A REPORT FROM JUAREZ, THE BLEEDING FRONT LINE OF THE WAR ON DRUGS

Driving on a cold desert night to a small farming community along the
Rio Grande where hit men had gunned down a man who stopped to buy a
beer, the convoy of local crime photographers snapped away at a
soldier manning a checkpoint. He was wearing a skeleton mask, a "mask
of death," as he pulled over drivers deemed suspicious and who could
be carrying drugs or guns. The soldiers were guarding a main highway
outside Ciudad Juarez that leads to communal farming communities that
mostly grow cotton and alfalfa along the river.

"He's just being a jerk," one photographer for the Diario de Juarez
newspaper said of the masked soldier. "A lot of them do it."

It was a busy night but not unlike others in this dirt-road
agricultural region, now known as one of the deadliest places in the
world. It's an area where journalists barely venture and where
politicians running for local offices are threatened into abandoning
their aspirations.

Earlier that evening, the reporters and photographers who cover the
city zipped to the international airport, where several hundred
passengers had been evacuated following the week's third bomb scare.
When it turned out to be a false alarm-nerves are jittery-the
journalists flocked to their parked cars.

Police scanners told of an "executed" man in the Loma Blanca
neighborhood in the Valley of Juarez, the porous stretch of land
southeast of Juarez that extends somewhat sleepily for 50 miles along
the Texas border and has historically been a haven for contraband and
illegal immigration.

Normally, the journalists would have sped to the area and tried to
scoop their colleagues for the story. But these aren't normal times.
Instead, they organized themselves in a caravan and drove to the
scene, keeping track of each other via cellular phones.

"We never go alone to a crime scene anymore. It's too dangerous. This
way, if something happens to you, at least there are witnesses," said
one veteran photographer of his beat recording the daily carnage of
drug violence in Juarez and its environs. "Yes, we're scared, but we
try to be careful."

When they arrived at the dusty neighborhood, dozens of people had come
out of their homes, and police and soldiers had cordoned off a corner
street. The only sound heard was the crying of women and babies.
Underneath the yellow light of a Carta Blanca sign outside a small
grocery store called La Consentida lay the body of Rogelio Ituarte de
la Hoya, a 37-year-old father of five children.

"Why? Why?" wailed his mother, Ana Lozano, a retired maid who lives in
El Paso, as relatives hugged and consoled her. "These murders are
happening every day and no one does anything. My son was innocent. He
didn't have anything to do with drugs!"

An eerie doom hangs over this ghostly border city, militarized by
4,500 soldiers and up to 5,000 federal police since 2008, and the
soldier wearing the black-and-white skeleton mask at one of dozens of
checkpoints erected throughout Juarez probably had a warped sense of
humor. But it's symbolic of the escalating bloodshed witnessed every
day, anywhere, at any time.

Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon deployed the military and
federal police in 2008 across northern Mexico to halt violence among
warring cartels, the deaths have mounted, and locals see a
correlation.

By far, Ciudad Juarez has experienced the most violence, skyrocketing
to about 5,060 murders in a little more than two years, and more than
700 from January through April alone. This compares with about 600
murders attributed to drug violence from 2006 to 2008. The Mexican
government estimates 22,700 people have died in drug-related crimes
across Mexico since 2006, when Calderon took office.

It's hard to keep up, but on any given day, between three and 12
people, including men, women and children, are gunned down or show up
dead on streets or in ditches, sometimes hanging from a bridge,
sometimes floating on the Rio Grande or nearby creeks. Many are
involved in organized crime, but many are innocent. There seems to be
no safe haven. People are killed in clinics, hospitals, funeral homes,
shopping malls and baseball games.

"The violence is unprecedented. Never in the history of Mexico has the
government lost such capacity to govern. So far this year, the
homicide rate in the Juarez Valley is about 1,260 per 100,000
inhabitants," says Chihuahua state human rights representative and
attorney Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson. "This murder rate is only found
on the battlefields of open warfare and could qualify as genocide."

The warfare is between the Juarez Cartel, headed by Vicente Carrillo
Fuentes, and the Sinaloa Cartel, run by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.
Although both are fugitives, they still run the show. In the past two
years, however, Guzman has so far successfully encroached on
Carrillo's turf, unleashing gang violence for the control of the opium
trade as well as the marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamines pouring
into the United States. Between 40 and 60 percent of Mexico's illegal
drugs are smuggled across a 300-mile route that stretches from New
Mexico to Texas, including the Big Bend National Park.

Even as violence spreads and mounts across neighboring border states,
including the state of Nuevo Leon, Mexico's industrial and economic
hub, Juarez is ground zero for Calderon's "Joint Operation Chihuahua,"
which allowed for deployment of the military and federal police.

Calderon's lack of success, highlighted by the March 13 murders a few
feet from an international bridge to El Paso of three people linked to
the U.S. consulate, has prompted a revision of the United States'
so-called "Merida Initiative." Under this plan, the Bush
administration had earmarked $1.3 billion for Mexico to fight
organized crime, including money for intelligence and aircraft
equipment for the country's military and police forces.

The consulate killings brought a high-powered U.S. delegation to
Mexico City on March 24. It was led by Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who told the
media that Mexico's military efforts were failing and there was fear
of violence spilling across the U.S. border. The meeting with Calderon
and top Mexican security and government leaders brought about a
revision of the Merida Plan that signaled a move away from the
military emphasis to one geared toward social efforts to fight the
crime.

Among the new measures revealed last month, Clinton and Mexican
Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa announced a $331 million plan, part
of the second phase of the initiative, to redirect the military
spending toward social and educational youth programs and improved
police training. There's also talk of creating a 10-mile cross-border
commuter trail to link El Paso and Juarez, a secure mass transit
system for business much like one in Baghdad's Green Zone, in many
European nations and in Seattle-Vancouver. But it's too early to tell
if it will work, and there's skepticism.

"In the short term, I don't see an option unless you legalize
narcotics, but that won't happen quickly," said Jorge Chabat, a
narcotics and national security expert and professor in Mexico City's
Center for Research and Economic Teaching. "The likeliest scenario is
that the violence continues and increasingly affects the U.S., like
the violence during Prohibition in the 1930s, which led to the
legalization of alcohol. It's an option to solve corruption and
violence, not to end drug consumption."

Ciudad Juarez, named after Mexico's only indigenous president, Benito
Juarez, was founded in 1659 by Spanish explorers as El Paso del Norte,
or the pass to the north. Until recently, it was choked with traffic
from trucks and people going about the business that is just part of
daily life in neighboring Texas and Mexican cities. People normally go
back and forth across international bridges, seeing relatives,
shopping or working. Juarez and El Paso make up for one of the largest
binational metropolitan areas in the world, together comprising 2.3
million people.

But the lifeline of this symbiotic relationship has now turned into a
multibillion dollar key passage of drugs to the United States, and
it's bearing the brunt of the impunity, brutality and inhumanity as
the cartels battle for control of the illegal drug market to the
States as well as the smuggling of high-powered weapons from Texas to
Mexico.

"I was born in El Paso, but I live in Juarez because I was married to
a Mexican. It was a good life, to be honest. My kids had nannies. I
had household help, and we traveled to the interior of Mexico and had
lots of fun," said one woman, who like most people interviewed didn't
want her name used. "A year ago, I moved to El Paso and stopped going
to Juarez. The violence is incredible. We're afraid."

Indeed, the violence for control of the key U.S. smuggling routes
likely surpasses the height of drug carnage in the late 1980s in
Colombia, where drug baron Pablo Escobar was viewed by many who
protected him as a sort of Robin Hood who built hospitals, schools,
soccer stadiums and apartments for the poor in his hometown of
Medellin. But Juarez has no good guys helping the locals.

The code of mafia honor in which women, children, friends of friends
or relatives of enemies went untouched has been abandoned in recent
years.

"We live in terror that one day it will be me, or my daughters. You
could be walking next to someone the narcos want, and they shoot you
for the hell of it. Now the military and the federal police occupy the
city. We don't know who's who. We don't trust anyone," said one man
who moonlights as a chauffer for the U.S. consulate. Like others, he
has seen headless bodies hanging from bridges and lifeless bodies
strewn on streets.

"If I see something suspicious, I look away, because they'll come
after me or someone I love. They know your license plates. They follow
you. They know where you work and where your children go to school,"
he added.

Cocaine is smuggled from Colombia across Mexico's southern border and
eventually into border cities. But Mexico also grows most of the
marijuana and a small percentage of opium poppy for heroin sold in the
United States. It also leads in crack cocaine production. The farming
villages nestled along the Sierra Madre mountain range along the
Mexican states of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua are known as the
Golden Triangle of marijuana growth.

Mexican reports say that in 2004, a truce was broken between Carrillo
Fuentes, nicknamed The Viceroy, and "Chapo" Guzman, the most wanted
man in Mexico, who's listed as the 701st richest man in the world by
Forbes, following the murders of close relatives on each side.

Tensions escalated and finally broke the two families' ties in 2008
when an old powerful drug ally of the Sinaloa Cartel, led by two
brothers named Beltran Leyva, aligned with the Juarez mafia,
unleashing the current marijuana smuggling bloodshed. The two cartels
have "sicarios," or death squads, and gangs working for and protecting
them. Gangs called the Artist Assassins and the Mexicles, thought to
number about 2,000 members, work for the Sinaloa Cartel. Meanwhile,
the Barrio Aztecas, born out of the Texas prison system, and La Linea
are aligned with the Juarez Cartel.

Many are trained hit men, while many are kids between the ages of 14
and 18, who are unemployed, uneducated and are hired for as little as
$40 to $80 to kill.

Now the Zetas, the elite government forces who defected from the
military around 2005 and joined the Gulf Cartel, operating out of
Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa and Matamoros just south of Texas, have
apparently gotten so strong they have formed their own deadly mafia,
adding to the cauldron of violence and sinister players of Juarez.

"What we lack is an ability to fully investigate. We sent in the
military without proper intelligence, a folly in any war," said
attorney and investigator De la Rosa. "So we don't know exactly which
social group is suffering this genocide, who is killing them and what
is the motivation."

Many residents here say they were initially happy when the army came
to Juarez. They thought it would put a lid on the violence, but within
a month, they say, it was obvious the military couldn't-or wouldn't-do
anything. In fact, murders doubled.

"The army brought all of its bad habits to Juarez: extortions,
kidnappings, torture," said Javier Cordona, 22, as he sat with gloomy
friends outside the packed Jardin Funeral Home in downtown, where
reporters had amassed following a rumor that one of the consulate
murder victims was being taken there.

"You know what the worst thing is about all this? It's that it's
become normal," said a 21-year-old friend, who didn't want his name
used. He said that in September five of his friends were killed by
gangs. "I think one of them may have had something to do with crime,
but not the rest of them. The thing is...we don't know who's who. You
may be standing next to someone or know somebody who knows somebody,
and you're dead. We don't know who to trust."

Mexico's soldiers and police are traditionally underpaid, and except
for those with specialized training in the high ranks, lower-class
citizens seeking a way out of poverty man the front lines.

"The Americans send money to fight the narcos but they don't pay us
well," said one federal police sergeant sent to Juarez as part of
Calderon's operation. He was manning a barricade during a presidential
visit in early March. With fear in his eyes, he chased a foreign
journalist and told his story, hiding behind a bush. Around him,
security for the Calderon visit was unprecedented, paralyzing Juarez
for hours. Residents moaned and joked that it would be the only time
cartel gangs would keep a low profile, and indeed, there were no
killings reported in about six hours.

"I'm here to speak on behalf of my colleagues," said the officer. "We
only make about $200 a week, and in the two years we've been here,
we've only gotten one uniform and one pair of boots. People in Juarez
say we're not doing anything, but it's not true. We're supposed to go
where we want, but we don't have good intelligence. We don't have
confidence in our leaders. I think you ought to investigate the army
chiefs. In the high ranks, they are corrupt. They tell us not to go
into this sector or that sector. They say 'Don't touch.'"

Traditionally, Mexico's military is a don't-touch zone. Attorney De la
Rosa, 64, the legal scholar who ran the Chihuahua state prison system,
is a veteran of human rights legal battles, including against the
military death squads called the White Brigades in the 1960s.

Since 2008, De la Rosa had documented 170 cases of soldiers
kidnapping, torturing and extorting innocent people. In October 2009,
he fled the city after several threats against his life, including an
unloaded gun pointed at his head.

"In every sense of the legal term, under the constitution, this was
military coup. We are under an occupation," said De la Rosa, who
reports to the state attorney general.

De la Rosa said General Felipe de Jesus Espidia, commander of the 5th
Military Command overseeing operations in Juarez, told him to drop the
cases against his troops. He refused and after that, he said, threats
against him ensued.

"It was probably someone I named in my lawsuits, but I don't know. The
military and the priesthood-it's impossible to win against them. One
has the power of the nation, the other the power of God," said De la
Rosa, who is a symbol of human rights in Juarez and is nicknamed Santa
Claus for his long white hair and beard. "But I am like a boxer in the
fifth round, I'm not done fighting."

De la Rosa, who has resolved dozens of cases of illegal military
detentions since 2008, didn't take the threats, including telephone
calls and being followed into gas station bathrooms and accused of
being in cohorts with traffickers, all that seriously. But in August,
one of his bodyguards was detained, held overnight and tortured by the
army.

He wrote a letter to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
seeking help. De la Rosa lived in the Valley of Juarez, in the
neighborhood of San Isidro, now mostly deserted after many of his
neighbors fled.

The last straw came in October, he said, when state Attorney General
Patricia Gonzalez called "to tell me they could no longer protect me,
that I was going to get killed and to leave Juarez immediately. I
think, honestly, they were being nice and warning me.

"But I knew then I was completely alone, that I had no institutional
support at all," he said.

On October 15, De la Rosa drove across the bridge to El Paso where
there was an alert for his car's license plates at U.S. Customs and
Border Protection. U.S. authorities urged him to seek political asylum
to ensure his safety, but he refused. He now lives in a small house in
the outskirts of El Paso on a six-month tourist visa that expires in
May. Meanwhile, talks with the military and state officials have
allowed for his return to work in Juarez, and his office was moved
inside the attorney general's office.

"I continue working for the people of Juarez. I can't leave the city
to the hands of delinquents," he said. "I have to fight for the rule
of law, or otherwise we will have another revolution."

De la Rosa became a human rights activist in the 1960s at the height
of the country's "dirty war" in which leftist dissidents were
disappeared and tortured. He won cases against the White Brigades, the
military secret operatives similar to other armed forces that left
tens of thousands dead in Argentina, Chile and Brazil at the time.

Under Joint Operation Chihuahua, the military has had legal authority
to detain suspects. It's a murky line easily crossed in a city where
anyone is suspect. In Mexico, human rights violations reportedly
committed by soldiers are usually investigated by the military itself,
and most go untried.

By the same token, army and federal troops are also targets of attacks
by organized crime and gangs. International human rights organizations
say more than 80 soldiers have been killed since 2008. Observers say
it's a war of unseen fighters.

"The cartels don't act like a regular army but like guerrillas, and
the proportions aren't one-to-one because the army doesn't know where
and when the narcos are going to attack," said drug investigator
Chabat. "There's inefficiency and corruption at all levels. The
government doesn't think it has another option besides military force.
But the resources are limited. Clearly it's not working."

The bloodshed has prompted all sorts of comparisons to recent
history-that Mexico hasn't seen this much disdain for a government
since the 1910 Mexican Revolution against dictator Porfirio Diaz and
that its violence is reminiscent to the 1930s mafia wars during
Prohibition in the United States. But by body count, Juarez has likely
surpassed Prohibition's bootlegging bloodshed.

"We're missing the boat here in the U.S. We're at the front line of a
war and Americans think it's an abstraction," said El Paso city
councilman Beto O'Rourke, 37, who leads the charge locally to legalize
marijuana. "The war on drugs has been an abject, miserable failure.
The narcos aren't making a political statement. This isn't the FARC in
Colombia...It's pure economics and one way to stop this, at least some
of it, is to legalize marijuana."

Juarez was a bustling city of 1.3 million that was the fourth economic
power in Mexico. It saw a boom of U.S. manufacturing factories called
maquiladoras that paid Mexican workers low wages, about $4 a day,
after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994.

But now Juarez is emptying out, and up to 100,000 people are estimated
to have fled.

"A lot of my friends and all of my relatives have moved to El Paso,"
said one woman, also speaking on condition of anonymity. "I have two
nephews who are doctors in Juarez. They still have their business over
there, but they boarded it up. One of them was assaulted three times
in his office. The last time it was people with guns."

It's hard to find any local government presence; the mayor of Ciudad
Juarez, Jose Reyes Ferriz, runs his administration mostly from El
Paso, residents say. He is a vehement supporter of the military
presence in his city. In early March, a pig's head with a note reading
"you're next," was found outside his Juarez residence.

"The army will remain in Juarez for the time being," he said at a news
conference March 27. "It has done an excellent job and has controlled
the delinquency rate, the robbery of banks and car thefts."

At this point, bank robberies and auto theft seem minor in a city
where children can walk out the door any given day and see a bleeding
body outside their homes. But it is the apparent policy the Mexican
government, quite different from prior administrations, is intent on
following for the near future.

"The White House thought the violence and corruption was a Mexican
problem that wouldn't affect the United States," Chabat said. "And
Mexico thought the consumption of drugs was a U.S. problem...Time has
proven that both perceptions are erroneous, and whether we like it or
not, the phenomenon of drug trafficking must be confronted by both
governments. If we don't, the chaos will overpower both nations."

It's certainly overpowering Juarez, rapidly becoming a dilapidated,
lawless city where only those who don't have other options stay. Many
of the poor who came in droves during the maquiladora boom are
returning to the southern states where they came from. The Juarez
business group called Coparmex estimates about 40 of the 300 or so
factories have shut down in the past two years, costing thousands of
jobs.

The Juarez Chamber of Commerce, meanwhile, estimates 10,000 businesses
have been forced to close. Many owners can't pay or refuse to pay the
bribes that gangs demand for protection. Dozens of businessmen have
been kidnapped for ransom and countless businesses have been torched,
leaving central shopping centers empty and boarded up. The
once-popular discotheque Broncos and Cowgirls was burned down a few
months ago by extortionists, and the surrounding shopping mall in
Plaza las Americas has few cars in its parking lots.

In the Plaza de las Armas, the once-bustling plaza that thrived
selling blankets and silver to American tourists, has disappeared.
Although locals still go there to sell hot dogs or get their shoes
shined for a semblance of normalcy, it empties out in the afternoon
after people return from work.

"There are less people in the plazas, in all public areas, hotels,
dance halls, shops. A lot of people are imprisoned in their homes,"
said the Reverend Carlos Reza, 32, a priest in the city's main
cathedral. Reza tells his flock in sermons that what is happening in
Juarez is similar to the persecutions of early Christians and
Israelites, meaning this too shall pass.

High unemployment and lack of education among those 18 to 25 years of
age-the age group that comprises around 40 percent of the population
in Juarez-has clearly fed criminal activity and crimes of opportunity,
but so have low wages of about $5 a day, a rate that has gone up only
about $1 since NAFTA went into effect, fueling an underground drug
economy that's attractive to the young and poor with no other options
to make a living.

"We have watched with mounting distress as the narcos become more
powerful. They are lawless. They are terrorists. They control the
Mexican side of the border," said Alejandro Junco, owner of Grupo
Reforma, the largest newspaper company in Latin America, speaking at
World Affairs Council luncheon in San Antonio on March 25.

"The rule of law in our democracy hangs by a thread. Those who are not
corrupted cannot contain the lawlessness.

"The reason so many young men join the bloodstained hands is they
would rather live one week like a king than endure a life of misery
for 70 years. Our sad reality is that if you are born poor, and you
don't leave the country, poverty is your destiny if you don't become a
hit man."

Junco, 61, employs some 4,000 Mexican reporters and most wear
bulletproof vests. Like other Mexican newspapers, Junco's dailies of
Reforma, El Nortein Monterrey and Mural in Guadalajara have forgone
bylines in drug stories.

Junco himself has been the target of death threats and, like prominent
figures who speak out, he says he has lost faith in the Mexican
government. He spends much of his time in Austin.

Mexico's National Human Rights Commission reports 60 deaths and 11
disappearances of journalists in the country since 2000. But this
year, six journalists were killed and five kidnapped reporters are
still missing.

The daily violence that Juarez endured almost unnoticed for nearly two
years gained international attention when three people linked to the
U.S. consulate, two of them Americans, were gunned down March 13,
about 2:30 p.m. in what appeared to be two different coordinated attacks.

Lesley Ann Enriquez, a pregnant employee of the U.S. consulate, was
leaving a children's consulate party with her husband, Arthur Redelfs,
a corrections officer with the El Paso County Sheriff's Office, and
their 3-month-old daughter when their white Toyota was intercepted a
few meters from the Santa Fe Bridge, one of the main bridges
connecting to El Paso and the site of a military camp.

Almost at the same time, after leaving the same party, Jorge Alberto
Salcido Ceniseros, the 37-year-old husband of another U.S. consulate
worker, was driving in his SUV with his children, ages 2, 4 and 7,
when gunmen opened fire and killed him instantly. Salcido was a
production manager of the Dallas-based technology and outsourcing
company Affiliated Computer Services Inc.

The killings brought an outcry of condemnation by the United States,
including President Obama.

Mexican authorities theorized that the Aztecas, which also operate in
other U.S. cities besides El Paso, including Dallas and Austin, as
well as in New Mexico and Arizona, are responsible for these killings,
and one gang member has been arrested.

The consulate-related killings could have been random, but they came
after published reports that U.S. intelligence agencies, including the
Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI, would embed with Mexican
police forces to train, advise and even supervise as part of the
Merida Initiative that President Bush signed with the Calderon
administration.

In Juarez, many saw a direct link between the murders and the reports
of increased U.S. intervention in Mexican security matters, an affront
to Mexico's sovereignty that could spawn a "narco patriotism" war,
much as Colombia saw when the United States announced in the late
1980s it would extradite captured drug leaders.

"There has been such a weakening of the government's power to govern
that they have to accept foreign intervention," said De la Rosa. "The
narcos sent a message written in blood to Obama, and it said. 'You
mess with us, and you will pay for it.'"

Among the greatest tragedies in a city of tragedy are the continuing
deaths, disappearances, torture and mutilations of women that gained
international attention more than a decade ago.

In 1993, the Mexican attorney general began counting the murder of
women as separate crimes, or "femicides." The women, most factory
workers, were turning up dead by the dozen, raped, mutilated and
dumped in empty lots. From 1993-2007, more than 700 "femicide" cases
were documented. In 2008, there were 87 cases, 164 in 2009 and 43 so
far in 2010, according to human rights observers.

"The government is not listening to those of us who work in human
rights. The disappearances and murder of women has now gotten lumped
into the drug war statistics, and it's no longer a separate crime,"
said Irma Guadalupe Casas, director of the Casa Amiga Crisis Center in
Juarez, a non-profit center that shelters women and provides legal,
medical and psychological services.

Casa lawyer Brenda Lara said she's seeing women seeking shelter who
are victims of domestic violence, many including wives or girlfriends
of drug gangs.

"'I will kill you and nothing will happen.'...That's what their
boyfriends say," said Lara, citing a 40 percent increase in women
descending on the center to seek refuge and escape. "And it's true.
Nothing will happen if they kill them."

Until lately, what little attention has been paid to the slaughter in
Juarez has come in part from the indefatigable efforts of a librarian
at the University of New Mexico in Las Cruces. With her daily posts of
up to a half dozen articles and bulletins on the Frontier News Wire,
and her constant updating of the death toll, Molly Molloy has emerged
as the de facto record keeper of the violence.

Daily, she scours the local press, analyzes, compares, checks and
rechecks her figures.

In her constant stream of posts, Molloy regularly critiques and
challenges news articles and official announcements that don't pass
the smell test.

"I began to pay close attention to the numbers of murders in Juarez
in the early part of 2008. More than 40 people were killed in the
month of January and this had never been seen before in the city,"
she says. Her research became part of the book Murder City: Ciudad
Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields by Charles Bowden.

"There is ample evidence that people are targeted and murdered for
many known and unknown reasons and that the killings have only
continued to increase since the army first arrived in force in
Juarez," she said. "Evidence of guilt is seldom, if ever,
provided...The huge majority of victims are poor people."

Many in Juarez think they've been forsaken, that the government is
letting the violence play out until a cartel winner emerges. Mexico
ended 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)
when Vicente Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive, won the presidency
under the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, in 2000.
Mexicans viewed this election as the country's first democratic
balloting, and there was hope that with it, corruption would decline
and rule of law would materialize.

Calderon maintains most of the murders are related to cartel violence,
that about 5 percent are innocent or bystanders. When answering
questions from the public or media about the success of his strategy,
the president insists it's a problem of "perception."

"We all have to work on the image of Mexico and the perception of the
violence," is an oft-repeated answer.

Calderon won in 2006 in a highly contested election, and when his term
ends in 2012, Mexicans could opt to return to PRI rule, when a policy
of criminal tolerance reined in drug violence. The question is what
role the U.S. government will play in a nation averse to foreign
intervention.

"The consulate killings put Mexico drug violence higher up on the U.S.
agenda. But will this be enough to change the bleak panorama for both
nations?" Chabat asked. "The truth is not clear, at least in the short
term. How long can Mexican people and even the U.S. government endure
this violence?"

In the meantime, the people of Juarez are trapped.

"We lock ourselves up," said the U.S. consulate driver. "And at night,
we dream of the dead."