Mexico drug gangs aim at new target: teachers

Posted at 05:02 PM on Saturday, Dec. 11, 2010
By TIM JOHNSON - McClatchy Newspapers Share

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- At least once or twice a day, sirens blare here as firefighters in this violent border city speed to the latest store or restaurant that gangsters have firebombed for ignoring extortion demands.

Boarded up businesses and abandoned restaurants give parts of the city a ghostly look as organized crime strangles economic activity.

Now as Christmas approaches, mobsters have chosen a new target, turning their sights on humble schoolteachers.

Painted threats scrawled outside numerous public schools demand that teachers hand over their Christmas bonuses or face the possibility of an armed attack on the teachers - and even the children.

To make the point clear, assailants set fire to a federal preschool in the San Antonio district a week ago, leaving the director's office in smoldering ruins.

Scribbled on the wall in gold paint was the reason: "For not paying."

The targeting of teachers in Juarez's 1,270 preschool, primary and secondary schools is a sign of the depravity that rules in a city whose name has become synonymous with homicide.

Gangs already have shaken down other parts of the municipal social fabric - doctors, dentists and even ambulance drivers.

Now with the targets being teachers, parents have pulled thousands of children from schools where heightened security already had turned them into seeming prisons, enclosed with coils of barbed wire atop concrete walls.

Three schools have closed for fear they might come under armed attack.

"We are scared," admitted Maria de Jesus Casio, principal of the Ramon Lopez Velarde Elementary School. But she also said teachers don't want to pay. "Teachers don't have much money. The salaries are just enough for survival."

Teachers in this city earn an average of $650 a month. Christmas bonuses vary but the average is about a month's pay.

Casio, 53, a veteran teacher with close-cropped reddish hair, said teachers arrived at school one day in late November to find this graffito painted on the outside wall:

"For the well-being of everyone, and the children, pay 50,000 pesos."

That same day, assistant principal Jorge Alberto Palacios said that he found a notice on his pick-up truck that "talked about a massacre of children" and indicated where to drop the money.

A third message came in a school telephone bill.

The threats arrived at a dozen schools, perhaps more, according to news reports, though a senior school official would speak only in general terms.

"The educational system is under threat by criminal groups," Javier Gonzalez, the under secretary for education in northern Chihuahua state, said in an interview. "We're just praying to God that there never is an event of this nature."

Gonzalez said parents want police cruisers posted outside each school "but this kind of possibility doesn't exist" because there aren't enough patrol cars.

Authorities have kept secret when bonuses will be deposited into teachers' bank accounts in hopes of making it more difficult for gangsters to strong arm the teachers.

The lime-green school that Casio leads is awash in graffiti, although inside its fenced grounds, children play merrily.

After the threats arrived, Casio called her teachers together, the 23 from the morning shift and the 13 from the afternoon.

"We explained everything to them. We took a few measures, like trying to leave school all in a group. We set up a phone tree. We told parents to pick up their children promptly," she said.

http://www.fresnobee.com/2010/12/11/219 ... z17s8QZG3U