Posted on 05/21/2003 5:52:46 AM PDT by FITZ
JUAREZ -- Three young men beaten to death, their fingers cut off and stuffed inside their mouth and pockets. A store owner shot dead with a large-caliber rifle. A 9-year-old boy tied up and choked to death.
The killings, which happened in Juárez during the weekend, are representative of a town rendered violent by the economic desperation, by a powerful drug cartel and by corruption, experts said.
Every year, tens of thousands of Mexicans and others from Latin America uproot themselves from small inland farms or fishing villages to find jobs in Juárez and maybe in the United States. These flotantes, or floating population, settle farther and farther on the outskirts of the growing city of 1.5 million, in shacks made of cardboard and wood pallets. Soon enough, they learn that there are not enough jobs in the ailing maquila industry and that crossing to the United States is beyond their means.
"They are stuck here with no money. They become hopeless. Survival kicks in. You'll steal, sell drugs, sell yourself," said Steven Slater, a former New Mexico police officer who advises Chihuahua district attorney's investigators on the murders of 80-plus women in the past 10 years.
"When you have so much crime, life becomes meaningless for some people," he said.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States and the tightened security at the border, illegal drugs became harder to get across. They piled up in Juárez, where traffickers found new customers in the desperate job-seekers. These new addicts are partly credited for waves of violent armed robberies committed at neighborhood corner stores.
Ouisa Davis, executive director of the Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services in El Paso, said border violence should make everybody reflect on deteriorating values.
"If anything, the violence that we are experiencing in our community and in Juárez should make us ask why is human life treated with such little value," she said. "We need to ask if the world is becoming a more dangerous place."
Monday, after the discovery of the tied-up body of 9-year-old Ricardo Aquino Olivares, the Catholic Diocese of Juárez called the violence "diabolical." An editorial in one of Juárez's daily newspapers, El Diario, lamented, "Poor Juárez, so far from justice." Juárez has more than 200 murders a year.
Spiral of violence
Law enforcement officials blame the organized drug trade for setting the tone.
"One of the byproducts of the drug trade is corruption, kidnapping, torture and murder," said Hardrick Crawford, the special agent in charge of the FBI in El Paso. "It creates the belief that everything goes."
The Carrillo-Fuentes cartel took over the Juárez plaza, or drug market, after the 1988 death of Pablo Acosta Villarreal, the drug lord based in Ojinaga, Chihuahua. The FBI said the new drug lords enlarged the cartel at least fourfold. In 1997, when Amado Carrillo Fuentes died, allegedly during plastic surgery to change his appearance, his brother, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, took over in a wave of bold, daylight abductions and murders.
The three dead men found Friday, including Julio Cesar Navarro Manzano, an 18-year-old El Paso native who lived in Juárez, are most likely victims of the drug trade. And so is store owner Raul Gutierrez Reyes, 33, who was found shot to death and left by the side of a cemetery Sunday, Juárez police said.
Lately, worker bees -- as opposed to high-ranking drug lords -- are the ones being executed by cartel hit men, suggesting that the organization is stable, FBI officials said. They also said they have information that Friday's victims had been stealing from the cartel. This theory seems consistent with the killers' action of cutting off the right index fingers of two of the men and stuffing them in their pockets, officials said. The third man's finger was cut off and placed in his mouth, suggesting he had "snitched," officials said.
Corruption
Jaime Hervella is frustrated. The founder of the binational Association of Relatives & Friends of Disappeared Persons staged a modest protest Tuesday in front of the Mexican attorney general's office in Juárez. Corruption, apathy and political games are standing in the way of justice for the families of more than 300 men who have disappeared in this Mexican border city since 1993, he said.
Three months ago, federal police received a map from an anonymous tipster leading to a possible burial site, but nothing has been done with the information, Hervella said. The federal police could not be reached for comment. In 1999, such a tip led to the binational excavation of mass graves in South Juárez, the recovery of nine bodies and closure for their families.
"There is nothing like not knowing," said Hervella, whose godson disappeared in 1997.
Hervella is not the only victims activist who has berated the Mexican government for what he perceives as sloppy and dishonest investigations.
In the cases of the murdered women, investigators have left evidence behind at crime scenes, and several suspects have said they were tortured into confessing. And in 1999, U.N. Special Rapporteur Asma Jahangir chastised Mexican authorities for blaming victims of rape and murder for what happened to them.
"Unfortunately, our neighbors do not have the sophistication and the types of law enforcement resources that we have here. And there is a degree of informality (corruption) that makes it difficult to conduct a proper investigation," said Eduardo Garcia, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Economic impact
The violence is a black eye that the tourism industry in Juárez is trying to minimize. In 1999, then-mayor Gustavo Elizondo placed a $30,000 ad in the Washington Post to fight negative publicity from the widespread coverage of the mass graves. He also asked that the Carrillo-Fuentes cartel not be referred to as the "Juárez cartel."
But shocking discoveries like the mass graves fade without gravely affecting the maquila industry, the biggest employer in Juárez, officials of the chambers of commerce in Juárez and El Paso said.
"Interestingly we just completed a round of focus groups in Dallas, Chicago and Los Angeles and it (crime in Juárez) was not mentioned by anyone as a concern," said Mark Matthys, spokesman of the Greater El Paso Chamber of Commerce.
Still, Matthys tells visiting businessmen to plan their trips to Juárez carefully and discourages them from going alone.
Louie Gilot may be reached at lgilot@elpasotimes.com; Tammy Fonce Olivas contributed to this report.
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