teachers all chipped in to hire a security guard for about $120 a
week.

Only about 60 of the school's 565 students are showing up for the
school's afternoon shift, Rodriguez said. Like many schools in
Mexico, the same building is shared by a morning and afternoon
school, each with its own name and staff of teachers.

During the mornings, when the school is known as the Maria Edme
Alvarez School, almost no students are attending, Rodriguez said.

Caught in crossfire

Meanwhile, drug-related violence is also getting closer to
schoolyards.

In Tijuana, hit men killed 16-year-old Carlos Alfonso Ortiz Davila as
he left the Cecyte High School on Dec. 12. Ortiz is the nephew of
Alfonso Duarte Mujica, an outspoken army general who is leading the
military's anti-drug efforts in northwestern Mexico.

At least four schools in Tijuana have been evacuated in the past year
because of shootouts between police and drug traffickers.

On Sept. 29, hit men dumped 11 bodies, their tongues cut out, in a
vacant lot across the street from the city's Valentin Gomez Farias
Elementary School.

The scene was repeated in Juarez on Nov. 26, when seven
bullet-riddled bodies were found next to a wall outside an elementary
school.

The killings have highlighted a key change in the way drug
traffickers operate. Before, traffickers were careful not to involve
children in drug violence, knowing it could draw extra heat from the
police.

But in the past year, hit men have killed children along with their
parents and shown little discipline in where they carry out killings.
In one case that shocked Mexicans, gunmen killed a 3-year-old boy and
a 9-year-old girl and wounded a 12-year-old girl after barging into
two Tijuana homes to kill their parents in January.

Celebrity cases

In Mexico City, where much of the country's wealth is concentrated,
kidnapping fears have also been stoked by two high-profile cases.
Both victims were snatched on their way to private schools.

On June 4, gunmen kidnapped Fernando Marti, a 14-year-old whose
family owns a national chain of sporting-goods stores, while he was
being driven to the British American School in Mexico City.

The boy's family paid a ransom, but his decomposed body was found in
a car trunk in August.

On Dec. 11, authorities announced they had found the remains of
Silvia Vargas, who was kidnapped in September 2007 while driving to
the exclusive Alexander Bain School.

Her father is the former head of Mexico's National Commission on
Sports and Physical Culture. He had paid a ransom, but when the
kidnappers did not release his daughter, he launched an emotional
campaign to find her, putting her photo on billboards around the city.

Police statistics show kidnappings in Mexico rose from 323 in 2004 to
596 in 2007, though the true number could be much higher because many
cases are never reported to authorities.

Thousands of people marched to protest the kidnappings in August, and
in November the federal government convened a forum on ways to
improve school security.

Back in Juarez, Principal Edmundo Salazar of State High School No. 7
showed the silent-alarm button that police installed in his office
this month after two drug-related murders occurred within a block of
the school. The alarm sends a signal to a police dispatcher.

More than 1,515 people have died this year in Juarez, a city of 1.3
million, according to an unofficial tally by El Diario newspaper.

The city government calls the silent alarms "panic buttons" and has
started installing them in businesses and churches as well.

"I don't know whether the button will do any good," Salazar said.
"But if it makes people feel safer, that's important. There's a lot
of fear in the air right now."

Reporter Sergio Solache contributed to this article.