Thread: Mexico to send more troops to besieged city

Mexico to send more troops to besieged city
Thu Feb 26, 2009 9:43pm EST

The army said on Thursday the deployment of up to 5,000 personnel could take the number of soldiers and federal police to over 7,000 in Ciudad Juarez, which is across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas.

This month alone, drug hitmen killed 250 people in Juarez, where a meeting of cabinet members on Wednesday was rattled by three bomb scares, forcing soldiers to briefly shut the city's international airport.

"We're throwing everything into this. We are cleaning the house," said President Felipe Calderon in an interview on Mexican television.

There are now 2,020 soldiers and 425 federal police in Ciudad Juarez, a city of around 1.6 million people. An army spokesman said the reinforcements would begin to arrive in the coming weeks.

Calderon's military operation is supported by the United States, which is concerned the violence could destabilize Mexico, a key trading partner, and spill over the border.

Mexico has deployed some 45,000 troops across the country to try to crush drug gangs but clashes between rival cartels and security forces killed around 6,000 people last year.

Drug trade analysts say Mexico's most-wanted fugitive, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, who leads a cartel from the Pacific state of Sinaloa, wants control of Ciudad Juarez, currently in the hands of local drug lord Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.

Ciudad Juarez is in the cross-fire as Guzman's hitmen seek to destroy the Juarez cartel's entire operation, drug experts say. Kidnappings and extortion of business people are rampant.

U.S. SENATE MEETINGS

In a what could be a new scare tactic by the gangs, a local newspaper received another anonymous bomb threat on Thursday.

Police evacuated the El Heraldo office in the state capital Chihuahua, south of Ciudad Juarez, after a man called the paper to warn of two bombs planted in the building. It turned out to be a false threat.

"It may have been another attempt by organized crime to spread fear or to distract the police," El Heraldo's news editor David Pinon told Reuters.

A U.S. Senate committee said on Thursday it would hold two meetings on the violence along the border, days after the Obama administration warned travelers about the growing risks.

"We must assess border security programs and plans in place and we must review the readiness of federal, state and local law enforcement," said Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The panel would examine how the two governments were addressing the situation and determine the potential for increased terrorist activity.
The committee said it may also look into whether there is merit to deploying National Guard to the border, fencing issues and potential mass migration from Mexico.


(Reporting by Julian Cardona; Additional reporting by Robin Emmott in Monterrey and Jeremy Pelofsky in Washington; Editing by John O'Callaghan)

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNew ... dChannel=0

Calderon's military operation is supported by the United States, which is concerned the violence could destabilize Mexico, a key trading partner, and spill over the border.

Let's bring those jobs home, where they should be anyway, seal the border and tell that outhouse south of us they get not one more dime until they start extraditing some of those murdering thugs they sent us, so we can prosecute them for the harm they've done to American citizens, and take back all their citizens currently bleeding the U.S.A. dry.