Thousands of Mexican soldiers pour into the country's most violent city in crackdown on drug gangs



Armed to the hilt, they came from land and air, determined to restore order to Mexico's most violent city.



Nearly 2,000 Mexican soldiers and armed federal police poured into the border town of Ciudad Juarez last weekend.



The city - just across from El Paso in Texas - has been ravaged by drug gangs. Just this month 250 people were killed there by hitmen fighting for lucrative smuggling routes.

War zone: Federal police check their guns as they get ready to board a plane from Mexico City to the lawless border town of Ciudad Juarez

Bringing out the big guns: Armed federal police prepare to patrol the streets as they arrive in Ciudad Juarez yesterday

The soldiers' mandate is clear - and ambitious.

'This is to reinforce the operation in general ... to eradicate kidnappings, extortion, assaults and homicide,' army spokesman Enrique Torres said.

The soldiers are the first contingent of as many as 5,000 troops and federal police being sent to Juarez.

The deployment is part of a five thousand man troop increase planned for this city - given the unlucky title of Mexico's most violent

The soldiers and police were flown in by air as well as driven in

Almost 2,500 soldiers and federal police have been there for nearly a year, but they have failed to curb the violence plaguing the city of about 1.6 million people.

President Felipe Calderon's military operation is supported by the United States, which is concerned the violence could destabilize Mexico, a key trading partner, and spill over the border.

Mexico has deployed some 45,000 troops across the country to try to crush drug gangs, but clashes between rival cartels and security forces killed around 6,000 people last year.

MASSACRE CENTRAL: HOW DRUG GANGS HAVE MADE MURDER AND TORTUE A WAY OF LIFE IN MEXICO



Yesterday Mexico's army blitzed a former holiday resort that's now the most deadly place on Earth. ANDREW MALONE reports



Bristling with firepower, faces hidden by balaclavas and sunglasses, the troops arrived by land and air. In scenes reminiscent of a Hollywood action film, convoys of military vehicles stretching for more than half a mile snaked into the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez yesterday, carrying 5,000 soldiers and federal police armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

Their mission? To tackle rampaging drugs gangs whose turf wars have left more than 6,000 people dead in a year - 700 in the past month.

It is a last desperate move in what has become the murder capital of the world. Once an upmarket holiday resort for rich Americans, Ciudad Juarez is in the grip of anarchy as rival gangsters battle each other - as well as the police and army - for control of this key staging post for drugs into the lucrative U.S. market as well as onwards to Europe.

Between federal police and Mexican Army soldiers up to 2,000 law enforcement officers swarmed the streets of Juarez over the weekend to join the 2,500 already there - and there are more to come

Described as a 'narco insurgency' that threatens the entire nation, the scale of the crisis was dramatically underscored last week when the city's head of police in the city was forced to flee. Robert Orduna had been warned that one of his men would be slaughtered every 48 hours until he quit. The drug lords kept their promise: they butchered five of Orduna's officers in ten days.

The killings came after hit-lists were pasted on shop windows warning of 'never-ending' bloodshed until police 'backed off' - and Orduna left town. 'I can't allow my men to continue losing their lives,' Orduna said in a statement after being smuggled out of his office, where he slept inside a bulletproof cage. 'I am presenting my permanent resignation.'

To the dismay of Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Orduna had only been in the job for six months: his predecessor fled across the border to Texas after he, too, was told to leave town or die. He, in turn, had replaced a police chief murdered by the gangs.

Mexican soldiers are ready for battle with drug gangs. The Government is deploying 5,000 troops to try to restore order in the country's most violent city

These slayings were the latest chilling sign that the gangs are determined to control this border city. Once popular with U.S. stars such as Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe and Ernest Hemingway, the bars are empty now and the once-elegant streets awash with blood.

Every day, gun battles rage along Triumph of the Republic Boulevard, the city's main thoroughfare, and the heads of enemies of the drug lords have been impaled on spikes in parks once popular with picnicking families. Hospitals treating victims regularly come under machine-gun fire. Radios used by emergency services are interrupted by the drugs gangs, who warn paramedics they will be killed if they treat any wounded.

Over one 24-hour period last month, 17 people were murdered, a relative of a U.S. congressman was kidnapped, and scores of buildings were set ablaze.

The war is being fought between a bewildering array of gangs, many of them using ex-Special Forces soldiers recruited from the Mexican military.

They are supported by corrupt police - with as many as one in five of local law-enforcement officers believed to be in the pay of the gang lords.

A forensic police officer investigates yet another gang-related murder

One commander was arrested last month on charges of attempting to smuggle a ton of drugs into the U.S. through El Paso.

Much of the bloodshed is being orchestrated by Joaquin 'Shorty' Guzman, one of the world's most wanted men, who leads a cartel from the Pacific-coast state of Sinaloa. Guzman has already turned his homeland into his own personal fiefdom.



Blamed for the deaths of 600 people already this year, the drugs baron has become enraged by the Mexican government's attempts to curtail his operations.

In one recent shoot-out, he exacted revenge by killing seven federal agents and beheading them. Armed with AK-47 assault rifles - known in Mexico as cuernos de chivo (goat's horns) due to their curved magazines - they also pumped more than 100 rounds into two police officers who had the temerity to stop one of their men.

Guzman, who wears orange ostrich-skin cowboy boots and gold jewellery in the shape of machine guns, has been battling the rival Gulf Cartel for control of Tijuana, another town near the U.S. border, where he has posted videos of executions and beheadings of rivals on the internet. He has also left headless corpses of rival gangs in playgrounds as a 'warning to the next generation'.

Mexico's President Felipe Calderon has vowed to keep up the pressure on the drug cartels

Not content with his estimated £15bn drugs business on the Pacific coast, however, Guzman wants to expand his empire into Ciudad Juarez, currently in the hands of rival Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.

Fuentes, who has had a $5million (£3.5m) bounty put on his head by the U.S., has for years controlled this overland shipment route for billions of dollars worth of drugs into the U.S., running his operation from a quasi-military headquarters possibly in Chile or Argentina.

Among the brutal methods in his 'narco-war' was the so-called 'House of Death' - an infamous building in Ciudad Juarez where torture and mass murders took place. It was discovered by an undercover U.S. agent - but the resulting court case was thrown out because American officials had colluded in the killings rather than blow the cover of their agent.

And the crisis has even spilled across the border into the U.S., where there has been a spate of killings and kidnappings by the murderous cartels.

Officers detain alleged members of a criminal gang. The police chief in Ciudad Juarez, Robert Orduna, quit after five of his men were murdered in 10 days

Barack Obama has been warned that Mexico's drugs lords now pose as big a threat to U.S. national security as Islamic insurgents. The U.S. is now planning to deploy the military to the border to try to contain the bloodshed.

'The violence is spreading like wildfire across the Rio Grande,' said George Greyson, an expert on Mexico at the College of William & Mary in Virginia.

The latest troop movements were ordered after President Calderon vowed to wipe out the drugs gangs, and pledged to send 5,000 men into Ciudad Juarez for a final showdown.

'We're throwing everything into this. We are cleaning the house,' the President insisted. The stakes could not be higher. As one of the Mexican president's aides predicted last night, if the government gave up its fight against the cartels, 'the next president of the republic would be a drug dealer'.

But Jose Reyes Ferriz, mayor of Ciudad Juarez, believes the drug war will end only when both sides have ended up killing each other - and there is no one left to deal drugs. Reyes said: 'But then someone else will just move in and take over. It's all just a nightmare.'



