From: JC <creechan@gmail.com>Date: 2010/2/19
Subject: [frontera-list] Turning Point in Mexico? LA Times Report by Tracy Wilkinson
To: Frontera LIst <
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latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/latinamerica/la-fg-mexico-tipping-
point20-2010feb20,0,639987.story
latimes.com
Juarez massacre may mark a turning for Mexico
The January killing of 15 young people has created a furor and left
some wondering whether it's a tipping point, a moment when Mexicans
overcame their fear and fatalism to confront the violence.
By Tracy Wilkinson
2:43 PM PST, February 19, 2010
Reporting from Mexico City
The slaughter last month of at least 15 young people with no apparent
criminal ties has galvanized the Mexican public in ways not seen here
in more than three years of bloody drug warfare and has forced the
government to enact long-resisted policy changes to combat violence.
Some in Mexico are wondering if this is their nation's tipping point,
a moment when public outrage that has bubbled along finally overcame
the fear and fatalism that until now largely silenced or intimidated
Mexican society.
Led by parents of the victims in the Jan. 31 massacre, citizens of
Ciudad Juarez have marched, protested, challenged Mexican President
Felipe Calderon and demanded a new strategy for reducing the gruesome
crimes that have made their city one of the world's deadliest. Joining
grieving parents in their wrath have been civic leaders,
entrepreneurs, politicians, educators and priests.
"For the very, very first time, people, civil society as a whole, have
come together and decided, this is enough," said Marcos Fastlicht, a
prominent Mexico City businessman who heads an organization dedicated
to the uphill task of promoting citizen participation in crime-
fighting. "And they've said that to Calderon . . . to his
ministers . . . that they are not going to take any more" neglect and
broken promises.
Calderon, an often aloof leader seemingly impervious to criticism, has
responded by apparently heeding the complaints and making the
remarkable concession that his military-led war on drug cartels has
proved insufficient.
He traveled to Ciudad Juarez twice in less than a week's time, amid
noisy street demonstrations demanding that he resign and with key
Cabinet ministers in tow, and received long litanies of grievances
from the beleaguered public. He quietly took a tongue-lashing from a
middle-aged maquiladora worker, mother of two teenagers killed in the
massacre, who confronted him abruptly at a town meeting.
"President, I cannot welcome you here," Luz Maria Davila started,
voice raised; Calderon waved off an aide who moved to whisk Davila
away. "We are living the consequences of a war we did not ask for."
It was a highly unusual rebuke from a humble woman in a country that
retains paternalistic tendencies and demands a certain reverence for
presidential figures.
Almost since its inception when Calderon took office in December 2006,
the president's anti-drug policy has been roundly criticized for
emphasizing military and police repression and largely ignoring other
components of the multibillion-dollar drug-trafficking industry.
Poverty and lack of opportunity send thousands into the ranks of
cartel foot soldiers in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El
Paso. The Mexican city became the extreme, terror-gripped example of
the policy's shortcomings.
Even as 10,000 army troops and federal police were deployed, someone
was killed in Ciudad Juarez last year about every three hours on
average and up to half a million residents fled, a quarter of the
population. As early as last summer, authorities told The Times they
were reviewing and planning to make changes in the strategy for
combating organized crime in the troubled city -- a pledge made
throughout the rest of the year, but never put into action.
Calderon has now been forced to offer a mea culpa and act. Embracing
the citizens' slogan, "We are all Juarez," he acknowledged that his
strategy had neglected socioeconomic factors and established a $50-
million fund for new schools, clinics and job-creation programs, while
also promising to assign a large contingent of judicial investigators
to Ciudad Juarez.
"By hearing the demands and the indignation directly," political
analyst Alfonso Zarate in Mexico City said, Calderon "has an
opportunity to rectify and to act differently."
Skeptics accuse Calderon of moving now because it's an election year.
Both the governorship of Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez is
located, and the mayor's post in the city are held by Calderon's chief
rival party and are up for grabs in voting scheduled in July.
Whatever his electoral calculations, however, Calderon is also keenly
aware of the corrosive political damage of the Ciudad Juarez disaster
on his government, an erosion that goes far beyond the screaming
crowds in the border city's streets.
A poll out this week showed a dramatic decline nationwide in support
for Calderon's government. An overwhelming majority said violent crime
had increased substantially in the last six months, and solidly half
the nation said the president's war on drug cartels was failing. The
poll by Buendia & Laredo sampled 1,000 people in face-to-face
interviews and has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
And there has been a busy confluence of voices of criticism from
segments of society, such as the Roman Catholic Church, that had
remained until now largely on the sidelines.
A member of Calderon's own National Action Party, legislator Manuel
Clouthier Carrillo, accused the government of playing favorites in
going after drug gangs, leaving the largest and most powerful of them,
the so-called Sinaloa cartel led by fugitive kingpin Joaquin "El
Chapo" Guzman, untouched. Clouthier was not clear about what
Calderon's alleged motives might be, but the suggestion stung and his
colleagues are demanding that he retract it.
So far the citizen outcry in Ciudad Juarez has been channeled toward
demands the government change course and withdraw the army (Calderon
refused). It has not focused on residents' own responsibilities in
challenging drug gangs.
Many Mexicans have in effect become complicit by failing to speak out.
But there were signs of that changing too.
Heriberto Galindo, one of the dozens of community leaders petitioning
Calderon in Ciudad Juarez this week, scolded his neighbors for
consistently lashing out at the government and army but never the
traffickers.
"We have to assume our own portion of blame as well," Galindo said.
"It is not always the government that is responsible for the killing
of a child."
The only other recent incident that provoked a level of outrage
similar to that generated by the deaths of the young people in January
was the 2008 kidnapping and killing of a boy from a wealthy Mexico
City family, a tragedy that unleashed angry marches across the
country. But the response quickly lost momentum.
It is possible that once again, the furor -- this time over the
killing of the youths in Ciudad Juarez -- could disappear in the
ephemera of rhetoric absent concrete action. Already, several Juarez
activists are complaining that the issue of human rights, much
violated in recent months, was given short shrift in the talks with
Calderon.
"The first step is to regain the public's trust," said Ciudad Juarez
Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz, "and that is not done with a government
decree."
wilkinson@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
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