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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | March 2008 
Body Count Mounts in Mexico Drug Wars
 Dudley Althaus - Houston Chronicle
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| | A crowd gathers outside the law offices in Guadalajara where seven people were shot to death Thursday. Lawyers at the firm had unsuccessfully defended the son of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, head of the Sinaloa cartel. (Guillermo Arias/Associated Press) | | |
Mexico City — The savagely dispatched, both old and new, keep turning up across Mexico.
In Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Mexcian federal police excavated 33 bodies in the past two weeks from the backyard of a house where authorities had seized more than 3,700 pounds of marijuana. Most of the bodies had been buried at least five years, authorities said.
In Guadalajara, police on Friday investigated the slayings of seven people shot dead the day before in a law office. Its principals counted accused drug gangsters and corrupt officials among their clients.
In perhaps a telling indication of how commonplace the bloodshed has become, neither the Guadalajara massacre nor the discovery of the mass grave in Juarez was treated as major news in the Mexico City press on Friday.
As the body count ticks away, the Mexican press logs each new death but often declines to delve into exactly why people get killed. News organizations in the locales where the killings take place often have been intimidated into indifference by the gangsters.
Violence across Mexico related to drug use, narcotics trafficking or gang wars over smuggling routes claimed an estimated 2,500 lives last year. It appears poised this year to surpass that toll.
The bloodletting proceeds even as Mexican President Felipe Calderon keeps 30,000 soldiers and federal police in gangster-plagued areas, including many cities along the Texas border. Calderon has made fighting the drug traffickers an anchor of his administration since taking office 15 months ago.
"We have an enormous commitment to legality," Calderon told an investors conference in the capital this week. "We have initiated, from the first day of my government, unprecedented operations to combat and eradicate the organized crime networks that have become immersed in the country for years, perhaps decades."
Julio Mata, who heads a nationwide organization of relatives of people who have allegedly disappeared at the hands of gangsters or police, said, "The violence is constant in Mexico."
Mata estimates more than 1,300 people have disappeared.
A resurgence of violence
In Ciudad Juarez, gangland violence waned in recent years as the bosses of the city's drug-smuggling organizations were killed or arrested. But the bloodshed returned this year when other trafficking groups began fighting for turf.
Nearly 100 people have been slain gangland-style in the city of more than 1 million since the beginning of the year. Two men were discovered shot to death Friday afternoon on a downtown street, their bodies left in a truck bearing Texas license plates.
The discovery of the 33 bodies buried outside the house in the city's La Cuesta neighborhood served as a reminder of just how violent Juarez has been — and might become again.
Unearthing bodies has become something of a regular occurrence in Juarez. Several hundred people have disappeared since the 1990s, according to the advocates for the families of the missing.
Juarez also gained notoriety with the unsolved slayings of more than 400 women since the early 1990s.
Human rights groups have accused the state and federal governments of not acting more forcefully to solve the killings, which many believe are linked to drug traffickers, corrupt officials or both.
Twelve victims were found buried in the backyard of a home in a middle-class Juarez suburb in January 2004. Federal investigators linked the killings to corrupt federal police agents working for local gangsters and arrested 13 of them, including several commanders. It later was reported by The Dallas Morning News that a man accused of taking part in putting the bodies in the backyard had worked as an informant for U.S. law agents.
Police play both sides
"Police forces are almost always involved," said Mata. "Either by their actions or their inaction, they bear responsibility."
The lawyers killed Thursday at the Guadalajara firm, Rangel Garcia and Associates, had unsuccessfully defended the son of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who was sentenced last month to five years in prison on drug-related charges.
Officials said the elder Guzman is the reputed head of a large smuggling cartel based in the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa.
At least four gunmen walked into the law offices Thursday afternoon, tied up those inside and shot them in the head. One woman remains in critical condition.
Mexican officials have pointed out the law firms' underworld clientele to the press but have offered no explanation for the killings.
The Guadalajara lawyers had also defended Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, an army general and former Mexican drug czar who was discovered in 1997 to have been working for the drug cartel based in Juarez.
Federal officials determined that Gutierrez Rebollo had been enthusiastically cracking down on the Juarez gang's rivals while leaving the gang untouched.
Gutierrez Rebollo, whom U.S. officials had praised as a tough crimefighter up until the moment of his arrest, is serving a 32-year sentence in a Mexican federal penitentiary.
dudley.althaus(at)chron.com |
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