Ciudad Juárez, Mexico: The world's most dangerous place?

CIUDAD JUÁREZ , MEXICO—The light is falling, the heat is letting up and gunmen have arrived at the modest house with the concrete front yard where there is a birthday party going on. With quiet efficiency they approach the painted wrought iron gates and begin spraying the adults with bullets. Three men crumple to the ground, dead. Two others succumb later in hospital.

The evening has begun with a massacre, but it’s still early.

A couple hours later, a man will be lying in a semi-fetal position, dumped at the side of the road opposite a used car lot, his blank eyes still open, his head in a pool of blood. Just down the road, another man will be shot dead inside a convenience store.

By the end of the night, there will be 10 killings in Juárez. The next day, 13. The day after that, 22.

Juarez, a city of 1.3 million hugging the border with El Paso, Tex., may now be the most dangerous place in the world — riskier even than Baghdad or Kandahar. This isn’t the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, or Cité Soleil in Port-au-Prince, pockets of danger in a larger whole. In Juárez, it’s everywhere. Here, death is like a Whac-A-Mole game, constantly rearing its head.

A corpse hangs from an overpass. Another floats in the Rio Grande. A man’s body slumps in his driver’s seat, his severed head resting on the hood.

It happens in store parking lots in broad daylight. In funeral parlours, homes, businesses, nightclubs.

And though there are now around 10,000 police and soldiers in the city, the average person remains utterly unprotected.

The cause is a vicious turf battle between two powerful drug cartels, and the war President Felipe Calderón has launched, with U.S. backing, against them.

The main result so far? Escalating violence. Some are now calling this an epic failure of policy.

“Even if they reduce the flow of drugs, it will come at what cost?” asks one Juárez journalist. “Tens of thousands dead?”

Driving across the short, unadorned bridge from El Paso and into dusty Ciudad Juárez is immediately jarring. One of the first things I notice is a sandbag fortification in front of an aging hotel, behind which is a federal police officer in full armour and helmet, peering out from behind a machine gun. I stop the car. A taxi driver warns me that my rental with its out-of-town plates is a target.

Juárez resembles a police state. Streets are crawling with agents, outfitted like soldiers but more menacing; their faces masked like bank robbers, their eyes shielded by dark sunglasses, standing in the beds of police trucks covering each direction with their machine guns.

Paradoxically, this heavy police and military presence has coincided with the region becoming increasingly lawless.

In March, the Canadian government warned its citizens against travelling to Mexico, especially Juárez, following the ambush of three people linked to the U.S. consulate.

There have been more than 5,100 killings here since 2008, when the Sinaloa cartel under Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman (one of the world’s richest men, according to Forbes), seeking greater profits, began to fight for territory long held by the Juárez cartel. The government began fighting them both.

The lives of Juarenses have changed completely in the face of the chaos. Few leave their homes at night. Tens of thousands have moved away.

“I feel a fear I’ve never felt before,” says Reina Alicia Hernandez Flores, holding her elbows and staring at the pavement, “like at any moment we could die.”

Hernandez is standing in the shade of a tree on Villa de Portal Street in south Juárez. I’ve come here because it’s the site of a crime so wanton it jolted awake even the most desensitized to the violence.

On the night of Jan. 30, dozens of local teenagers were partying inside a peach-coloured house on the street. Their mothers used to say that if their kids were going to go out, they’d rather it be close by; it’s safer.

Not that night.

Around 11, seven SUVs and trucks pulled up. Two blocked the intersections. Masked gunmen entered the house while others kept watch outside. The partygoers, boys and girls, were rounded up and shot in the head. Sixteen were killed — 11 teens and five adults — and more than a dozen wounded.

Pictures of the aftermath show the floor of one room bathed in blood.

Hernandez heard the shots from her home about five doors down. Her husband, who was outside smoking a cigar before bed, ran back in the house. “They’re killing the boys!” he screamed. Hernandez bolted down the street but was stopped by the barrel of an AK-47, a glaring gunman fingering the trigger. She pleaded with him. “My son is inside! Please!”

In seconds the executioners emerged from the house. “We’re finished our work,” she heard one of them say. They climbed in their trucks and drove off.

The darkness made it difficult to find the body of her son Adrian, 17, amid the pile of corpses. From the way they were positioned, it appeared “they were all trying to protect each other,” Hernandez said.

At first, the state prosecutor, and later the president, claimed it was a drug-related vendetta. They changed their tune — and the president apologized — after evidence suggested otherwise. It appears gunmen for the Juárez cartel were looking for another party with rival gang members

“They were good, studious kids,” says Hernandez’s neighbour Maricrus Camargo, whose 19-year-old, José Luis, was also among the dead.

Camargo says that before the incident, she used to think that the only people killed in this drug war were, as the president claims repeatedly, somehow involved in it.

“But not now,” she affirms. “A lot of people are innocent.”

I ask them how they feel about their city now. “They killed our sons in front of our eyes,” Camargo declares. “We can expect anything now.”

Just that morning, she bought flowers from a mobile vendor. As she was arranging them, she was thinking of her son, crying.

“Now I buy flowers for my son, instead of shoes.”

The “borderland” is extremely important to the cartels because it’s worth billions. The U.S. State Department says 90 per cent of the cocaine destined for the U.S. flows through Mexico from its origins in South America. And up to 60 per cent of all illegal drugs are smuggled across a 350-kilometre stretch from New Mexico to Texas’s Big Bend National Park.

By extension, Mexico is also the main source of cocaine in Canada, since the U.S. is the major transit country for the drug smuggled into this country, according to the RCMP.

But few in the backrooms of Toronto nightclubs snorting the white powder think about the eroding security in Ciudad Juárez.

At the scene of the five-person massacre earlier this night, in the middle-class Infonavit Casa Grande neighbourhood, I watch as the police, federal and municipal, mill about, filling out forms, talking on cell phones. I don’t see any statements taken. Within a half-hour the police tape is gone, and so are they.

Gustavo De la Rosa Hickerson, a human rights ombudsman with the Chihuahua State government, says the killers are almost never caught in this war. “Nobody is convicted of anything,” he says. The conviction rate for drug-related arrests across Mexico is believed to be about 2 per cent.

Cecilia Valenzuela de Mendez, dressed in a pink satin blouse, has been staring into space. Her son Arturo, father to a 4-year-old, is dead. Murdered in the family’s own front yard.

It was a relative’s birthday party. Valenzuela was in the back of the house washing dishes when she heard the commotion and caught a glimpse of the killers as they fled. “They were wearing uniforms,” she says.

She starts to moan, like she’s about to vomit. “It has come home to us,” she wails. “What do I do?”

Her other son, José Alfredo, looks bewildered. His eyes dart side to side, as if he’s worried the killers, probably the feared sicarios — hitmen for the organized crime groups — might return. The victims “weren’t involved in anything,” he says, preempting any question about drugs, gangs.

The government has claimed that sicarios have used stolen police uniforms in the past. But public suspicion of the police and military is rampant.

Virtually no one says they are to be trusted. One young man contends he was forced by federales — the federal cops — to withdraw money from an ATM. Others say they stop vehicles on false pretenses and steal valuables, or simply take bribes.

Police in Mexico have long been corrupt; it’s one of the scourges Calderón has tried to root out, as well as dishonesty inside the justice system.

Not all officers are crooked. On April 23 six federal agents and one municipal officer — a 22-year-old mother — were slaughtered in an ambush by a cartel-affiliated gang. They appeared to be honest cops trying to do their jobs.

Before early April, when 5,000 federales took over from the Mexican army in leading the anti-drug effort here, ombudsman De la Rosa’s office was investigating 220 complaints of abuse by the military, from illegal detention to torture to disappearances.

Then one night he was threatened with a gun pointed to his head while stopped at a suburban intersection. Later one of his bodyguards was killed. He fled to El Paso.

He has since returned to work, but now there are complaints against the federales.

Even municipal police officers like Arturo Muñoz are wary of the effort. In the middle of Muñoz’s back is a hard lump. It’s a bullet, still lodged there since he was shot in March while working as an undercover cop guarding a convenience store.

“These federales come from far away and all they see is a big market to make money,” the 20-year veteran officer says. “They’re supposed to deal with the cartels but they’re just looking for your car without plates so they can stop you, take $50 and let you go.”

Muñoz, who makes about $600 a month and has another job making garage doors to make ends meet, believes the corruption goes up very high. The traffickers wouldn’t be able to move their products and guns past the hundreds of checkpoints in the city and countryside undetected. “If something happens,” he surmises, “it’s because they allow it to happen. It’s not luck.”

Corruption is also top of mind for the woman who manages the finances at one of the city’s more expensive funeral homes. I went there mistaking it for another that endured a massacre during a memorial service.

This woman had her own story to tell. The business is being forced to pay $600 in weekly extortion. It began last October with a phone threat. The management didn’t pay attention at first. The threats continued. The office was moved and staff began wearing jeans and running shoes to work, in case they had to flee.

Then, gunmen shot up the front of the building with high-calibre rifles.

Management began paying, says the woman, who asked that neither her name nor that of the business be published for security reasons. “It was the only way. The threat was that the next time it will be dead people.”

All through the ordeal, the woman adds, the police would never come. But now that they’re making payments — every Monday they get a call telling them where to take the money — the police “respond very quickly,” she says, shaking her head.

The day he took office, Juárez mayor José Reyes Ferriz fired the municipal forces’ top officers. The chief had been caught crossing into the U.S. with a trunk full of marijuana. It took two years but the local department is now almost entirely made up of new recruits.

Reyes is optimistic for the future, despite the increasing violence. “This has nothing to do with the failure of federal policies,” Reyes says. “It has to do with the flow of drugs into the U.S. over the last 15 years.”

The soft-spoken Reyes, a business lawyer by profession, sits behind a presidential desk in an elegant dark-wood paneled office in Juárez’s city hall. He’s had threats, including a pig’s head at his front door. Most Juarenses believe he sleeps at his home in El Paso every night; he denies it.

Reyes comes from a more left-wing party than Calderón, yet he staunchly defends the president. Calderón has been able to reduce the flow of cocaine through Mexico by 30 per cent, Reyes says, and so the cartels are “fighting for a larger piece” of a shrinking pie.

Critics say Calderón has inexplicably thrown firepower at the cartels while ignoring other crucial elements in any fight against organized crime.

Notably, argues Edgardo Buscaglia, a renowned expert on global organized crime, his government has ignored the thousands of legal enterprises linked to the cartels that allow them to launder money, move and distribute their products, and bribe soldiers and police.

“As long as you don’t dismantle the economic side of organized crime in the legal economy, you’ll never get rid of their power to corrupt and exercise violence,” explains Buscaglia, a professor of law and economics at the Autonomous Institute of Technology of Mexico.

And why isn’t this tackled? Buscaglia says it’s simple: these businesses contribute to the political campaigns of all parties.

Named after Benito Juárez, Mexico’s first president from an indigenous native group and one of its most celebrated, Juárez is a mix of dilapidated and sparkling new. Until the recession, it was one of Mexico’s richest cities, thanks to hundreds of cheap-labour maquiladoras producing everything from TVs to medical supplies for the world.

The recession has hit hard: Juárez went from zero to 20 per cent unemployment in two years.

But the other reason for the decline is the dramatic explosion in violence and the near impunity with which it all unfolds.

Alfreda Varela’s life as a reporter has changed dramatically in the past couple of years. Juárez used to have as many murders as any similar-sized American city. Now, All Varela reports on nowadays is death. On this night, he is speeding from one murder scene to the next for his all-news station, Channel 44.

He goes from the Casa Grandes case and soon he’s in front of a used car lot, Teto Car’s (sic). Lying on the ground is the body of Israel Valle José Triana, a 31-year-old who appears to have been kidnapped, then dumped out of a vehicle and shot.

After 20 minutes at the scene, he and his crew move on to the next, the Oxxo convenience store. “It’s historic what’s happening here,” Varela says to me. “Juárez’s social structure is falling apart. All the executions, the kidnappings, the assaults, femicides, extortions, it’s killing the economy, and the corruption is infiltrating all the police forces.”

Many think that once you step foot into Juárez you stand a good chance of being killed. It’s a bit of an exaggeration. But I worried for my safety only once, while standing before a concrete fence behind the home of celebrity singer and songwriter Juan Gabriel, on which sicarios, working for the Juárez drug gang, wrote a graffiti message taking responsibility for the killing of the seven police on April 23. They suspected the police of providing support for the Sinaloa cartel. They threatened more carnage if this support continues.

My guide was already nervous about being there. Not long after our arrival a large, white SUV with smoked-out windows rolled by, then backed up and turned down the street we were on. Keenly aware these were likely gang members, and were likely armed, and remembering the death toll here, I held my breath.

The SUV drove very slowly past, but didn’t stop. I exhaled.

I was beginning to understand what life feels like in Juárez.

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BODY COUNTS

Since Mexican President Felipe Calderón took office in December, 2006, there have been about 23,000 drug-related deaths across the country. The most murderous city has since become Juárez. Some comparisons from 2009:

Toronto: 62 murders

Juárez: 2,660

Baghdad: 1,545 deaths (with a population five times larger than that of Juárez)

Afghanistan: 2,412 civilian deaths and 520 coalition military deaths for the entire country (population 29 million).

Sources: UNAMA, Iraq Body Count, icasualties.org

The gangs of Juárez

Juárez cartel: Led by Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, this cartel has long ruled these parts. For enforcement, it uses La Linea, which took responsibility for the recent slaughter of seven police, and the Barrio Aztecas, who got their start in the Texas prison system.

Sinaloa cartel: Led by the notorious Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman, in recent years it has encroached on Juárez territory, seeking to control the most lucrative transport corridor to the U.S. and Canada. Guzman, who was arrested years ago but claimed to be a simple farmer, is still believed to still be living in the lush Sinaloa state to the southwest, some say openly with the protection of authorities. For enforcement, the cartel uses the Mexicles and the Artist Assassins.