Mexico killings: President Calderón visits Juarez to tout new social programs
Sara Miller Llana, The Christian Science Monitor / March 16, 2010Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
President Felipe Calderón visits Ciudad Juarez today, just days
after the Mexico killings of two Americans. He will tout new social
programs aimed at improving life in the violence-wracked city.
If any place has spiraled downward in Mexico's bloody fight against organized crime, it is Ciudad Juarez, the grim border town where two Americans were shot dead in this weekend's Mexico killings. Here businesses get burned down
if owners do not pay traffickers monthly “protection money” and
residents live with the daily menace of kidnappings and daylight
shootouts.
Ciudad Juarez also epitomizes Mexican President Felipe Calderón's
solution to the escalating drug war that has dominated domestic
politics, partnership with the US, and media parley over the past three
years.
Mr. Calderón sent a surge of military troops and federal
police to Juarez in 2008 to reclaim this once bustling industrial city
that has always drawn poor Mexicans from across the country and from
where thousands are today fleeing. But, as the government has gotten
tougher against crime, crime has only increased.
Over the weekend, an American consular employee and her husband were shot dead
in their car in broad daylight with their baby, unharmed, in the back
seat. Almost simultaneously, in another location, the husband of
another employee affiliated with the consulate was also gunned down and
killed.
'Rock bottom' moment
The
attacks, which will add to the pressure Mexico faces to solve its
public safety problem, come after the city's – and the nation's – “rock
bottom” moment in January, when 15 people were killed at a teen's
birthday party. Most were young students without any apparent ties to
drug gangs.
Residents took to the streets, demanding a change
in tactic in a city where cars are forced past military checkpoints and
masked federal officers in pickup trucks roll down the streets. Many
demanded they all leave.
'We Are All Juarez'
While
Calderón is not about to back down from his military strategy – still
supported by many here who see the military as the only hope for order
– he has responded to public anger with the acknowledgment that force
alone will not solve the problem. Last month, he launched an ambitious
new project dubbed “We are all Juarez” to create jobs, boost addiction
programs, and build schools, parks, and galleries.
As Calderón
visits Ciudad Juarez today to discuss the strategy, his third visit
since the massacre, he will face many skeptics who say that the
strategy is motivated by elections in the state this summer, not by a
new way of thinking. So far it has been more promise than action. But
officials call it a turning point that could be replicated elsewhere in
Mexico.
Abelardo Prieto Escobar, the agrarian reform secretary
who is overseeing the new strategy, says that the social element is key
moving forward.
“We are not just fighting violence, but the origins of violence,” he says.
Fed up with the drug war
Mexico
roundly supported Calderon's decision to dispatch some 45,000 federal
forces across the country, but three years later over 18,000 people
have been killed and impatience has mounted. In a recent poll by the
Mexico City-based firm Buendia & Laredo, just over half the nation
says the president’s fight has made the country more dangerous.
Nowhere is the population more rattled than in Juarez, across from El
Paso, where cartels are battling for control over the US market. Of all
the drug-related homicides in 2009, about a third of them played out
here.
“They have been combating violence with the military, and that has
obviously not worked,” says Hugo Almada, a long-time activist in Juarez.
Nobody expects a withdrawal of forces.
In
fact, authorities say they will be bringing in more police to carry out
intelligence-gathering to fight extortion and kidnapping that has
scared off residents. “Nobody wants to see the army on the streets, we
wish we could get past it,” says Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz. “But
the army is the only way out of what is happening.”
Coming together
But
for once, the mayor, the federal government, and a slew of human rights
workers, social workers, and angry and traumatized parents seem to be
on the same page. “We are all Juarez,” in its initial phase, will
include the construction of five more high schools, health centers,
35,000 temporary jobs, microcredit for 10,000 people, and universal
healthcare coverage for 280,000 people, the mayor says. The list goes
on.
Combining the fight against crime with the social programs
could be a laboratory for the rest of the country, says Mayor Reyes
Ferriz. "Juarez is very much at the center of decisionmaking. It will
have repercussions in the rest of Mexico," he says.
The US, which
has sent FBI agents and other officials to investigate the killings
over the weekend, has supported Calderon's military strategy, pouring
aid money into new helicopters, technology for customs, and training
for police.
Yet, as Mexico has shifted its rhetoric on the drug war, so, too, have US officials.
"People
in Washington are thinking about what comes next," says David Shirk, a
Woodrow Wilson Center fellow and professor at the University of San
Diego. "Juarez has certainly been the watershed moment in changing
rhetoric and public discourse on these issues in both countries."
High expectations
Expectations are running high in Ciudad Juarez.
"We
need to combat the causes of violence," says Jorge Quintana Silveyra,
the rector of the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez, noting that
more than half those from 6th to 12th grade are
not in school. He calls it a "social disaster," and has asked federal
legislators for extraordinary funds, the same kind released during
“natural disasters,” he says, to help rescue the city.
"Violence
has no good results only with the police," says Mr. Silveyra. "The only
way out of this is through education and culture."
But amid presidential visits and federal officials turning a local hotel into temporary headquarters, doubts are rampant.
Public
anger mounted in the wake of the teen massacre in January, after
Calderón initially dismissed the children as gang members. He later
apologized, but graffiti on the walls just a few homes down from the
shooting makes sentiments clear: "Calderón, liar!" screams one angry
message.
Calderón is likely to face similar protests today.
And
even academics and activists who support “We are all Juarez” in theory
worry that the promises will fail if corruption and impunity are also
not profoundly tackled. “Without justice, all the social programs they
create are at risk,” says Leticia Castillo, coordinator of the
sociology department at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez.
“This could be a turning point,” says Mr. Almada, the activist. “It is not one yet.”