Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

JUAREZ -- A so-called narco offensive last week left Juárez police leaderless and under fire with a wave of killings that also targeted for death elected officials in the outlying village of Guadalupe.

The Juárez Citizens Command vigilante group on Saturday issued a manifesto, in which the group supported the Mexican army and condemned the crimes against police officers last week.

According to Juárez news media, the manifesto of the Comando Ciudadano por Juárez, or CCJ, alerted the community against a group of kidnappers and extortionists that travels the city in a white Grand Cherokee with tinted windows and Texas plates and a white pickup also with tinted windows but no plates.

The manifesto states the CCJ will act soon and asked residents to report the criminals to three phone numbers in Juárez. It was signed by a group leader identified as Comandante Abraham.

This is the third manifesto since the organization made its first threat Jan. 15 to kill one criminal a day if order is not restored in the city. The command set a deadline of July 5 to carry out its threat.

As violence continued, at least five people, including a woman, were killed Saturday in the Mexican border area.

Just after midnight Saturday, José Alberto García Reyes, 28, was shot to death in the middle a street near Caseta, across the
Advertisement
Quantcast
Rio Grande from Fabens, Chihuahua state police said. In addition, a woman in her mid-20s was found killed around 8 a.m. in the backyard of a house in El Barrial neighborhood in Juárez.

Gerardo Martínez Leyva, 46, Jesús Armando Acosta Núñez, 30, and an unidentified man were gunned down within less than two hours Saturday afternoon in two incidents, Chihuahua state police said.

During a gathering in honor of Mexico's Army Day on Thursday, Juárez Mayor José Reyes Ferriz told soldiers that the military was vital "against the charges of the cornered beast that is narco-trafficking."

The beast struck last week by killing the Juárez police director and four officers, a Cereso prison guard and a transit officer. The onslaught led to the resignation of the city's top police official, Public Safety Secretary Roberto Orduña Cruz, who quit Friday after nine months on the job because drug traffickers threatened to keep killing police if he didn't resign.

Gunmen also killed two members of the town council of Guadalupe, which is along a notorious smuggling corridor in the rural Valley of Juárez.

"Make no mistake, considering the military weapons now being used in Mexico and the number of deaths involved, the country is in the middle of a war," stated a report last week by Stratfor, an Austin-based publisher of global intelligence.

The report, titled "Mexico: The Third War," contends that Mexico is actually in the middle of three wars:
# One -- A war among drug cartels for control of smuggling territories called "plazas," including Juárez.
# Two -- A war between Mexican government forces and the drug cartels.
# Three -- A war waged on Mexican citizens by increasingly bold kidnappers, extortionists and other criminals.

The violence, which has continued for more than a year, has become a gruesome part of daily life in the Juárez region, where homicides sporadically occur every few hours from remote villages to crowded urban boulevards.

"There are deaths daily," Juárez resident Manuel Jimenez said, tossing down a tabloid with a graphic crime photo on the cover. "Another day, another death," he said.

The few successes against the powerful drug cartels have come mainly from the Mexican military, which has deployed about 45,000 soldiers around the country. Soldiers have regularly seized multi-ton marijuana shipments. Such seizures were mostly unheard of years ago.

Mexico has lost 78 soldiers in the fight against cartels in the past two years, officials said.