The American president rallies thousands of men by the border with Mexico, where drug cartels control the territory and prepare to commit terrorism. The plan was accomplished perfectly, and Ciudad Juarez, a small town opposite the American El Paso, has begun to live a new nightmare. The cartel gangsters in Juarez filled a car with over ten kilos of explosives, linked to a cell phone turned into a primer. Then, they kidnapped a man, forced him to wear a cop uniform and shot him just to hurt him. Then they made their victim enter the car loaded with explosives and call the nearest police station reporting the shooting of an officer by the drug dealers.
The frames of the action show the arrival of a couple of Federal Police SUVs, journalists and local TV stations. The injured man was screaming and asking for help while officers, nurses, reporters and curious onlookers got closer to the car. Then a big blaze, a rumbling; the bomb was detonated from a distance by the cell phone. On the spot, there were four dead and a dozen wounded. This is the Mexico of the war between the government and the drug dealers, a war that since 2006 has killed almost 25,000 people.
Since the Thursday, July 15 car incident, we now have to add bombing to the ambushes, the machine gun fights, the targeted homicides, the honest cops killed in front of their houses just like the corrupted ones, the enemies kidnapped, tortured, filmed and then decapitated or hanged on the nearest bridge.
This is terror like in Iraq or Afghanistan, but cooked in a Mexican sauce with the never before seen idea of a live and wounded lure to attract the enemy. It’s not completely clear yet why the drug dealers decided to raise the bar of the conflict. In Ciudad Juarez, a city where all you have to do to get to the U.S. is to cross a bridge, the final destination of the biggest part of Mexican cartels’ drug shipments, the drug dealers don’t want interferences with their activity. Did the government rally the Federal Police and the Army to patrol the territory? The cartels answer with car bombs to create a climate of terror, to say openly that they’re ready to make Ciudad Juarez the Baghdad or the Kabul of Central America. The only possible comparison is with the Colombia of the ‘80s, when Medellin’s cartel used terrorism and detonated a bomb on a flying plane as retaliation against the decision to extradite a few criminals to the U.S.
The bombing says to everyone, especially security forces, to stay away from the cartels’ traffic, to remain safe in the police stations. Their deals are worth billions: According to the latest estimates of the American Drug Enforcement Agency the drug dealers’ annual turnover ranges between $18 and $39 billion. This message is also for President Felipe Calderon who, four years ago, as soon as he was elected, declared war on the cartels, to let him know that his efforts don’t affect the power of the organized crime.
The leap in the criminal violence in the drug war in Mexico carries a list of questions. The common denominator for the cartels is that violence has to be total and without moral boundaries; all we have to do is mention that at the beginning of the escalation the decapitated heads of six gangsters were thrust on a gate in front of a police station in the touristic Acapulco. The military commando action perpetrated in the last week of June in Gomez Palacio, in the State of Durango, has no other meaning but the exhibition of pure and simple violence. In the middle of the night, armed men entered a rehab center for drug addicts and opened fire. As a result, nine died. What was the goal? There are no certain answers, only hypotheses: That among those present there was some rival from another gang; that the hunt was for some informer recruited by the police among the drug addicts; or, again, that it was a message to say that it’s useless to hide in a rehab center to escape the forced recruitment in the cartels. No matter what, death is always around the corner.