Heavy army presence chafes in Mexico drug war city

Thu Apr 23, 2009 1:14pm EDT

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico, April 23 (Reuters) - Soldiers are storming into bars to search customers, giving advice to the mayor and even directing traffic as the army takes over the running of the most violent city in Mexico's drug war.

A massive security crackdown has reduced killings in Ciudad Juarez, on the U.S. border, but the military occupation is beginning to chafe with residents, threatening support for President Felipe Calderon's war on drug cartels.

As well as manning road-blocks and guarding government offices, thousands of troops sent to the northern city stand at road junctions directing traffic and search everyone from bar clients to schoolchildren for drugs and guns.

"Fifty soldiers came into the bar last week and searched everyone. Very few people come in now because of that and we're losing money," said Giselle, a bartender in Ciudad Juarez who declined to give her last name for fear of repercussions.

Ciudad Juarez is a manufacturing city across from El Paso, Texas, and once famed as a party town. But drug gangs killed 1,600 people here last year. Business and tourism slumped as hitmen dumped bodies on streets and hung headless corpses from bridges. Terrified residents avoided going out at night.

People are now venturing out again as the 10,000 troops and federal police Calderon sent in last month cut the murder rate by 80 percent and, despite complaints of army heavy handedness, many residents are relieved at the drop in killings.

"Thank goodness for the soldiers, it was hell here before," said restaurant chain owner Arturo Galvan.

Still, the relief with which many received the soldiers is fading as reports of rights abuses mount and people tire of army checkpoints. Street drug dealing continues unabated.

Such is the discontent that Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz last week promised the troops would start leaving in September, although the army quickly denied any such plans.

Masked soldiers stand guard outside shops and banks and army generals run the police and the prisons, but many people say they still do not feel safe.

"You live in fear all week," said footballer Cirilo Saucedo, who plays for the city's first division side Indios and was rumored to have been beheaded this month.

"Only in the match you forget, you give your all so people have that escape in football," he told El Norte newspaper.

BEATEN AND KILLED

Some 6,300 people were killed in Mexico last year in an escalating drug gang conflict that is worrying Washington as it starts to spill over into U.S. cities like Phoenix and Tucson.

Calderon was praised by U.S. President Barack Obama last week for his army crackdown, and Washington is sending more agents to its side of the border to curb the southbound flow of guns and cash to the cartels.

Calderon opted to send troops after the drug gangs in late 2006 as the army is seen as cleaner than often-corrupt police forces, but complaints of human rights abuses are mounting.

Mauricio Ibarra, a top investigator at the National Human Rights Commission told Reuters this week that soldiers have arbitrarily detained suspects for long stretches and beaten and tortured them with electric shocks to solicit information.

The human rights commission for Chihuahua state, home to Ciudad Juarez, blames the army for clumsy security operations that target children in school buses and women at checkpoints.

In the gravest accusations so far, two mothers say soldiers abducted, tortured and killed their two sons this month.

One of them, Margarita Rosales, told Reuters her son Javier Eduardo, 21, was snatched along with a friend by soldiers, beaten to death and dumped on the edge of the city. His friend, a U.S. citizen, survived and recounted the ordeal on local television before leaving for the United States.

"If the soldiers come to do wrong, they have no place here. My son was a radiologist, not a vagrant," Rosales said.

Army spokesman Enrique Torres said the army was helping a police probe into the murder but denied any federal police or soldiers were involved. "There have been cases of criminals dressed in stolen police and military uniforms who have committed abuses, but they are not our people," he said.

In places where drug cartels splash money around and pay generous wages to informants, locals are naturally hostile to the arrival of troops and federal police.

Mariachi musicians in Ciudad Juarez are nostalgic for the days when drug cartels paid them well at parties.

"A lot of our clients were narcos. They treated us better than the police, who made us play for free or paid with fake dollars," said Guadalupe Nava.

Polls show the drug war has yet to hit Calderon's popularity, but it could last for years. A government official said this month troops could stay on the street until 2013. (Writing by Robin Emmott; Editing by Catherine Bremer)

http://www.reuters.com/article/americas ... SN23349296