Published November 28, 2011
Ciudad Juarez – Two men and a woman were killed by gunmen as they drove down an avenue over the weekend in Chihuahua city, the capital of the like-named northern Mexican state, police said.
The victims were on a busy avenue when their compact car was cut off by the gunmen, who opened fire on the vehicle, the Chihuahua municipal police department said.
The men got out of the car and tried to run, but the gunmen killed them, police said, adding that the woman was shot dead inside the automobile.
The unidentified gunmen managed to get away from the crime scene and investigators do not have any leads in the shooting.
Chihuahua, one of the states most affected by drug-related violence in Mexico, has accounted for about 30 percent of the more than 40,000 drug-related murders registered since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the country's drug cartels nearly five years ago.
The state accounted for 1,567 of the 10,022 drug-related murders registered between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30 in Mexico, a report published last month in Mexico City's Reforma newspaper said.
Chihuahua is home to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's murder capital.
Juarez, located across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, has been the scene in the past few years of a turf war between the Sinaloa and Juarez drug cartels.
Ciudad Juarez has been plagued by drug-related violence for years.
The murder rate took off in the border city of 1.5 million people in 2007, when 310 people were killed, then it more than tripled to 1,607 in 2008, according to Chihuahua AG's office figures, with the number of killings climbing to 2,754 in 2009.
More than 3,100 people were murdered in the border city last year, making 2010 the worst year since a war between rival drug gangs sent the homicide rate skyrocketing in 2008.
The killing has not slowed this year, with about 1,900 people murdered in Juarez.
There are currently several situations of internal displacement in Mexico. Possibly the largest has been caused since 2007 by the violence of drug cartels and the government's military response. This has caused displacement in the states of Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Durango, Guerrero, Sinaloa and Michoacán.
This displacement has been little documented, and more comprehensive studies of its scale and impact are needed. Three cases of mass displacement reportedly caused the displacement of some 3,000 people; otherwise the violence has caused gradual displacement which has been reported only rarely. However, a research centre which documented displacement in Ciudad Juárez found that up to 220,000 people had left their place of residence in the area over three years as a result of the violence, of which about half reportedly remained in the country as IDPs. A private consultancy report cited by several media sources has suggested that the violence has internally displaced 1.6 million people in the last five years; however the report is not publicly available and the basis of the figure is unknown.
People fleeing drug-cartel violence have often not found security in their place of displacement. Another main challenge has been the physical and legal protection of their housing, land and property. Some IDPs have lost their identity documents as a result of their sudden displacement, and have subsequently been unable to access social services. While no proper assessments of IDPs' access to basic necessities have been conducted, it has been generally assumed that they support themselves or rely on extended family networks.
The longest-running situation of displacement was caused by the Zapatista uprising in 1994 in the state of Chiapas. Indigenous communities that support the Zapatista movement have continued to be displaced and have also caused the displacement of people not aligned with the Zapatista movement, and recent estimates have suggested that between 9,000 and 24,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) remain in protracted displacement.
In Chiapas and in the neighbouring states of Oaxaca and Guerrero displacement has also been caused by religious tensions within indigenous communities. Meanwhile, in Oaxaca, indigenous triqui communities have also been displaced by attacks by paramilitary groups. IDPs in all these states have limited access to livelihoods, and there have been no initiatives to restitute their land.
The government has recognised and taken some steps to address the protracted displacement following the Zapatista uprising. The other smaller situations in Chiapas and its neighbouring states of Oaxaca and Guerrero have received much less attention. In this context, an internal displacement bill proposed in 2011 by the government of Chiapas, and a decision by the Mexican senate to provide more funds to support indigenous IDPs, have been notable developments.
FIVE years ago next week, Felipe Calderón took office as Mexico’s president and launched a crackdown against organised crime. Since then there has been a horrible predictability about the country’s drug war: each year the number of deaths has risen, most of them concentrated in a handful of cities. But this year both those tendencies look as if they have started to change. The annual death toll seems to have plateaued at around 12,000. Hotspots have cooled, only for violence to invade places previously considered safe.
Ciudad Juárez, in Chihuahua state and on the border with Texas, is the most striking example of this. For several years it has been the most dangerous place in Mexico and, by most counts, the world. A city of 1.3m, it saw more than 3,000 murders last year. Yet this year the number of mafia-related killings in Chihuahua has fallen by about a third, according to a tally by Reforma, a newspaper, as have kidnappings and car thefts. (The government has not released murder statistics in almost a year.) So far this year, Chihuahua state accounts for only around 15% of such murders in Mexico, down from a peak of 32%.
The turnaround is the fruit of better co-operation between the municipal, state and federal branches of government, according to Héctor Murguía, Juárez’s mayor. Such co-operation is not easy in Mexico, where policing is still divided between more than 2,000 separate forces, despite efforts by the federal government to pass a law to consolidate them. Mr Murguía is particularly proud of his new chief of police, Julian Leyzaola, hired from Tijuana, where he presided over a dramatic dip in the murder rate. Mr Leyzaola, a retired army officer, has detractors: on November 17th Baja California’s human-rights commission accused him of torturing detainees in Tijuana, an accusation he rejects. Others are sceptical about the relevance of the government in reducing the violence in places such as Juárez and Tijuana. In both cities the powerful Sinaloa “cartel” has been pushing to displace incumbent gangs. The dip in violence suggests that it has at last beaten or reached an accommodation with its rivals, believes David Shirk, head of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego. The Tijuana mob has been all but wiped out. The head of La Línea, a rival of Sinaloa in Juárez, was arrested in July. Some of these busts may be thanks to rival cartels’ tip-offs. “The government is an instrument that contributes—but whose hand is on the instrument?” asks Mr Shirk. Whatever the cause, both cities now appear increasingly to be the Sinaloa mob’s turf: the army said that $15.3m in cash it seized in Tijuana this week belonged to them.
Though Sinaloa’s expansion may have slowed the violence in Juárez and Tijuana, elsewhere it has stirred it up (see map). Nuevo León, Mexico’s richest state after the capital, was once one of its safest. But Sinaloa’s attempts to dislodge the Zetas, their strongest rivals, from the state capital, Monterrey, have caused almost as many murders as in Chihuahua. Similarly, Sinaloa dispatched a group of “Zeta killers” to cause havoc in previously-quiet Veracruz over the summer. The Zetas have retaliated, sending gunmen to Sinaloa’s Pacific strongholds. Acapulco has already suffered; next may be Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city. It was protected by large numbers of federal police before and during the Pan American games. But the games finished on November 20th.
Predicting the traffickers’ next moves has become harder because many cartels have split into smaller groups. Based on a survey of messages left online and at the scenes of executions, Eduardo Guerrero, a Mexican academic, estimates that in 2007 there were 11 organised-crime groups active in Mexico, whereas in 2010 there were 114. Mr Murguía says that there could be ten different mobs operating in Juárez alone. Separating the big gangs from opportunistic youths is not always easy. Some teenagers are turning to amateurish extortion rackets because there are few other opportunities (see article). “The cry heard in Mexico is employment, employment, employment,” Mr Murguía says.
Juárez must now hold on to its gains with fewer police. Only 2,500 federal cops patrol, down from 5,000 in January. “We don’t know which side the municipal police will play for,” says Hugo Almada, of the University of Juárez. Some believe that the local force has links with the Juárez cartel. But the federal cops are not wholly clean either: several dozen have been arrested over the past year for crimes including kidnapping, extortion and murder. The year has shown that the world’s most dangerous city need not stay that way. Yet violence in places such as Nuevo León “suggests that what has happened in Juárez can happen anywhere in Mexico,” Mr Shirk says. Too soon to celebrate, then.
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