MEXICO RAMPS UP DRUG WAR WITH A SURGE ON RIO GRANDE

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico--A few weeks ago, Army Captain Ramon Velasquez
got his introduction to Ciudad Juarez, ground zero in Mexico's war
against violent drug cartels.

A stocky man with round glasses, Capt. Velasquez led a 10-man patrol
in midday traffic on one of the city's major boulevards. Suddenly,
gunmen with automatic rifles opened up on a taxi stuck at a traffic
light about three blocks away, killing two men and a woman.

A military unit guards the crime scene after an execution in Ciudad
Juarez, Mexico.

Capt. Velasquez scrambled to the site of the killings, where the
gunmen had already vanished. He and his men yelled questions at
dozens of eyewitnesses: How many killers were there, what kind of car
did they drive? "Not one person said a word. Not even what direction
they had gone," says Capt. Velasquez, 42. "Executions here happen at
any time, at any place. That terrifies the population. They don't
trust anybody. And they don't talk."

For two years, the center of Mexico's bloody drug war has been this
gritty city of 1.5 million people across the river from El Paso,
Texas. Two of Mexico's most powerful gangs are battling for control
of the city, a gateway for drugs going to the U.S. as well as a
growing local drug market.

In response, President Felipe Calderon has sent 7,000 soldiers and
2,000 federal police to stem the violence --so far, unsuccessfully.
In 2008, 1,600 people were killed in drug-related hits. This year,
more than 2,500 have died. By some estimates, Juarez's approximately
165 deaths per 100,000 residents make it the murder capital of the
world. That compares with 48 violent deaths per 100,000 residents of Baghdad.

The chaos in Ciudad Juarez has snared Mexico's army, the country's
most respected institution, in what may be a no-win situation. Even
as the violence rises, so do allegations of human-rights abuses by
the army. The failure to pacify Ciudad Juarez has put Mr. Calderon's
antidrug strategy--based largely on using the military to retake
control of the country from drug cartels that have corrupted local
police and politicians--on embarrassing public display.

"The assassins have won," says Bernardo Garcia, the white haired
owner of a tiny tortilla factory. His brother Refugio, a clothes
vendor, was killed two weeks ago as he left a church service with his
daughter by a drug gang who wanted to extort him. "Only God can help
us now," he says.

Mr. Calderon's war on drug gangs has defined his presidency so far.
Within months of his 2006 inauguration, he dispatched the army to
states where drug-related violence was on the rise, calling powerful
drug cartels a threat to national security. Three years later, some
45,000 troops--about a quarter of the army--patrol areas ranging from
Ciudad Juarez to Mr. Calderon's home state of Michoacan.

The conservative has won praise in many quarters, including
Washington, for squarely taking on the drug gangs. Mr. Calderon has
extradited dozens of traffickers wanted in the U.S. Last week, elite
Navy troops killed Arturo Beltran Leyva, one of Mexico's most
powerful drug lords, in a four-hour battle at a luxury condominium
complex in the resort city of Cuernavaca.

But in weary Ciudad Juarez, he is blamed for having gone to war
without a comprehensive victory strategy. Since first sending troops
to Ciudad Juarez in March 2008, Mr. Calderon has only made two
fleeting visits to the city. He hasn't engaged residents on the
violence consuming the city. "He stays for two hours and he's gone,"
says Daniel Murgia, president of the local Chamber of Commerce.
"They've left Ciudad Juarez totally alone. There is a total absence
of authority."

Mr. Murgia and other business leaders last month called for the
United Nations to send peacekeepers to tame the city's violence. Mr.
Murgia went further and breached a Mexican taboo when he asked that
the U.S. send military police to help. In early December, 3,000
Juarez citizens staged a protest march. Some carried placards asking
the army and federal police to leave.

Jorge Tello, Mexico's National Security adviser, says the government
has devoted more resources to fighting drugs and violence in Ciudad
Juarez than any other place in Mexico. "We are doing everything we
can," said Mr. Tello, who travels monthly to the city, but he
acknowledges: "We need better results."

Ciudad Juarez has the look and feel of an occupied city. Soldiers,
their faces covered with black balaclavas and manning automatic
rifles or 50 caliber machine guns, constantly crisscross Ciudad
Juarez in open-backed SUVs.

In some ways, Capt. Velasquez and the Mexican army in Ciudad Juarez
are in a similar situation to U.S. soldiers when they first occupied
Baghdad after ousting Saddam Hussein. The U.S. had overwhelming
superiority in troop strength and firepower, but its conventional
forces were soon bogged down in a guerrilla war with an enemy that
ambushed U.S. troops with devastating results. Lacking good
intelligence, the U.S. could neither protect the general Iraqi
population nor effectively strike back at its guerrilla tormentors.

While Ciudad Juarez' drug dealers and hit men aren't guerrillas or
suicide bombers--largely they are trying to kill each other instead
of Mexican soldiers--they do use the hit-and-run tactics of
guerrillas, melting back into the population and making it difficult
to tell who is who. As in Iraq, ordinary citizens are afraid to
provide information to the authorities. On their daily rounds, Capt.
Velasquez and his men are also under constant surveillance from young
boys working for the drug gangs who inform their bosses of his
patrol's every movement.

"There are many people who watch us all the time," says Capt.
Velasquez, an artilleryman who, like most soldiers here, is on a
two-month rotation. "They control time and place. It's the same rule
anywhere: He who knows the terrain has superiority."

Ciudad Juarez's troubles began in January 2008, when Mexico's most
notorious drug lord, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, tried to take over
the city's drug trade from the local Juarez Cartel, which was itself
backed by a cadre of corrupt cops and ex-cops called La Linea, or The
Line. Mr. Guzman recruited two local gangs--the Artistic Assassins
and the Mexicles--to take on the Aztecas, another gang in the service
of the hometown La Linea, according to the city's mayor and other officials.

The confrontation has reshaped life in Ciudad Juarez. At times, hit
men from both sides have broken into hospitals to finish off wounded
victims, so now, people wounded by assassins are only taken in at
three city hospitals which have extra security. Funeral corteges are
also targets, so funeral masses are shorter and also have special security.

Drivers in the morning rush hour have sometimes been greeted with the
grisly sight of dismembered bodies. One favorite dumping ground is a
highway overpass known as the Rotary Bridge in honor of the city's
Rotary club. Authorities say women are taking up the assassin's
trade, and they can be as cold-blooded as the men. It was a woman who
walked up to another woman dropping off a friend at the city's
largest hospital and shot her dead two weeks ago in the middle of the day.

The drug gangs have branched out into extortion. On a recent patrol,
Capt. Velasquez' convoy stopped at a modest strip mall, where a woman
swept out the broken glass from a small restaurant. The previous
night, three gunmen in a beat-up Nissan Sentra, who had been
demanding protection money, drove by and shot up the place.
Extortionists had driven out 14 out of the mall's 18 clients.

The landlord, a lanky, leathery-faced man wearing a blue jean jacket,
said he'd cut the restaurant's rent by half, to $350 a month, because
the violence has driven many clients away. "Anybody who has any money
is leaving for the other side of the border," he said. "You can't
live here anymore."

The extortion wave has spread to funeral homes. Last month, an
assassin and his driver parked in front of the Funeraria del Refugio,
a squat, yellow building on a crowded street. The killer walked in,
interrupting a funeral, and locked mourners in the bathroom, yelling
that he had come to collect a protection payment. He then executed
the funeral home's manager, police and eyewitnesses say. The next
day, the men returned and burned down the funeral home.

In March, 2008, soon after the troubles began, Mr. Calderon
dispatched 2,000 troops. As the violence rose, he ordered a surge of
an additional 5,000 troops and 2,000 federal police in April of this
year. Both times, the murder rate fell sharply after the troops
arrived. But the drop-off in killings lasted a few weeks. As soon as
the drug gangs figured out the new patterns of army and police
patrolling, they resumed killing.

Some experts say the Mexican army needs to adopt the style of the
counter-insurgency tactics used by the U.S. military in the Iraq war.
That strategy got American soldiers out of large bases and forced
them to interact with the population and get intelligence. "They have
to co-mingle with the locals and find out who's who in the zoo. Find
out where the bad guys are, and preempt them," says a former U.S.
military officer with knowledge of the Mexican army. But, the
official says, the Mexican army, which is made up of conscripts,
isn't trained on how to interact with the community. The result: a
lot of patrolling that's good for show but bad for results.

In Ciudad Juarez, soldiers generally are on patrol or back at a local
army base or other temporary housing, including abandoned factory
buildings. One reason: the high command fears that contact with the
city's drug traffickers could induce desertions to the dark side.

It has happened before. In 1997, about 30 defectors from an elite
army unit went to work for the Gulf Cartel. These former soldiers,
known as "Zetas," became the Gulf Cartel's enforcers, deploying
tactics such as decapitations to terrorize rival cartels and law enforcement.

Manuel Aponte, a former army lieutenant who deserted in 2004, has
become the right hand man of Joaquin Guzman, the cartel leader, and
is leading the Sinaloa cartel's assault on Ciudad Juarez, according
to a recent Mexican intelligence document viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Soldiers aren't considered to be remotely as corrupt as Mexico's
notorious police forces. But the army has a questionable record. A
decade ago, Mexico was deeply embarrassed when its newly named drug
czar, army Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was arrested for being in
the pay of a drug lord.

The army says it is slowly turning things around in Juarez. In the
past year, it has arrested the vast majority of the 5,518 people
detained for alleged drug trafficking and weapons violations,
according to Enrique Torres, a spokesman for the joint army and
police operation.

Two weeks ago, the army held a news conference to display five
handcuffed men, whom they introduced as members of the Azteca gang.
The five are alleged to have quickly admitted to taking part in or
ordering 268 killings. Mr. Torres says the army has arrested 60
people responsible for more than 1,000 killings.

Others in Ciudad Juarez doubt such claims. Mexican authorities, be
they army or police, have little capacity to investigate crimes. Many
people here believe that the authorities resort to torture or
beatings to wring confessions out of suspects. "So what does the army
do? They find a guy, and they hang 30 murders on him!" says Hernan
Ortiz, a professor and civic activist. "Does anyone believe these
cases were investigated?"

Another problem is mounting allegations of human rights abuses that
could hurt the army's image. Since its incursion, the army has been
accused not only of beatings and looting homes, but also, in more
than 20 cases, of disappearing people and conducting extrajudicial killings.

One such case concerns two brothers, Carlos Guzman, 28, and Jose Luis
Guzman, 27. The two worked at a shop run by their father, Javier,
that sells everything from old sewing machines to used typewriters.
Both sons were detained in a raid by soldiers and federal police on
Nov. 14, 2008. A federal police report says the two were detained by
the army, which took them to a nearby base. They haven't been seen again.

For a year, the army denied it had anything to do with the case. "We
protested, but the army has always denied it took them," says the
elder Mr. Guzman, 56, wearing a baseball cap as he stands by a stack
of old radios. But on Dec. 2, Mr. Guzman met with three army lawyers
who told him they would investigate.

"They say the last thing that dies is hope," says Mr. Guzman. "But a
year has passed and you imagine the worst. Every 15 days I go to the
morgue to see if my sons have turned up."

The army largely dismisses complaints of abuses as the work of people
allied with drug traffickers who want to drive the soldiers out of
the city. "Many times they make human rights complaints because they
want to limit our capacity for action and besmirch the institution,"
says Brigadier General Jesus Hernandez Perez, commander of the 4th
Artillery Regiment, and Capt. Velasquez' commanding officer.

Mr. Guzman says he was happy the soldiers had arrived to clean up
Ciudad Juarez. "Not all the military are bad," he says. "Some do
their job right. But the ones I got were bad."