Juarez massacre may mark a turning for Mexico
The January killing of 15 young people has created a furor and left some wondering whether it's a tipping point, a moment when Mexicans overcame their fear and fatalism to confront the violence.
February 19, 2010By Tracy Wilkinson
Reporting from Mexico City — The slaughter last month of at least 15
young people with no apparent criminal ties has galvanized the Mexican
public in ways not seen here in more than three years of bloody drug
warfare and has forced the government to enact long-resisted policy
changes to combat violence.
Some in Mexico are wondering whether
this is their nation's tipping point, a moment when public outrage that
has bubbled along finally overcomes the fear and fatalism that largely
silenced or intimidated Mexican society.
Led by parents of the victims in the Jan. 31 massacre, citizens of
Ciudad Juarez have marched, protested, challenged Mexican President
Felipe Calderon and demanded a new strategy for reducing the number of
the gruesome crimes that have made their city one of the world's
deadliest. Joining grieving parents in their wrath have been civic
leaders, entrepreneurs, politicians, educators and priests.
"For
the very, very first time, people, civil society as a whole, have come
together and decided, this is enough," said Marcos Fastlicht, a
prominent Mexico City businessman who heads an organization dedicated
to the uphill task of promoting citizen participation in
crime-fighting. "And they've said that to Calderon . . . to his
ministers . . . that they are not going to take any more" neglect and
broken promises.
Calderon, an often aloof leader seemingly
impervious to criticism, has responded by apparently heeding the
complaints and making the remarkable concession that his military-led
offensive against drug cartels has proved insufficient.
He
traveled to Ciudad Juarez twice in less than a week, amid noisy street
demonstrations demanding that he resign and with key Cabinet ministers
in tow, and received long litanies of grievances from the beleaguered
public. He quietly took a tongue-lashing from a middle-aged maquiladora
worker, mother of two of the teenagers killed in the massacre, who
confronted him at a town meeting.
"President, I cannot welcome
you here," Luz Maria Davila started, voice raised; Calderon waved off
an aide who moved to whisk Davila away. "We are living the consequences
of a war we did not ask for."
It was a highly unusual rebuke
from a humble woman in a country that retains paternalistic tendencies
and demands a certain reverence for presidential figures.
Almost since its inception when Calderon took office in December
2006, the president's anti-drug policy has been roundly criticized for
emphasizing military and police repression and largely ignoring other
components of the multibillion-dollar drug-trafficking industry.
Poverty
and lack of opportunity send thousands into the ranks of cartel foot
soldiers in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso. The
Mexican city became the extreme, terror-gripped example of the policy's
shortcomings.
Even as 10,000 army troops and federal police officers were
deployed, Ciudad Juarez last year had a homicide about every three
hours on average, and up to half a million residents fled, a quarter of
the population. As early as last summer, authorities told The Times
they were planning to make changes in the strategy for combating
organized crime in the troubled city, a pledge made throughout the rest
of the year, but never put into action.
Calderon has now been
forced to offer a mea culpa and take action. Embracing the citizens'
slogan, "We are all Juarez," he acknowledged that his strategy had
neglected socioeconomic factors and established a $50-million fund for
new schools, clinics and job-creation programs, while also promising to
assign a large contingent of judicial investigators to the city.
"By hearing the demands and the indignation directly," political
analyst Alfonso Zarate in Mexico City said, Calderon "has an
opportunity to rectify and to act differently."
Skeptics accuse
Calderon of moving now because it's an election year. Both the
governorship of Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez is located, and
the mayor's post in the city are held by Calderon's chief rival party
and are up for grabs in voting scheduled in July.
Whatever his
electoral calculations, however, Calderon is also keenly aware of the
Ciudad Juarez disaster's corrosive political damage to his government,
an erosion that goes far beyond the screaming crowds in the border
city's streets.
A poll out this week showed a dramatic decline
nationwide in support for Calderon's government. An overwhelming
majority said violent crime had increased substantially in the last six
months, and solidly half the nation said the president's war on drug
cartels was failing. The poll by Buendia & Laredo surveyed 1,000
people in face-to-face interviews and has a margin of error of 3.5
percentage points.
nd there has been a busy confluence of voices of criticism from
segments of society, such as the Roman Catholic Church, that had
remained largely on the sidelines.
A member of Calderon's own
National Action Party, legislator Manuel Clouthier Carrillo, accused
the government of playing favorites in going after drug gangs, leaving
the largest and most powerful of them, the so-called Sinaloa cartel led
by fugitive kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, untouched. Clouthier was
not clear about what Calderon's alleged motives might be, but the
suggestion stung and his colleagues are demanding that he retract it.
So far the citizen outcry in Ciudad Juarez has been focused on
demands that the government change course and withdraw the army
(Calderon refused). It has not addressed residents' own
responsibilities in challenging drug gangs.
Many Mexicans have in effect become complicit by failing to speak out. But there were signs of that changing too.
Heriberto Galindo, one of the dozens of community leaders petitioning
Calderon in Ciudad Juarez this week, scolded his neighbors for
consistently lashing out at the government and army but never the
traffickers.
"We have to assume our own portion of blame as
well," Galindo said. "It is not always the government that is
responsible for the killing of a child."
The only other recent
incident that provoked a level of outrage similar to that generated by
the deaths of the young people in January was the 2008 kidnapping and
killing of a boy from a wealthy Mexico City family, a tragedy that
sparked angry marches across the country. But the response quickly lost
momentum.
It is possible that once again, the furor -- this time
over the killing of the youths in Ciudad Juarez -- could disappear in
the ephemera of rhetoric absent concrete action. Already, several
Juarez activists are complaining that the issue of human rights, much
violated in recent months, was given short shrift in the talks with
Calderon.
"The first step is to regain the public's trust," said
Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz, "and that is not done with a
government decree."