DRUG WARS STRANGLING JUAREZ - NO END IN SIGHT

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - At the traffic lights in this city, only the
killers look at other cars. Everyone else looks straight ahead,
afraid of ticking off potential assailants. By nightfall, vehicles
disappear from the roads.

"People are afraid to go out into the street, so the restaurants are
doing badly," said Alejandra Marquez, an architect. "You don't go out
to eat. You go to the mall, which has more security."

Ciudad Juarez, the sprawling Mexican metropolis of 1.3 million people
across the border from El Paso, Texas, is Murder City, probably the
most dangerous city in the world outside a declared war zone.

Already this year, 686 people have been murdered here.

Residents hunker in trepidation. Most answer cell phone calls only
from people they know to avoid random extortion attempts. Instead of
going out on the town, they hold private parties - and only with close friends.

Those residents who can afford to leave have left.

"The exodus is dramatic," said Gustavo de la Rosa, the local
ombudsman for the Chihuahua State human rights commission. "There are
at least 20,000 abandoned houses, and maybe up to 30,000."

Americans have reason to be concerned, too. The United States does
about $1 billion a day in trade with Mexico, and nearly one-sixth of
that trade goes through the Juarez-El Paso region.

Crime in Juarez also threatens to bleed across the border.

Criminal gangs working for drug cartels already operate on both sides
of the border, and in a sign of the growing risks, on March 13 gunmen
killed three people linked to the U.S. consulate in Juarez. The
sky-high murder rate is driven by two rival groups - the Juarez
cartel and the Sinaloa cartel - and their battle for control of drug
smuggling into the United States.

The FBI estimates that 40 percent to 60 percent of the narcotics and
marijuana smuggled from Mexico to the United States moves through the
corridor, which runs roughly from the Texas border with New Mexico to
Big Bend National Park, about 300 miles southeast.

Murder is only one of Juarez's problems. Ambitious cartel underlings
have diversified into extortion, kidnapping, carjacking and robbery.
When President Felipe Calderon sent 10,000 soldiers to Juarez in
March 2008 to bolster security after a purge of corrupt police, the
army largely ignored other crimes to focus on the cartels, and crime
has taken off.

The result is a palpable sense of unease despite assertions by the
mayor, Jose Reyes Ferriz, that only 200 of the 2,400 people killed
last year were innocent bystanders.

"The perception of security - that 'it won't affect me' - is less and
less," said Carlos Chavira Rodriguez, local head of the Mexican
Employers Federation. "Everyone knows you might get robbed in the
street or hit by a stray bullet."

Gunmen carried out 1,900 carjackings last year in the city, and
extortion is rampant. In a working-class district of southeastern
Juarez, neighbor Anastasio Sayas surveyed a two-story house that had
been torched before dawn. The owners had refused payment to gangsters.

"They demand payment from every small business. ... It's sad to see
how the people suffer," Sayas said.

The 345 assembly plants that ring the city still employ 190,000
workers - making Juarez home to about one-sixth of the assembly jobs
in Mexico - and the plants' owners have been told they have nothing
to fear from the drug battle.

"The message keeps coming back to these industrial companies that if
you're not in the drug trade, you're not going to be a target," said
Bob Cook of the El Paso Regional Economic Development Corp.

It's a different matter, however, for tourist-dependent Mexican
businesses in the city.

Signs saying "For Rent" in Spanish and English dot shuttered
restaurants, bars, hotels and other businesses.

"Six thousand businesses have closed during the last nine months,"
said Daniel Murguia Lardizabal, head of the local branch of the
National Chamber of Commerce. "Downtown is dead."

The miserable employment situation has fueled the ranks of the gangs.

"Juarez has 70,000 young people between the ages of 15 and 29 who
neither study nor have jobs," said Chavira of the Mexican Employers
Association. "These people are easy pickings for the gangs."

Those gangs are locked in a fight to the death that experts say
threatens anyone who has the misfortune to be nearby.

"To kill one person, they shoot hundreds of rounds and maybe hit the
person with five," said Enrique Torres, spokesman for the joint
police-military command in the city. "We've arrested people who were
paid only 300 pesos ($25) per killing."

The battle for Ciudad Juarez began about two years ago when the
Sinaloa drug cartel, led by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman and based along
Mexico's Pacific coast, began trying to wrest control of the crucial
drug smuggling corridor into the United States from the Juarez cartel.

Fighting for the Juarez cartel is a street gang known as the Aztecas
that operates on both sides of the border. Most Azteca members are
heavily tattooed ex-cons who served time in Texas jails. One of the
top Azteca leaders, Eduardo Ravelo, is a U.S. citizen.

The Sinaloa cartel's street gangs include the Assassin Artists and
the Mejicles, which are less disciplined than the paramilitary-style
Aztecas but every bit as homicidal.

Neither side holds the advantage, and the violence is likely to go on.

"Our intelligence does not indicate that the Sinaloa cartel has taken
over the Juarez corridor; however, they are making serious attempts
to do so," said Joseph M. Arabit, the special agent in charge of the
El Paso field division of the Drug Enforcement Administration. "The
upper hand changes from week to week, because this is an ongoing struggle."

Calderon's decision to send in the army in 2007 has seemed only to
make matters worse - the death toll of 1,623 in 2008 rose to 2,635 in
2009 - and many residents want the army gone.

Last week, authorities pulled soldiers from the city and turned
security over to some 5,000 additional federal police brought to
Juarez from around the country.

The city, meanwhile, tries to cope with the executions that average
seven per day - so common that this reporter drove by one shortly
after it happened. A body lay covered by a sheet on a sidewalk.

On another day, after a hit squad in the Erendira district executed a
man, a radio report said children in an adjacent park "kept on
playing," paying no heed to the slaying.