Hundreds of heavily armed soldiers fanned out across Mexico’s bloodiest drug war city on Tuesday trying to prevent a collapse in law and order just south of the US border.
Sirens blared as the army staged one of its biggest troop build-ups in years in Ciudad Juarez, a desert city across the border from El Paso, Texas, where near-daily clashes between drug gangs and police have terrified residents.
Infamous in the 1990s for the unsolved murders of hundreds of women, Ciudad Juarez is now engulfed in the worst drug violence in Mexico as cartels in league with corrupt cops fight over one of the country’s most profitable smuggling routes.
More than 2,000 people have been murdered in the area over the past year and drug gang hitmen showed their power last month by forcing the city’s police chief to resign with a threat to keep killing police officers until he quit.
“We’ve got to show we can achieve security in Juarez, for Mexico’s sake, for its economy, for people’s lives, for our international reputation,” said Victor Valencia, the Chihuahua State governor’s representative in Ciudad Juarez.
Ciudad Juarez is prized for its location smack in the middle of the 3,200km US-Mexico border, with road and rail links deep into the US. The Pacific-coast Sinaloa gang, led by top fugitive Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, is one of several fighting for control of the city.
Mexican police forces are tainted up to the highest levels by corruption and direct links to the drug cartels, and Mexican President Felipe Calderon has staked his reputation on a nationwide army-led crackdown on cartels.
Ciudad Juarez is now the most crucial battleground of a war that killed more than 6,000 people across Mexico last year and is scaring off investors in cities near the border.
“The solution is with the military. The federal, state and municipal police are infiltrated by organized crime,” Valencia said.
The army expects to have 7,500 soldiers and federal police stationed in Ciudad Juarez by the end of this week, with a further 2,000 troops in the rest of Chihuahua state.
Six local bishops pleaded in newspaper ads this week for an end to the killings that are “staining the state with blood.”
Troops rolled past US-style shopping malls in Ciudad Juarez on Tuesday to set up checkpoints at bridges running over the border and at the city’s international airport, briefly shut last week after bomb threats.
Calderon has about 45,000 soldiers across Mexico fighting cartels, but has never before sent so many troops to one city.
At least four main cartels are fighting for control of Ciudad Juarez, and gangs of unemployed youths have joined the fray to extort businesses, kidnap residents, rob banks and work as hitmen.
Meanwhile, joggers found the decapitated bodies of three men on Tuesday near a bullfighting ring in Tijuana, an official said.
The bodies were also missing their hands and one its feet, deputy state Attorney General Salvador Ortiz said.
He said the heads were found nearby with a message calling the men “snitches.”
A fourth body, whose head was wrapped in masking tape, was found in a creek, Ortiz said.
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