Mexico is in the grip of the most violent drug war the nation has ever seen. Sick of the sh**, President Felipe Calderón has sent in the army to take on both the country’s notorious drugs cartels and the corrupt local police forces. The result is chaos. The army is fighting the cartels, the cartels are fighting each other and honest cops are in short supply.
Nowhere has suffered more than Ciudad Juárez, a border town just 100m from the US city of El Paso. At 6am when day breaks, the first sirens are heard. That means the first bodies have been found. Corpses are spotted on roadsides, down alleys, in public dumps and perched in public squares.
Bodies have been found handcuffed together, bearing the marks of vicious beatings. Severed heads have been dumped in cool boxes and there are reports of torture videos posted on YouTube. A local paper claimed one cartel hired a musician to play victims their favourite ballads during their executions.
The cartels act like they’re untouchable. They pass lists of names to local and El Paso police, telling them who they’ll be killing in the weeks to come. One note was left at a monument to fallen officers in January this year. It listed 22 police officers who had resisted the corrupting efforts of the cartels. So far, 18 are dead.
To hold a public role here is terrifying. Death threats and corruption attempts go down daily. The city hasn’t had a police chief since May, when the old one resigned in fear after seven of his commanders had been killed. In smaller nearby towns, the entire police force has resigned and left the army to do their job.
When the government announced the launch of an anti-kidnapping group, many thought it might help stop the violence. But hope faded when the head of the new unit was assassinated in front his family as he left his home one day.