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Ciudad Juárez: Mexico's nameless dead

As Mexico's drugs war goes on, the government is breaching the rights of citizens innocent of any involvement with the cartels


José DarÃ*o Alvarez Orrantes is 19 years old and a first-year student of Sociology at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. On 29 October he attended his eleventh March Against Death (Kaminata). He was peacefully protesting against the militarisation of the city, when the federal police shot him in the back. Gravely wounded, he is fighting for his life.

José DarÃ*o has a name, and despite the seriousness of his situation, he is still alive. That is more than can be said for the nearly 7,000 people violently killed in Ciudad Juárez since the beginning of 2008. The majority of them have simply disappeared into the macabre statistics of the victims of the war against drugs. Their deaths have never been investigated, and the government has sown seeds of doubt about their innocence. In the worst cases, they are represented as criminals, in the best as the collateral victims of the war against the drug dealers. As far as the government is concerned the dead are assumed to be criminals unless it can be proven otherwise.

This was how they treated the murder of 16 youngsters, many of them little more than children, at a party in the Villas de Salvárcar district on 30 January this year. And to add insult to injury, 48 hours later President Felipe Calderón announced that investigations had shown they were almost certainly killed in a confrontation between rival gangs.

The parents of the victims hung placards outside their houses that read: "Mr President, until those responsible are found, you are the murderer. What would you do, Mr President, if your son had been one of the victims?"

On 11 February, during a public meeting in Ciudad Juárez, MarÃ*a de la Luz Dávila, the mother of Marcos and José Luis Piña Dávila, who were both killed at the party, stood up in front of Calderón and interrupted his speech. Looking him straight in the eye, she said: "Excuse me, Mr President, I cannot welcome you here because you are not welcome. People have been murdered here. I want justice to be done and I want my boys back. I will not shake your hand because you are not welcome here. I want you to withdraw what you said about my boys being gang members, and to ask for forgiveness… I know this; if they had killed your son, the murderers would have been caught by now. The governor and the mayor promise us justice every time; but nothing is done. I demand justice!"

MarÃ*a de la Luz Dávila's rage is shared by the whole community in Ciudad Juárez. It is what took José DarÃ*o Alvarez Orrantes and his comrades on to the streets in the March Against Death, and it is what feeds the demands for justice from thousands of parents who have lost their sons and daughters.

This anger was born not only out of the thousands of violent deaths, but from the daily abuses and assaults by the police and the military. The list of those abuses suffered by the population of the city is enormously long. The population is equally afraid of the drug dealers and the men in uniform. Young people are suspect simply by virtue of being young; they are stopped in the street and threatened at gunpoint. The police break into private houses without a warrant and terrorise those who live there. The first victim of the war against the drug traffickers has been human rights.

The fact that the vast majority of the killings over the past two years have been against unarmed people who were not involved in any kind of confrontation is also unprecedented. They were not murders perpetrated in the course of wars between drug "cartels", nor in armed confrontations between the police or the army and criminal gangs. They were crimes committed in a city living under an undeclared state of siege, patrolled day and night by 10,000 armed men, and full of checkpoints.

Perhaps that is why broad layers of the population share the view that the police and the army are not in the city to fight the drug traffic but rather to help one drug cartel against another. That is what people say, and they add that the local police support the Juárez cartel while the army defends the interests of the Gulf cartel. Because it seems that although they are always close to the places where these crimes are committed, neither the police nor the army ever intervene to stop them.

Since the war against drugs began in Chihuahua state, a number of important social leaders have been murdered. The list is very long; Armando Villarreal Martha, a peasant leader and the promoter of several campaigns of refusal to pay the high prices charged by the Federal Electricity Commission, was gunned down. BenjamÃ*n Lebarón, a charismatic figure in the Mormon community who led a number of campaigns against insecurity, was "executed". According to the Civic Assembly of Ciudad Juárez and the National Front Against Repression, Manuel Arroyo, a researcher for the trade unions, Géminis Ochoa, the spokesman for the street traders, and the human rights campaigner Josefina Reyes were all murdered in the city. Ochoa had been threatened by the Federal Police when he announced the organisation of a protest march against abuses by the military, and Reyes was persecuted by the army after she had publicly repudiated militarisation.

The attack on the March Against Death on 29 October represents yet another escalation of the police and army's assault on the citizens of Ciudad Juárez. In the city of the nameless dead, the citizens are reaching the limits of their tolerance of the forces of public order. The rage of those who are demanding justice will soon have its day.

• This article was translated by Mike Gonzalez