Mexico Under Siege

A TIPPING POINT FOR MEXICO?

The January Killing of 15 Youths in Juarez Has Created a Furor, and
Fear and Fatalism Could Be Losing Their Hold

The slaughter last month of at least 15 young people with no apparent
criminal ties has galvanized the Mexican public in ways not seen here
in more than three years of bloody drug warfare and has forced the
government to enact long-resisted policy changes to combat violence.

Some in Mexico are wondering whether this is their nation's tipping
point, a moment when public outrage that has bubbled along finally
overcomes the fear and fatalism that largely silenced or intimidated
Mexican society.

Led by parents of the victims in the Jan. 31 massacre, citizens of
Ciudad Juarez have marched, protested, challenged Mexican President
Felipe Calderon and demanded a new strategy for reducing the number
of the gruesome crimes that have made their city one of the world's
deadliest. Joining grieving parents in their wrath have been civic
leaders, entrepreneurs, politicians, educators and priests.

"For the very, very first time, people, civil society as a whole,
have come together and decided, this is enough," said Marcos
Fastlicht, a prominent Mexico City businessman who heads an
organization dedicated to the uphill task of promoting citizen
participation in crime-fighting. "And they've said that to Calderon .
. . to his ministers . . . that they are not going to take any more"
neglect and broken promises.

Calderon, an often aloof leader seemingly impervious to criticism,
has responded by apparently heeding the complaints and making the
remarkable concession that his military-led offensive against drug
cartels has proved insufficient.

He traveled to Ciudad Juarez twice in less than a week, amid noisy
street demonstrations demanding that he resign and with key Cabinet
ministers in tow, and received long litanies of grievances from the
beleaguered public. He quietly took a tongue-lashing from a
middle-aged maquiladora worker, mother of two of the teenagers killed
in the massacre, who confronted him at a town meeting.

"President, I cannot welcome you here," Luz Maria Davila started,
voice raised; Calderon waved off an aide who moved to whisk Davila
away. "We are living the consequences of a war we did not ask for."

It was a highly unusual rebuke from a humble woman in a country that
retains paternalistic tendencies and demands a certain reverence for
presidential figures.

Almost since its inception when Calderon took office in December
2006, the president's anti-drug policy has been roundly criticized
for emphasizing military and police repression and largely ignoring
other components of the multibillion-dollar drug-trafficking industry.

Poverty and lack of opportunity send thousands into the ranks of
cartel foot soldiers in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El
Paso. The Mexican city became the extreme, terror-gripped example of
the policy's shortcomings.

Even as 10,000 army troops and federal police officers were deployed,
Ciudad Juarez last year had a homicide about every three hours on
average, and up to half a million residents fled, a quarter of the
population. As early as last summer, authorities told The Times they
were planning to make changes in the strategy for combating organized
crime in the troubled city, a pledge made throughout the rest of the
year, but never put into action.

Calderon has now been forced to offer a mea culpa and take action.
Embracing the citizens' slogan, "We are all Juarez," he acknowledged
that his strategy had neglected socioeconomic factors and established
a $50-million fund for new schools, clinics and job-creation
programs, while also promising to assign a large contingent of
judicial investigators to the city.

"By hearing the demands and the indignation directly," political
analyst Alfonso Zarate in Mexico City said, Calderon "has an
opportunity to rectify and to act differently."

Skeptics accuse Calderon of moving now because it's an election year.
Both the governorship of Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez is
located, and the mayor's post in the city are held by Calderon's
chief rival party and are up for grabs in voting scheduled in July.

Whatever his electoral calculations, however, Calderon is also keenly
aware of the Ciudad Juarez disaster's corrosive political damage to
his government, an erosion that goes far beyond the screaming crowds
in the border city's streets.

A poll out this week showed a dramatic decline nationwide in support
for Calderon's government. An overwhelming majority said violent
crime had increased substantially in the last six months, and solidly
half the nation said the president's war on drug cartels was failing.
The poll by Buendia & Laredo surveyed 1,000 people in face-to-face
interviews and has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

And there has been a busy confluence of voices of criticism from
segments of society, such as the Roman Catholic Church, that had
remained largely on the sidelines.

A member of Calderon's own National Action Party, legislator Manuel
Clouthier Carrillo, accused the government of playing favorites in
going after drug gangs, leaving the largest and most powerful of
them, the so-called Sinaloa cartel led by fugitive kingpin Joaquin
"El Chapo" Guzman, untouched. Clouthier was not clear about what
Calderon's alleged motives might be, but the suggestion stung and his
colleagues are demanding that he retract it.

So far the citizen outcry in Ciudad Juarez has been focused on
demands that the government change course and withdraw the army
(Calderon refused). It has not addressed residents' own
responsibilities in challenging drug gangs.

Many Mexicans have in effect become complicit by failing to speak
out. But there were signs of that changing too.

Heriberto Galindo, one of the dozens of community leaders petitioning
Calderon in Ciudad Juarez this week, scolded his neighbors for
consistently lashing out at the government and army but never the traffickers.

"We have to assume our own portion of blame as well," Galindo said.
"It is not always the government that is responsible for the killing
of a child."

The only other recent incident that provoked a level of outrage
similar to that generated by the deaths of the young people in
January was the 2008 kidnapping and killing of a boy from a wealthy
Mexico City family, a tragedy that sparked angry marches across the
country. But the response quickly lost momentum.

It is possible that once again, the furor -- this time over the
killing of the youths in Ciudad Juarez -- could disappear in the
ephemera of rhetoric absent concrete action. Already, several Juarez
activists are complaining that the issue of human rights, much
violated in recent months, was given short shrift in the talks with Calderon.

"The first step is to regain the public's trust," said Ciudad Juarez
Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz, "and that is not done with a government decree."