WAKING UP TO DEATH

Americans' Murders in Juarez Finally Get Our Notice

So this is what we need to get our attention? Does it really take the
shooting deaths of two Americans in Ciudad Juarez to jar
PresidentBarack Obama and official Washington into an urgent
condemnation of a nation's violence? To put Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates on planes headed to consult
with a neighboring country?

Clearly, the slayings of an employee at the U.S. Consulate in Juarez
and her husband are heartbreaking, especially since the couple leaves
behind a 7-month-old daughter found sobbing in the back seat of their
car, beside her dead parents. We can't imagine the pain the young
couple's family is enduring at their funerals today and the loss an
orphaned girl will feel forever.

But gruesome slayings have dominated events in Juarez for three years;
they just hadn't involved many Americans. Instead, the dead were
almost all Mexican drug hoodlums, innocent Mexican passers-by or
mistaken Mexican targets, including 16 youths massacred in one January
incident.

Just about anyone in Juarez can tell you stories about this person
being followed or that person being intimidated. How their city has
been ground to a halt by thuggish drug gangsters with all the smarts
of sixth-grade dropouts. The moneymen running the drug cartels and
their terrorist henchmen have so destabilized Juarez that people and
jobs are fleeing by the tens of thousands.

Left behind is a captive population trying to survive in a terribly
destabilized city 10 minutes south of downtown El Paso.

You might not know it by Washington's relative silence, but 2,600
people were murdered in Juarez in 2009. If that many civilians were
killed in one year in Baghdad or Kabul, Washington's foreign-policy
community - those smart folks who attend think-tank luncheons, write
insightful articles and analyze world affairs on cable TV - would be
having nonstop arguments about a grave world problem.

Perhaps the deaths of consulate employee Lesley Enriquez and her
husband, Arthur Redfels, will drive home the news: This awful
situation is just across a U.S. border, not an ocean away. It could
spill over intoTexas at any moment .

If nothing else, it jeopardizes the $51 billion in annual trade
between El Paso and Juarez. And there's the increasingly real
possibility that drug gangs could own a city on our southern border.

To its credit, Congress has passed a billion-dollar plan to help
Mexico fight the cartels. But passing a plan and putting the situation
on the front burner at the White House and State Department are two
entirely different matters.

It's past time for Mexico's violence to become a top-tier
foreign-policy matter for Americans. Fighting terrorism anywhere is
paramount, and this is terrorism we can see over the backyard fence.