WITH FORCE, MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS GET THEIR WAY

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz is supposed to be
the one to hire and fire the police chief in this gritty border city
that is at the center of Mexico's drug war. It turns out, though,
that real life in Ciudad Juarez does not follow the municipal code.

It was drug traffickers who decided that Chief Roberto Orduna Cruz, a
retired army major who had been on the job since May, should go. To
make clear their insistence, they vowed to kill a police officer
every 48 hours until he resigned.

They first killed Mr. Orduna's deputy, Operations Director Sacramento
Perez Serrano, together with three of his men. Then another police
officer and a prison guard turned up dead. As the body count grew,
Mr. Orduna eventually did as the traffickers had demanded, resigning
his post on Feb. 20 and fleeing the city.

Replacing Mr. Orduna will also fall outside the mayor's purview,
although this time the criminals will not have a say. With Ciudad
Juarez and the surrounding state of Chihuahua under siege by heavily
armed drug lords, the federal government last week ordered the
deployment of 5,000 soldiers to take over the Juarez Police
Department. With the embattled mayor's full support, the country's
defense secretary will pick the next chief.

Chihuahua, which already has about 2,500 soldiers and federal police
on patrol, had almost half the 6,000 drug-related killings in all of
Mexico in 2008 and is on pace for an even bloodier 2009. Juarez's
strategic location at the busy El Paso border crossing and its large
population of local drug users have prompted a fierce battle among
rival cartels for control of the city.

"Day after day, there are so many horrible things taking place
there," said Howard Campbell, an anthropologist at the University of
Texas at El Paso who studies Mexico's drug war. "The cartels are
trying to control everything."

Nothing is surprising in Chihuahua anymore. Gunmen recently shot at
one of three cars in Gov. Jose Reyes Baeza's motorcade, killing a
bodyguard and wounding two agents. The drug cartels routinely collect
taxes from business owners, shooting those who refuse to pay up. As
for the Juarez mayor, who has made cleaning up the notoriously
corrupt police department his focal point, the cartel recently
threatened to decapitate him and his family unless he backed off.

The handwritten threat that it issued went further than that. Like
many people in Juarez, Mayor Reyes has homes on both sides of the
border, splitting his time between El Paso and Juarez. The note
threatening him made it clear that the assassins going after him
would have no qualms about crossing into the United States to finish
off the mayor and his family.

"We took the threat seriously," said Chris Mears, a spokesman for the
El Paso Police Department. "I'm not going to tell you what actions
were taken, but we've taken actions."

In an interview in his wood-paneled office overlooking the United
States, Mr. Reyes, 46, whose father was mayor in the early 1980s,
said he was not going to allow criminals to run the city, despite the
inroads they are making. He said he initially opposed his police
chief's decision to resign because he did not want the outlaws to
feel empowered. He acceded only as a life-saving gesture, he said.

"I'm not going to give in," he vowed in an interview, welcoming the
arrival of soldiers so that the traffickers will feel the heat even more.

Right now, the Juarez police are no match for the outlaws. Last year,
the senior uniformed officer was killed, one of 45 local police
officers killed since January 2007, and a former police chief pleaded
guilty to charges of smuggling a ton of marijuana from Juarez to El
Paso. Mr. Orduna, who lived at the police station to avoid being
killed, had replaced another chief who fled to El Paso after
receiving threats last year. If the army had not come in, the mayor
would no doubt have had a difficult time finding somebody to head the
department.

Introducing a nationwide police recruitment campaign, the mayor has
raised salaries and benefits enough that he is attracting new
recruits to replace the many officers being fired for their links to
organized crime.

"I know the dangers and I accept them," said Jose Martin Jauregui
Lopez, one of the 289 cadets now being trained at Juarez's police
academy. "There are a lot of people afraid for me: my mom, my
relatives. But this is what I want to do."

As a sign to the traffickers that he was not running from them, Mr.
Reyes appeared Friday to be like any other mayor, giving a speech at
the opening of a shopping center, signing a memorandum of
understanding with a developer, reassuring residents that he would
keep loiterers from gathering in front of their homes.

But the bodyguards holding assault rifles who clung close to him made
it clear that Juarez remained a city under siege.

"There's no square inch of the city that has been untouched by the
violence," said Lucinda Vargas, an economist who works by day to
remake the city as executive director of Juarez Strategic Plan, but
retreats to El Paso at night. "There's a lot of evidence that Juarez,
in a micro sense, is becoming a failed state. But I still think we
haven't failed yet and that we could still rescue ourselves."