CIUDAD JUAREZ VIOLENCE SURGES FORTH UNABATED

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - In this carnage-racked border city of 1.3
million, more than 80 murders have been clocked in the past three
weeks, and kidnappings, extortions, robberies and rapes further
bedevil an already rattled population.

So far, the new year looks to be bringing as much if not more havoc
than the last. The demons are loose.

"Walking in the streets of Juarez is an extreme sport," said
political scientist Tony Payan, an expert on border violence,
repeating a grim quip making the rounds.

Though little more than 1 percent of Mexico's 105 million population
lives in Juarez, it accounted for a third of the country's nearly
5,400 gangland murders last year, according to the federal
government. And with President Felipe Calderon's war on the country's
powerful drug syndicates unlikely to abate, this city bordering El
Paso looks to remain a prime battleground.

Some U.S. security experts warn that Mexico teeters on meltdown - of
being a "failed state." Irritated Mexican leaders shrug off the
notion, but Juarez's criminal chaos wails like a siren before an
approaching storm.

"Those of us on the border are evidence of how raw things can get,"
said Lucinda Vargas, a former World Bank official who heads the
Juarez Strategic Plan, a think tank. "There is not a corner of the
city that escapes the effects of crime."

Once contained largely to the gangsters themselves, the mayhem has
become generalized. Just who the demons are depends upon who is being
tormented, who is doing the tormenting.

Consider that Tuesday alone:

- - Authorities recovered the decapitated head of a police chief of a
town just down river. Three other heads stuffed into a cooler were
left on the steps of a city hall in a neighboring village.

- - Two state police detectives were shot to death in their patrol
truck in a downtown Juarez parking lot.

- - A Juarez traffic police commander was kidnapped by unknown
assailants.

And then consider that 10 people were murdered the previous
Wednesday, Jan. 14, including a 19-year-old law student-varsity
baseball pitcher who had been abducted 30 hours earlier from his
family's townhouse near the border.

The parents of the student, Jaime Irigoyen, said their son's
abductors wore army uniforms and spoke with southern Mexico accents,
like many of the 3,000 soldiers patrolling the city's streets.

A Mexican army statement denied soldiers were involved.

"That whoever deprived him of liberty were dressed in military-style
uniforms in no way says they were soldiers," the army said. "We call
on the general public not to be fooled by criminal gangs."

But members of the public said they saw men in uniform commit crimes.
Witnesses said the eight gunmen who stormed a prayer service at a
drug rehabilitation center in August and killed eight people were
attired in military garb as well.

"They were dressed like soldiers," said Socorro Garcia, the
Assemblies of God pastor who was leading the service.

As in most of the city's more than 1,600 homicides last year, no one
has been arrested for the clinic attack nor for the student's killing.

"One can't take refuge in a real rule of law, because it doesn't
exist here," said Vargas, a Juarez native and hopeful reformer who
nonetheless returns to El Paso each night.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Washington has made
contingency plans to bolster U.S. border defenses if gangsters seize
control of a city such as Juarez.

And former U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey recently warned that Mexico
faces becoming a "narco state." U.S. military planners have
hypothesized that Mexico and Pakistan pose the greatest risk of
sudden collapse.

Mexican officials have dismissed such talk as overblown.

"We are putting the house in order," Calderon said in a recent
speech. "Mexico has political stability."

True enough, perhaps. People still line up to pay their taxes and
vote at election time. Public utilities work much of the time. Police
direct traffic, patrol neighborhoods. Most of Mexico - and even much
of Juarez - functions peacefully. But some fundamentals have gone
dangerously awry.

International trade has built Juarez's new highways, office towers
and gated suburbs. But too many of the city's people watch that
progress with their noses pressed to a window. Factory jobs start at
less than $50 a week, and even that work is dwindling amid the
global recession.

Criminal enterprise - selling narcotics in the neighborhoods or
helping to smuggle drugs to U.S. consumers - pays far more.

Thousands of young men belong to the 500 street gangs that police
estimate operate in Juarez. The gangs ally with the larger drug
syndicates and battle one another for turf.

"The young don't have any long-range plans," said sociologist Julia
Monarrez, who studies the gender factors of Juarez's violence, which
has also claimed nearly 600 women since the early 1990s. "They are
disposable."

But amid the violence here, many Juarez residents with the money and
U.S. visas have slipped across the Rio Grande to El Paso.

As for those who remain, they shut themselves inside after
sundown.

"In a micro sense," Vargas said, "Juarez is a failed state."