Breaking News

Mexican soldiers patrol an industrial area of the border city of Ciudad Juarez March 3, 2009.

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) – 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 U.S. 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 2,000 mile border with road and rail links deep into the United States. The Pacific-coast Sinaloa gang, led by top fugitive Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, is one of several fighting for control of the city.

Mexico’s police forces are tainted up to the highest levels by corruption and direct links to the drug cartels, and 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 told Reuters.

The army expects to have 7,500 soldiers and federal police stationed in Ciudad Juarez by the end of the 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 U.S.-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.

GANGS PILE IN

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.

Residents fear the city could go the way of Colombia’s Medellin at the height of the drug war there in the 1990s, when murder rates hit 6,000 deaths a year.

Mexican soldiers inspect vehicles at a checkpoint at the Paso del Norte international border crossing in Ciudad Juarez March 3, 2009.

“Juarez is prisoner to an infinity of groups fighting for the territory, and others who are making the most of the confusion for easy money,” said army spokesman Enrique Torres.

Guzman, Mexico’s most-wanted man, wants to seize Ciudad Juarez from local drug boss Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, and officials say the shadowy La Linea cartel from the western state of Michoacan and the feared Zeta hitmen from the Gulf of Mexico cartel are also at war here.  The jump in killings in the city to around 10 a day in February has put Calderon under intense pressure.  Some U.S. officials have publicly asked whether Mexico is becoming a failed state and voiced concern about a spillover of executions, kidnappings and extortions into the United States.

Last month, gunmen killed two city councilmen and forced out Ciudad Juarez’s police chief by killing his deputy and vowing to murder an officer every 48 hours until he stepped down.

A former soldier attacked a convoy carrying Chihuahua’s state governor in what many believe was an attack linked to drugs. Spooked by a series of death threats, the city’s mayor now lives over the border in El Paso.

Ciudad Juarez, which boomed in the U.S. Prohibition era and now bulges with factories making goods for export, has pockets of normality during the day. Cars cram its shabby streets, residents sit in parks or walk their children to school.

But at night, the city once famed for its sex and tequila-fueled party life is ghostlike and residents adopt a self-imposed curfew from dusk till dawn.

“The drug hitmen are in control here. Things are out of control, there’s so much death,” said textile salesman Valente Salazar in Ciudad Juarez’s main square as troops swept past in Humvees. “At six o’clock I go home and I don’t go out at all after that. There are so many killings.”

PHOENIX — This week, an Arizona gun shop goes on trial in state court in what law-enforcement officials are calling a landmark case against gun dealers who sell weapons that end up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels, fueling horrific violence south of the border that killed more than 6,000 people last year.

X-Caliber Guns LLC, is accused of knowingly selling hundreds of weapons, mostly AK-47s, to buyers who were posing as fronts for Mexican drug gangs. The gun store’s owner, 47-year-old George Iknadosian, has maintained his innocence in court filings.

While the U.S. has long pressed Mexico to stop the flow of illegal drugs such as cocaine from crossing the border heading north, Mexico has complained that the U.S. doesn’t stop the flow of guns heading south. Mexican and U.S. officials estimate that more than 90% of the weapons used by Mexican drug cartels come from the U.S.

A forensic worker takes away the body of a dead police officer after unknown gunmen opened fire on a police vehicle in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on Saturday. Mexican and U.S. officials estimate that more than 90% of weapons used by Mexican drug cartels come from the U.S.

Consider what happened last year in the Mexican border city of Nogales. The chief of the Sonora state anti-drug unit, Juan Manuel Pavón, was murdered by cartel hit men, just hours after attending a U.S. seminar on how to resist the tide of American firearms surging into Mexico. Several weapons linked to the crime traced back to X-Caliber Guns.

“The three highest priorities for me in terms of U.S. cooperation in the drugs war are these: guns, guns, guns,” Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal. “These drug groups intimidate society and government because of their firepower. And their firepower comes from the U.S.”

No one knows how many weapons cross the border into Mexico each year. Unlike contraband drugs, which are consumed, contraband guns “remain in circulation until they are captured,” says Terry Goddard, the Arizona Attorney General bringing the case against X-Caliber Guns.

The number of U.S. guns in Mexico is growing. The Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, says more than 7,700 guns sold in America were traced to Mexico in the fiscal year ending last September. That’s twice the 3,300 recorded the previous year and more than triple the 2,100 traced the year before that.

U.S. officials acknowledge that U.S. gun laws are partly to blame. The 1994 ban on the sale of assault weapons like AK-47s in the U.S. led to a decrease of such weapons south of the border. But the ban expired in 2004, and the numbers in Mexico spiked. Last week, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said the Obama administration would seek to reinstate the ban. Contributing to the problem is the fact that Mexico’s customs control is famously weak, and authorities rarely check inbound traffic from the U.S.

Meanwhile, Mexican drug gangs are stocking up on deadlier weapons. ATF officials say they have registered more purchases of high-powered FN Herstal rifles and pistols — the Belgian-made weapon called “matapolicias” in Mexico, or “cop killers,” for their ability to fire through body armor. Such items are sold in hundreds of Arizona gun shops, or by private owners advertising online.

Although U.S. gun laws generally forbid the sale of weapons to noncitizens, the X-Caliber case shows how Mexican purchasers used intermediaries — or “straw buyers” — to flout the rules.

The scheme, according to the prosecution, was simple: The buyers, usually 19- to 22-year-old U.S. citizens with no police record, declared that the firearm was for personal use, but instead passed it along to an associate of a Mexican cartel. The buyer filled out a standard form used by the ATF to track firearms. Lying on the form is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. But ATF agents here say buyers in the X-Caliber case were paid a fee to run that risk — up to $100 on each transaction.

Gun shops generally rely on ATF recordkeeping to check them before selling to the wrong buyer. Ken Logan, a manager at the Shooters World gun store in Phoenix says the ATF form, once approved after being checked against a national data base, relieves the store of responsibility. “The ATF says ‘yea’ or ‘nay,’ on who I can sell a gun to,” he says.

Gun stores run the risk of lawsuits if they’re deemed to be “profiling” — refusing to sell guns to young Latinos, for instance. Mr. Logan concedes he has seen men enter gun stores, point out to a girlfriend what weapon they should buy, and leave. The girlfriend fills out the form, attesting the firearm is for her personal use.

Getting bullets is even easier. Gun dealers here must report anyone purchasing more than one handgun during a single five-day period, but there is no restriction on ammunition. Last Christmas Eve, salesmen at Cabela’s Sporting Goods store in Phoenix were surprised when two Hispanic men bought 24,000 rounds of 5.7 caliber bullets — the same caliber used in FN “cop killers.” They paid in cash — more than $10,000. When the buyers were seen loading their purchase into a car with Mexican license plates, store managers summoned police. Authorities found 12 FN rifles and three “cop killer” handguns.

Police arrested the buyers, but only because they were foreign nationals, thus forbidden from possessing arms in the U.S.

The murder of Mr. Pavón last year illustrates how Arizona’s gun-friendly culture contributes to mayhem in Mexico. Last October, the men under Mr. Pavón’s command fought gangs of narco-pistoleros in gun battles across the state. On October 24, a caravan of heavily armed assassins descended on Nogales, only to be repelled, leaving 10 gunmen dead. A week later, they attacked a police substation about a mile from the U.S. border crossing.

Days later, Mr. Pavón was in Arizona for consultations with U.S. officials.

At a farewell picnic at a federal shooting range in Tucson, the Mexican policeman was invited to test fire a powerful American weapon that has been surfacing lately in the narco-gangs’ arsenals: the 50 caliber Barrett rifle, powerful enough to pierce a tank’s armor.

“We had a shootout,” recalls Mr. Newell, the ATF agent. “He won.”

The following night, Commander Pavón was ambushed as he entered a Nogales hotel.

Members of the Mexican Navy stand guard beside seven tons of cocaine siezed earlier this month in Mexico's escalating efforts against drug cartels.

MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Felipe Calderon has issued a series of ultimatums in the past few days to tell drug cartels he’s not backing down from a fight, and to prepare the public for an increasingly bloody battle.

Casualties from Mexico’s war on drugs already have been mounting, and the bloodshed has prompted waves of concern in Washington and elsewhere. “Mexico right now has issues of violence that are a different degree and level than we’ve ever seen before,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told Congress this week, saying it has become one of her top priorities.

Worries about Mexico are starting to affect investors’ perception of the country, too. On Friday, the peso hit a record low, breaking through the psychologically important 15 per dollar barrier, closing at 15.23. Though the principal reason is concern over the effect of the U.S. economic downturn, violence “has definitely raised Mexico’s profile in a negative fashion with investors,” says Gray Newman, chief economist for Latin America with Morgan Stanley.

In unusually bellicose language for a Mexican president, Mr. Calderon is making clear he plans to ramp the fight up further. “It’s either the narcos, or the state,” he said in an interview published on Friday by Mexican newspaper El Universal.

Since taking power in late 2006, the conservative politician has sent more than 40,000 army troops to several Mexican states to confront increasingly brazen and violent drug-trafficking gangs. So far, turf wars between rival cartels have grown bloodier, claiming an estimated 6,290 lives last year. So far this year, more than 1,000 people have died, officials say.

Mexican officials say that the rising violence is a sign that pressure from the government is forcing the cartels to battle each other for turf. And they stress that Mr. Calderon is the first president to tackle the issue head on after his predecessors let the problem slowly build.

“Taking on the cartels is parenting a child having a tantrum. When you start disciplining the child, the tantrum increases at first. But if you stay firm, it eventually works,” Mexican Interior Minister Fernando Gomez Mont said in an interview.

Mr. Gomez Mont said Mexico is taking important steps such as forcing law-enforcement agencies from different levels of government to share information, but needs to sharply raise spending on security-related issues.

The violence could get worse before it gets better. Drug cartels are adopting guerrilla-style tactics, ambushing security forces and assassinating high-level security officials and others. They are also smuggling entire arsenals of weapons from the U.S.

“Eighteen months ago we saw a spike in .50-caliber machine guns heading south,” says William D. Newell, special agent in charge of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives station in Arizona. “Six months ago we started seeing grenades. That’s a serious escalation of violence.”

Some agents fear more dramatic attacks such as car bombs are next. A memo distributed by the ATF’s Bomb Data Center, circulating among U.S. law-enforcement agencies, reports that this month a gang of gunmen, presumably linked to narcotics groups, stormed a mining site in the Mexican state of Durango and made off with over 250 pounds of explosives.

Marisella Molinar was killed while driving her boss, a target of cartels, across the border into El Paso, Texas.

JUAREZ, Mexico (CNN) — Jose Molinar knew something wasn’t right. He hadn’t heard from his wife for a few hours, which was not sitting well with him.

Marisella Molinar worked as a secretary for a top prosecutor in Juarez, Mexico, Jesus Huerta Yedra.

She was employed in the office for more than 10 years and though she lived across the border in El Paso, Texas, with her husband, she drove about 20 minutes over the Juarez-El Paso border every day to the job she loved.  The growing violence over rival drug cartels had concerned the couple, but Mexico was a part of their lives and they were sure the violence stayed between rival drug gangs, who were fighting over a lucrative drug route into the United States.

Without fail, Marisella Molinar would call her husband every day when she arrived to work, went out for lunch and when she was leaving the office.

But on December 3, 2008, by around 5:30 p.m., Jose Molinar still hadn’t heard from his wife. He called the office in Mexico and was told she was giving her boss a ride over the border so he could do some Christmas shopping. Jose Molinar turned on his television, and his life changed forever.

“As soon as the image came up, I saw her truck,” said Molinar, who was watching the news out of Juarez, “and I knew what happened right then and there.”

Marisella Molinar was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her passenger, Jesus Huerta Yedra, was a target of the cartels that day. As Molinar’s car was about a mile away from the border crossing back to the United States, gunmen walked up to her car and fired 85 rounds from an AK-47 into their intended target. One shot hit Marisella Molinar, a mother of two and proud grandmother, in the chest, killing her instantly.

“She wasn’t involved, she didn’t have anything to do with this!” said Jose Molinar in a recent interview with CNN. “She was the guy’s secretary and she was giving him a ride to meet his wife here in El Paso who was Christmas shopping.”

But instead of making it home to help her husband hang Christmas lights, Marisella Molinar became yet another victim in the drug war taking place just steps from the U.S. border.

The violence generated by the war of the drug cartels for control of drug routes translated last year into some 6,000 killings. More than 1,600 of them occurred in Juarez, three times more than the most murderous city in the United States. This year, in two months, the body count in Juarez is 400.

Mexican military and police in riot gear now patrol the once popular streets of Juarez. Gone are the Americans shopping, dining and partying. The bars and restaurants are shuttered — many closed for good. Americans don’t come here anymore.

In March 2008, the Mexican military joined with Mexican states and local law enforcement in the fight against drug cartels in border cities. Mexican President Felipe Calderon has waged a war against business as usual with the cartels who controlled drug routes through Mexico and into the United States. The fallout has led rival drug gangs to launch all-out war not only with the military, but also with each other, because the once-established drug routes are now up for grabs.

The violence has been the worst in Juarez, where cartels have killed police officers, forced the chief of police to resign and threatened public officials.

“They started killing police officers, and not when they were doing police work, but when they were coming out of their homes and getting into their cars to go to the police station,” said Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz, whose own family has recently received death threats.

At the city’s only morgue, bodies are piling up. The mayor said there are far too many dead for the small facility to handle. The majority of the dead are unidentified members of the cartels. Just last week, the mayor said, 50 corpses were buried in mass graves because no one claimed the bodies.

Officials from both sides of the border said the drug war may go on for years. Beheadings, bodies riddled with gunfire and blood-stained streets will continue daily, they said.

They added that the appetite for illegal drugs is too great in the United States, and the drug routes are too lucrative for the battles to end.

“It’s not going to be won quickly,” said Enrique Torres, a spokesman for the Mexican government, adding that the Mexican president is committed to fighting the cartels. “He can’t talk about a time frame in this type of situation. We know the monster is big, but we don’t have an idea of how big it is.”