Thousands of Mexican soldiers pour into the country's most violent city in crackdown on drug gangs
By Andrew Malone
Last updated at 12:07 PM on 04th March 2009
Armed to the hilt, they came from land and air, determined to restore order to Mexico's most violent city.
Nearly 2,000 Mexican soldiers and armed federal police poured into the border town of Ciudad Juarez last weekend.
The city - just across from El Paso in Texas - has been ravaged by drug gangs. Just this month 250 people were killed there by hitmen fighting for lucrative smuggling routes.
War zone: Federal police check their guns as they get ready to board a plane from Mexico City to the lawless border town of Ciudad Juarez
Bringing out the big guns: Armed federal police prepare to patrol the streets as they arrive in Ciudad Juarez yesterday
The soldiers' mandate is clear - and ambitious.
'This is to reinforce the operation in general ... to eradicate kidnappings, extortion, assaults and homicide,' army spokesman Enrique Torres said.
The soldiers are the first contingent of as many as 5,000 troops and federal police being sent to Juarez.
The deployment is part of a five thousand man troop increase planned for this city - given the unlucky title of Mexico's most violent
The soldiers and police were flown in by air as well as driven in
Almost 2,500 soldiers and federal police have been there for nearly a year, but they have failed to curb the violence plaguing the city of about 1.6 million people.
President Felipe Calderon's military operation is supported by the United States, which is concerned the violence could destabilize Mexico, a key trading partner, and spill over the border.
Mexico has deployed some 45,000 troops across the country to try to crush drug gangs, but clashes between rival cartels and security forces killed around 6,000 people last year.
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Yesterday Mexico's army blitzed a former holiday resort that's now the most deadly place on Earth. ANDREW MALONE reports
Bristling with firepower, faces hidden by balaclavas and sunglasses, the troops arrived by land and air. In scenes reminiscent of a Hollywood action film, convoys of military vehicles stretching for more than half a mile snaked into the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez yesterday, carrying 5,000 soldiers and federal police armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
Their mission? To tackle rampaging drugs gangs whose turf wars have left more than 6,000 people dead in a year - 700 in the past month.
It is a last desperate move in what has become the murder capital of the world. Once an upmarket holiday resort for rich Americans, Ciudad Juarez is in the grip of anarchy as rival gangsters battle each other - as well as the police and army - for control of this key staging post for drugs into the lucrative U.S. market as well as onwards to Europe.
Between federal police and Mexican Army soldiers up to 2,000 law enforcement officers swarmed the streets of Juarez over the weekend to join the 2,500 already there - and there are more to come
Described as a 'narco insurgency' that threatens the entire nation, the scale of the crisis was dramatically underscored last week when the city's head of police in the city was forced to flee. Robert Orduna had been warned that one of his men would be slaughtered every 48 hours until he quit. The drug lords kept their promise: they butchered five of Orduna's officers in ten days.
The killings came after hit-lists were pasted on shop windows warning of 'never-ending' bloodshed until police 'backed off' - and Orduna left town. 'I can't allow my men to continue losing their lives,' Orduna said in a statement after being smuggled out of his office, where he slept inside a bulletproof cage. 'I am presenting my permanent resignation.'
To the dismay of Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Orduna had only been in the job for six months: his predecessor fled across the border to Texas after he, too, was told to leave town or die. He, in turn, had replaced a police chief murdered by the gangs.
Mexican soldiers are ready for battle with drug gangs. The Government is deploying 5,000 troops to try to restore order in the country's most violent city
These slayings were the latest chilling sign that the gangs are determined to control this border city. Once popular with U.S. stars such as Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe and Ernest Hemingway, the bars are empty now and the once-elegant streets awash with blood.
Every day, gun battles rage along Triumph of the Republic Boulevard, the city's main thoroughfare, and the heads of enemies of the drug lords have been impaled on spikes in parks once popular with picnicking families. Hospitals treating victims regularly come under machine-gun fire. Radios used by emergency services are interrupted by the drugs gangs, who warn paramedics they will be killed if they treat any wounded.
Over one 24-hour period last month, 17 people were murdered, a relative of a U.S. congressman was kidnapped, and scores of buildings were set ablaze.
The war is being fought between a bewildering array of gangs, many of them using ex-Special Forces soldiers recruited from the Mexican military.
They are supported by corrupt police - with as many as one in five of local law-enforcement officers believed to be in the pay of the gang lords.
A forensic police officer investigates yet another gang-related murder
One commander was arrested last month on charges of attempting to smuggle a ton of drugs into the U.S. through El Paso.
Much of the bloodshed is being orchestrated by Joaquin 'Shorty' Guzman, one of the world's most wanted men, who leads a cartel from the Pacific-coast state of Sinaloa. Guzman has already turned his homeland into his own personal fiefdom.
Blamed for the deaths of 600 people already this year, the drugs baron has become enraged by the Mexican government's attempts to curtail his operations.
In one recent shoot-out, he exacted revenge by killing seven federal agents and beheading them. Armed with AK-47 assault rifles - known in Mexico as cuernos de chivo (goat's horns) due to their curved magazines - they also pumped more than 100 rounds into two police officers who had the temerity to stop one of their men.
Guzman, who wears orange ostrich-skin cowboy boots and gold jewellery in the shape of machine guns, has been battling the rival Gulf Cartel for control of Tijuana, another town near the U.S. border, where he has posted videos of executions and beheadings of rivals on the internet. He has also left headless corpses of rival gangs in playgrounds as a 'warning to the next generation'.
Mexico's President Felipe Calderon has vowed to keep up the pressure on the drug cartels
Not content with his estimated £15bn drugs business on the Pacific coast, however, Guzman wants to expand his empire into Ciudad Juarez, currently in the hands of rival Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.
Fuentes, who has had a $5million (£3.5m) bounty put on his head by the U.S., has for years controlled this overland shipment route for billions of dollars worth of drugs into the U.S., running his operation from a quasi-military headquarters possibly in Chile or Argentina.
Among the brutal methods in his 'narco-war' was the so-called 'House of Death' - an infamous building in Ciudad Juarez where torture and mass murders took place. It was discovered by an undercover U.S. agent - but the resulting court case was thrown out because American officials had colluded in the killings rather than blow the cover of their agent.
And the crisis has even spilled across the border into the U.S., where there has been a spate of killings and kidnappings by the murderous cartels.
Officers detain alleged members of a criminal gang. The police chief in Ciudad Juarez, Robert Orduna, quit after five of his men were murdered in 10 days
Barack Obama has been warned that Mexico's drugs lords now pose as big a threat to U.S. national security as Islamic insurgents. The U.S. is now planning to deploy the military to the border to try to contain the bloodshed.
'The violence is spreading like wildfire across the Rio Grande,' said George Greyson, an expert on Mexico at the College of William & Mary in Virginia.
The latest troop movements were ordered after President Calderon vowed to wipe out the drugs gangs, and pledged to send 5,000 men into Ciudad Juarez for a final showdown.
'We're throwing everything into this. We are cleaning the house,' the President insisted. The stakes could not be higher. As one of the Mexican president's aides predicted last night, if the government gave up its fight against the cartels, 'the next president of the republic would be a drug dealer'.
But Jose Reyes Ferriz, mayor of Ciudad Juarez, believes the drug war will end only when both sides have ended up killing each other - and there is no one left to deal drugs. Reyes said: 'But then someone else will just move in and take over. It's all just a nightmare.'
CNN) -- Nearly 7,000 Mexican soldiers and federal police arrived in the U.S.-Mexico border city of Ciudad Juarez this week to restore security to a city plagued by a long-standing, bloody drug war.
Mexican federal police patrol in Ciudad Juarez earlier this week.
Random vehicle checkpoints, patrols of masked soldiers and police in SWAT gear are some of the signs of the massive military buildup ordered by Mexico's president, Ciudad Juarez police spokesman Jaime Torres Valadez said Thursday.
Another 1,500 soldiers are expected to join the 3,500 that rolled into Juarez earlier this week to support municipal police in street patrols and ultimately take control of their operations, Torres said.
In addition to the army troops, about 3,000 federal agents arrived to carry out investigations Torres likened to those of the FBI in the United States.
"They'll stay as long as necessary," Torres said, in the city across the border from El Paso, Texas.
Extreme violence among warring drug cartels and the Mexican government has long plagued Juarez and the state of Chihuahua, but the situation has been getting worse.
Last month, the city's chief of police was obliged to quit after threats from organized crime to kill a policeman every day that he remained on the job.
And this week, the U.S. Consulate in Juarez specifically warned Americans to avoid an area southeast of the city.
"There has been a dramatic increase in drug related violence in the Guadalupe Bravo area and there is no indication that the situation will improve in the near future," the consulate said on its Web site. 
Watch how drug killings are making Americans wary of Mexico »
President Felipe Calderon's security cabinet met in the city last week to devise a strategy to combat narcotraffickers.
The federal government is footing the bill for the troops' wages and food, and the municipal government is paying for their gas and living expenses, Torres said.
Surveillance cameras will be installed throughout the city to help police stem executions and assassinations in the streets, scene of many of Juarez's 1,600 killings in 2008.
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Police advised residents to carry identification with them at all times to ensure that encounters with law enforcement in the streets and at vehicle checkpoints proceed as quickly as possible, Torres said.
"It's necessary to keep the peace," Torres said in a telephone interview as he sat in his car, waiting in line at a police checkpoint. "For me, it's safe. If there are more soldiers, I feel safe."
But human rights advocates say the military presence creates a police state in a region where confidence in law enforcement is low.
"The increase in law enforcement brings elements that create an environment conducive to the violation of human rights," said José Luis Armendáriz González, president of the Chihuahua State Commission of Human Rights. "What are the limits of their power? The risk for wrongful detentions, raids of homes increases when there's no clear line."
Armendáriz said the focus on troop numbers detracts from improving the quality of investigation and crime-fighting techniques.
"We've been battling the criminal elements with force and gunfire for years now with few results," he said. "I believe it's necessary to pass to a second phase that focuses on intelligence and infiltrating the criminal organization to hit all levels."
Others say the stronger law enforcement presence is producing results.
"In the last seven days, we've had no more than five reported deaths. Before that, the average was six a day," Sen. Ramón Galindo Noriega said in an interview Wednesday.
"Maybe it's a coincidence, but I believe the presence has generated an environment of greater security and this is congruent with the numbers that we have this week."
Galindo, a lifelong Juarense who sends his children to schools in Juarez and owns businesses there, said more troops are the only answer to a problem that has transformed Juarez from a center of industry and commerce to a major battleground in the war among drug cartels.
"What we had before was a state that was under the control of crime. It was a state that didn't permit a normal life. People left, businesses closed. There was fear in the streets, an environment of fear that we had to take radical measures to eradicate," he said.
"I believe the people are content with the presence of the army. They feel safer in the city, calmer in the streets."
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