In Ciudad Juarez, Drugs Fuel a Murderous War

CIUDAD JUÁREZ (March 24) -- Two weeks ago, José Reyes Ferriz, the mayor of the sprawling industrial city now notorious as Mexico's murder capital, got a message affixed to the head of a pig left in a trash bag on the street. The gruesome narcomanta left little to the imagination: "Reyes Ferriz has two weeks to live," it read. Threats like that resound throughout the city, from its middle-class neighborhoods to the packed cells of its prisons.

The prediction of an early death was hardly the first for the outspoken mayor, a trade attorney who speaks fluent English and teaches law at a university in Juárez. He is still very much alive, and he has a lot to do. Since Mexican President Felipe Calderón began sending army troops and federal police to this beleaguered city a year ago, violence has flared as much more cocaine stays in Mexico rather than being trafficked to the United States.

The cutoff has stimulated a retail market for the drug within Juárez -- and a bloody battle among rival gangs that has claimed 600 lives so far this year alone. Three-fourths of this year's victims were between the ages of 14 and 24, most bearing tattoos testifying to their allegiance to one of three gangs: the Aztecas, affiliated with the Juárez cartel, and the Artist Assassins and the Mexicles, both connected to Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's powerful Sinaloa cartel, which has been fighting to muscle in on the Juárez turf.

"The pie was getting smaller, so they all wanted a bigger piece to keep their operations going," Reyes Ferriz said during an interview from his office, which overlooks the site where three people connected to the U.S. Consulate were gunned down March 13 a short distance from a border crossing into El Paso, Texas.

In light of the killings of Lesley Enriquez, a pregnant American who worked for the consulate; her American husband, Arthur Redelfs; and Jorge Alberto Salcido, the Mexican husband of another consular employee, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led a high-level delegation to Mexico City on Tuesday to discuss how to better focus the Mérida Initiative, a $1.3 billion fund set up by the Bush administration in 2008 to help Mexico stymie the brutish power of the drug lords.

Despite criticism from citizens and drug war experts that the influx of federal police isn't helping, the U.S. delegation expressed its support for Calderón's meet-them-on-the-streets approach. Signaling his seriousness while Clinton was in town, Calderon sent 450 additional federal police to Juárez on Tuesday, bolstering a force that has swelled from 1,600 local police to 11,500 cops and soldiers, all armed with automatic weapons and patrolling the city, where an average of six people are killed each day.

Although the United States has been a sometimes-reluctant partner in Calderón's war against drugs, Reyes Ferriz points to two significant wins in recent days. Clinton's delegation vowed to earmark more Mérida money for local policing efforts in Juárez, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently announced it would repatriate Mexican deportees who have served time in U.S. jails not just exclusively to Juárez, but in various towns along the border. Reyes Ferriz said that move alone should do much to quell the fighting.

But in the evening, as sirens wail through Juárez's empty streets, the casualties of an evolving turf war continued to pile up. Reyes Ferriz, whose term ends in October, is aware his legacy may be mixed. "What I've done, there's not much to show for it," he said, "because I worked on the security issue and things are still very bad."

The kidnappings, carjackings and extortion have terrorized citizens, caused businesses to shutter and stanched the flow of foreign investment. But those activities add more cash to the cartels' drug business, which generates an estimated at $1 million a week, Reyes Ferriz said. "The money they were getting from retail drug sales was not enough," he said. Sicarios, the cartels' hired killers, are paid as little as 500 pesos, or about $40, a week, indicating just how cheap life has become -- and how desperate the killers -- in Ciudad Juárez.

Nicolas Sosa, a bald-headed gang member with a broken nose and an elaborate design shaved into his beard, knows all about that. He killed two police officers and is serving a five-year prison term at the Center for Social Readaptation, a medium-security prison in Juárez.

Sosa, 34, is a member of the Artist Assassins, the local street fighters for Guzman's powerful Sinaloa cartel. He holds out no hope for a truce with other gangs. "It won't work because they kill our families and our friends," he said. "I just don't think it's possible." Without a truce, there is little to suggest the fighting will end, despite the tens of thousands of federal forces dispatched to the city since Calderón took office in December 2006.

The prison is itself a microcosm of Juárez, as gangs maintain their hierarchies and their grudges inside or out. The prison authorities segregated rival gangs after a gun battle broke out 10 months ago, leaving 20 inmates dead.

Since 2007, unemployment in this city -- which has more factory jobs than Detroit and Atlanta combined -- has climbed to 20 percent, forcing young people into the drug-fueled violence. Convicted felons complain there are no legitimate job opportunities after they've done their time. "If you're tatted up and have a criminal record, you won't get a job," said Alejandro Saenz, 30, an Artist Assassin who has spent the past decade in prison and expects to be paroled soon.

"The problem isn't economic, it's social. When both parents are out of the house all day working in the maquillas, people look for a life on the streets," said Jesús, 30, a member of the Aztecas gang who said he had been in prison for three years for assaulting a store owner.

The deeper social problems lead many residents to suggest that neither an increased military presence nor American assistance will solve Juárez's problems. "I haven't noticed an increase in security," said a high school teacher who requested anonymity out of fear of being targeted. "People keep getting killed with nothing changed."