| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | November 2009 
Drug Violence Escalating In Mexico
 Robert Arnold - click2houston.com
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November 10, 2009
| | Local 2 Investigates travels to the border city of Juarez, Mexico, where murders, kidnappings and carjackings have become a daily occurrence. Robert Arnold reports. | |
Houston - Local 2 Investigates traveled to the border city of Juarez, Mexico, where murders, kidnappings and carjackings have become a daily occurrence. In 2008, the Mexican government sent thousands of troops and federal police officers to Juarez to stem the violence. Yet many who live in the sprawling city across from El Paso claim Mexico's plan to stop the drug violence has failed.
During one day in Juarez, six people were gunned down and the head of the Chihuahua State Police was nearly murdered. There are an average of nearly seven murders a day in Juarez.
"If the Army's purpose was to stem the violence, then it has been a miserable failure," said El Paso attorney Carlos Spector.
Spector represents several clients seeking asylum in the United States. Gustavo De La Rosa Hickerson is one of Spector's clients. He's not seeking asylum, but he does need protection.
"Instead of investigating and arresting the heads of these gangs, the killings have continued and nothing has been accomplished," said Spector.
Hickerson is a human rights investigator for the Mexican government. Hickerson claims he has documented more than 100 human rights violations at the hands of the military.
"What I found is the Army began the systematic violation of human rights," said Hickerson. "They were rounding people up and torturing them."
Hickerson claims the military uses brute force instead of investigative techniques to get information. Yet, he says the Mexican government has not acted on any of the cases he's brought forward. In fact, Hickerson says his life has now been threatened because of what he's uncovered.
Hickerson spends most of his time hiding in El Paso, but he's not seeking asylum in the U.S. He's challenging his own government to protect him.
"The protection they have offered me is not satisfactory," said Hickerson. "We're going to have to find another way to go about our work because the violence in Juarez is terrible."
During the trip, Local 2 Investigates also met Emilio Gutierrez and his 16-year-old son who are seeking asylum in the U.S. Gutierrez was a reporter for the Juarez paper, El Diario.
"I started writing about the assaults being carried out by the military," said Gutierrez. "After that, I started getting calls telling me to stop and warnings that my family would be hurt."
No one from El Diario would speak with Local 2.
Spector says claims like these make him question how hard the military is working to find the cartels.
"Everybody in every village knows exactly where the cartels are. You can't tell anybody they don't know where they're at," said Spector.
No one in Juarez wants to talk about the violence because anyone can become a target. On the same day we saw the other murders, gunman randomly shot up a man's truck. Dozens of bullet holes make for a miraculous tale of survival … except he wouldn't talk with Local 2.
Perhaps the boldest act of violence we saw was the attempted murder of state police chief, Luis Prieto. Gunman sprayed his SUV with bullets and even tossed a grenade that, fortunately, didn't go off. Prieto survived the attack, but his bodyguard was killed. A spray painted message on the side of a school was a warning to Prieto. Police never found the gunman. What they found was an abandoned SUV that had been stolen at gunpoint from an El Paso couple visiting Juarez earlier in the day.
"It's staggering to think that this criminal subculture has become so large, and it seems to be unstoppable almost in Mexico," said Howard Campbell.
Campbell is an anthropology professor at the University of Texas-El Paso and the author of the book, "Drug War Zone."
Campbell contends the problems in Mexico have become so great it's no longer a matter of simply finding the criminals. Campbell says Mexico now has to eradicate an entire sub-culture based on drug trafficking.
"I'm not sure people in the United States comprehend how bad things have gotten in Mexico," said Campbell.
Juarez's mayor recently asked for more troops to be sent to his city. The Mexican government also reports it has made more than 2,000 arrests and seized of thousands of guns, along with huge stashes of drug and money in Juarez since the military deployments in 2008. However, when Local 2 asked for a statement from the Mexican government for this story, we did not get a response.
The year is not yet over and there have already been more than 2,000 murders in Juarez. In 2008, 1,800 people were murdered in the border city.
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