VIOLENCE-PLAGUED JUAREZ ONLY GOT WORSE IN 2010

Rarely do statistics tell the whole truth, but mark Juarez as an exception.

It accounts for 1 percent of Mexico's population and more than 20
percent of the country's murders.

Juarez is death city, the most dangerous place in North America, and
it is getting worse by the year. It has had more than 3,000 murders
in 2010, an average of almost nine a day. Sixty-four of its police
officers were among those killed.

El Paso, by contrast, saw its number of homicides drop to five this
year from 13 in 2009. Both totals were uncommonly low for a city of
more than 620,000.

New York City probably will finish 2010 with fewer than 600
homicides, and it has six times the population of Juarez. The Mexican
city is home to 1.3 million people.

With a week still left in the year, Juarez has exceeded its 2009
murder toll by 400, an increase of more than 15 percent. The city has
almost doubled the 1,608 murders it had in 2008, when the first
explosion of violence occurred.

Worse, there is little or no chance that the killings will be solved.
Juarez police, who number about 3,000, and investigators from
Chihuahua state simply cannot keep pace with the carnage, much of it
attributed to gangs and warring drug cartels.

Even if the government in Juarez were 100 percent honest, something
no one believes to be true, police could not begin to arrest all the
killers in their midst. In an imperfect or corrupt system, criminals
have the upper hand.

"One of the things lacking over there is a commitment to law
enforcement," said Greg Allen, police chief of El Paso.

Allen said a murder in El Paso brings an immediate show of force and
dispersal of vast resources. He and his command staff assign up to 16
detectives and officers to every homicide.

Allen empathizes with those trying to maintain law and order in
Juarez, where kidnapping, extortion and murder are so common that
even a day of double-digit killings may not make the front page in El
Paso. He said his own department, with about 1,100 officers, is
overrun with calls from crime victims, though most cases are mild
compared with what is happening in Juarez.

"Everything we're doing right now is a Band-Aid effect," Allen said,
citing a case in which his officers did not respond to victims of car
thefts for more than five hours. He said such inefficiency in El Paso
- - the safest large U.S. city, according to a survey by CQ Press - is
his greatest frustration.

For the conscientious cop in Juarez, knowing that murderers operate
with impunity is the worst part of an impossible job.

Randolph Roth, a history professor at Ohio State University who has
studied murder from colonial times to the present, said the crisis in
Juarez is comparable to a handful of other places.

One was the mafia wars in Sicily during various stretches of the
1900s. France's outlying provinces during its revolution and the
American South during Reconstruction were equally violent, as
criminal gangs asserted their power, Roth said.

"In all of those places, the central government had not been able to
establish its control," he said. "What's happened in Mexico is
similar. The cartels have tried to become warlord governments on
their own. It is very hard, as we are finding in Afghanistan, to root
these factions out."

One commonality in all the most violent places was that law-abiding
people fled. This has been the case in Juarez and its environs, said
Arvin West, sheriff of Hudspeth County, Texas.

His deputies patrol just across the border from the Mexican towns of
Guadalupe and El Porvenir, where an exodus occurred last Easter.

"All the little villages further in evacuated," West said. "Farmers
and ranchers just let their horses and cattle go free when they left."

Their fears were legitimate.

One riverside shootout left three men wounded on the U.S. side and
another dead on the Mexican side. West said murders in the rural
towns of Mexico subsided after springtime. Still, vigilance is his watchword.

"It ain't no safer than it was two years ago. It's a ticking time
bomb," West said.

A father and son with ties to El Porvenir died in October, killed by
gunmen who invaded their home in Juarez.

The victims, Rito Grado Serrano, 59, and Rigoberto Grado Villa, 37,
were perforated with 22 bullets. Though Rito Grado lived in Juarez,
he was a government executive of El Porvenir.

Police Chief Allen said El Paso has a sizable shadow population
because of people fleeing Juarez. He puts the figure at 30,000, but
said "that number is conservative."

Tony Payan, an associate professor of political science at UTEP who
specializes in border issues, estimated that the number who have left
Juarez for U.S. cities is 80,000 to 100,000.

"I have students who are living four or five to an apartment in El
Paso," Payan said. "Even if it's just American citizens or people
with dual citizenship moving across, it's a phenomenal number."

The departures, the bullets, the loss of jobs have combined to end
night life in Juarez. Shuttered stores dominate shopping areas.

Juarez's massive factories, many tied to American companies, have
withstood the trauma better.

"The maquilas have seen an uptick in orders, but they are not adding
jobs or capacity," Payan said.

In shell-shocked Juarez, he sees worrisome new developments.

"Men 18 to 35 who were involved with the cartels are dying, dead,
disabled," he said.

"More women and juveniles are involved now. The women are not
killing, but they are used in drug sales at the retail level."

As for juvenile males, gangs enlist them for extortion and drug running.

So great are the number of murders in Juarez that writing and reading
about them can take on an antiseptic quality. Some days the death
toll is so numbing, the victims so faceless, that it is as though we
are watching people die in television shows.

On Jan. 10, a story in the El Paso Times began this way: "The
violence continued Friday in Juarez with at least 18 slayings. ...
One man was cut into pieces, another was decapitated, one was hanged,
a man in a wheelchair was shot to death and three women were killed."

It ran in the metro section, the first of many such compilation
stories necessitated because of the staggering numbers and the
reality that the next day would bring more of the same.

Still, a handful of cases stood out, demonstrating that the city can
still be moved and perhaps outraged.

Marauding gunmen on Jan. 31 killed 15 people at a birthday party in
the Juarez neighborhood of Villas del Salvarcar.

Eleven of the victims were teenagers, and the youngest was just 13.
Another boy, 17, was an honor student. Two others played
American-style football at their school.

Police and politicians said the killings were committed by drug
dealers intent on disposing of rivals, a claim that many in the
neighborhood disputed.

Some of those killed probably were innocents who had the misfortune
of being in the same place as the hunted. Those responsible for the
crime cared not if women or teenagers died. "Kill them all. Leave no
witnesses." Those are the everyday themes for the executioners in Juarez.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon was among those in officialdom who
said a preliminary investigation showed that the victims at the party
could have been in gangs. He apologized during a visit to Juarez in February.

Perhaps only in Juarez could history repeat itself with another
massacre at a birthday party.

It happened again in October, when gunmen killed 14 people and
wounded 19 more. Six women and girls were among those killed. The
wounded included a 9-year-old boy. Perhaps the killings that
attracted the most notice in America had victims from El Paso.

Gunmen on March 13 killed Lesley Enriquez Redelfs, a worker at the
U.S. Consulate in Juarez, and her husband, Arthur H. Redelfs, an
officer at the El Paso County Jail.

Attackers stalked them after they left a children's birthday party in
Juarez to return to El Paso.

Leslie Redelfs was pregnant. The Redelfs' baby daughter survived the
shootings from her seat in back of the couple's SUV.

That same afternoon, gunmen killed the husband of a second consular
employee after he left the same party.

The leader of a drug gang in November confessed to the murders and to
the slaughter of the 15 people in January. Arturo Gallegos
Castrellon, 32, of Los Aztecas, said he ordered those killings and 80
percent of Juarez's homicides during the last year.

"'He is in charge of the whole organization of Los Aztecas in Ciudad
Juarez," Luis Cardenas Palomino, chief of the regional security
division of the federal police, said last month from Mexico City.

Could this be? One man as a puppeteer controlling thousands of lives?

Earlier, another gang member said the Redelfs were targeted because
of Arthur Redelfs' work at the jail. El Paso County Sheriff Richard
Wiles said there was no truth to this claim.

As for motive, federal police in Mexico did not say why Gallegos
supposedly ordered the killings of consular employees.

Separating fact from fiction is never easy in Juarez murder cases.
Sheer volume suggests that the killings are the work of no one man or
even one criminal organization. The conventional thinking is that
many die because the Sinaloa and Juarez drug cartels remain at war.

Payan, the UTEP professor, said violence will ebb when their fight is
over. "The Juarez cartel is looking at the end," he said. "It will be
finished off by the government or the Sinaloa cartel."

A single cartel dominating illegal exports will lessen the murder
rate, Payan said. This, he said, has happened in Tijuana, Mexico,
where one criminal empire effectively has won out.

But authorities in San Diego, Calif., a neighbor to Tijuana, said
that was not the case. "I don't want to say the killing and violence
are down in Tijuana," said Capt. Dave Myers of the San Diego County
Sheriff's Department. "There is no real validity to that. There is
still a battle."

Juarez is a place where the violence has been underestimated.
Occasional lulls during the last three years created false hope and
even predictions that the worst was over. "None of us expected this
to go very long," Payan said.

If we learned anything in 2010, it was that Juarez became more
violent and unpredictable than ever.

Fifty-one killings occurred in a three-day stretch of August. One
week in June brought more than 60 homicides.

No place in Chihuahua state or its environs was immune. Many of the
more brazen crimes occurred outside the Juarez city limits.

Gunmen killed six men in May near a kindergarten in Loma Blanca, in
the rustic Valley of Juarez. The next month, two dozen riflemen
stormed a rehabilitation center in Chihuahua City, killing 19 men.

"This is an unprecedented event in the state capital," said Carlos
Gonzalez, a spokesman for the Chihuahua attorney general.

Payan said he continues to believe that Juarez and its people have
better days ahead. "I insist on being somewhat optimistic, even in
the middle of the storm," he said.

Most of Mexico's violence is in northern and western states, and
Juarez is the epicenter.

Payan hopes the eventual end of the drug war will stabilize the city,
just as Chicago calmed after the U.S. government stopped Al Capone's
criminal operations.

Roth, of Ohio State University, said there is one good reason for optimism.

"It's amazing how resilient cities are," he said. "I can't think of a
case where a city actually collapsed."

Juarez, the city suffering more than any other in North America, does
not want to be the first.

Homicides in El Paso

Year Homicides

2010 5

2009 13

2008 18

2007 17

2006 15

2005 14

2004 11

2003 21

2002 14

2001 20

2000 20

1999 14

1998 18

1997 25

1996 30

1995 38

1994 43

1993 56

1992 50

1991 52

1990 35