Where else but in a country where the government is helpless, and spends its time attacking the US immigration policies instead of the crime that kills scores of people each day.
More people die in Tijuana and Juarez in half a year than die in all of the US in a year. They are already off to a great start.
207 dead; army storms warehouse in Juárez
By Daniel Borunda / El Paso Times
Posted: 02/05/2009
The Mexican army and heavily armed federal police with a helicopter flying overhead raided a drug warehouse Thursday morning in Juárez even as killings are surging beyond the extraordinary levels of last year.
If it isn't a war zone, it would be hard to tell by the body count, which has reached 207 in the Juárez area this year.
In the first five days of February, 54 people were slain, surpassing the 37 homicides in all of February last year.
The raid by forces with Joint Operation Chihuahua led to the seizure of nearly 2 tons of marijuana hidden in plastic containers apparently ready to be transported to the United States, said Enrique Torres, spokesman for the federal anti-crime operation.
An estimated 100 federal agents and soldiers with their faces masked took part in the unusually strong show of force as they rushed into the same warehouse on Mexico street where four men were shot to death Tuesday. No arrests were reported.
The raid came as the Juárez region continues to boil with drug-related violence.
Before dawn Thursday, five men were shot execution-style in the community of El Millón, east of Juárez across the Rio Grande from Fabens, Chihuahua state police said.
The men were lined up, their heads covered and their hands and feet bound with tape when they were shot in the backyard of a home, police said. The men, who had not been identified, were wearing pajama pants and underwear.
Some Juárez news outlets reported that the men belonged to the same family and were pulled out of a home while they slept.
Investigators said the men were killed by 11 rounds fired by a "military-style" small firearm.
El Millón is a village in the valley of Juárez whose farming communities are part of a notorious smuggling corridor east of El Paso-Juárez that has recently become a hot spot for violence.
Last Saturday, three severed heads - the latest in a string of similar decapitations in the valley - were found in an ice chest in the main plaza in El Millón, along with an undisclosed threatening message, police said.
The valley drug-smuggling corridor is reputedly controlled by Jose Rodolfo Escajeda, alias "El Rikin," who was featured by the Drug Enforcement Administration on a "wanted" billboard in El Paso last year, a DEA spokesman said. Escajeda remains at large.
The violence in Juárez and other parts of the state of Chihuahua began in January 2008, spurred by a war among the Juárez and Sinaloa drug cartels. More than 1,600 people were killed last year in Juárez.
Almost all the slayings remain unsolved, though authorities have made a few arrests.
For example, Israel Duran Ledesma, 18, aka "El Loco" or "El Morgan," was arrested Wednesday evening on the Bridge of the Americas.
Duran is charged in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Felix Antonio Garcia Ramirez during a Sept. 22 fight among street vendors and window washers on the same international bridge.
By the numbers
The number of homicides in Juárez compared with the count at the same time last year.
January 2009: 153.
January 2008: 37.
*February 2009: 54.
February 2008: 37.
Total homicides
*2009: 207.
2008: 1,609.
*Homicides as of the evening of Thursday, Feb. 5.
Sources: Chihuahua state police and El Paso Times tally.
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