by Laura Carlsen
On January 31, an armed commando unit pulled up to a house in a working-class neighborhood in Ciudad Juarez on the Mexican side of the border with the United States. Inside the house, 60 teenagers were celebrating a friend's birthday. Wielding high-caliber weapons, the commandos opened fire on the kids, robbed the house, then drove away from the scene — amid human cries, the scent of gunpowder, and the total absence of law enforcement officials.
To date, 16 people are dead as more lie wounded in the local hospital. Photographs capture the concrete floors stained with blood, the bereaved families, the frightened neighbors. Local residents interviewed in the aftermath of the tragedy called the security forces "useless." Fearing to give their names, they noted that the gunmen entered the neighborhood, hunted down the victims, and passed right by a group of soldiers in the vicinity.
"We heard a lot of shots, at first we thought they were bottle rockets, but later we heard the running and the cries of the young girls that were at the party. Then came silence and a strong odor of gunpowder," a witness reported. Residents say that even 10 hours after the murders, the crime scene had not been secured.
So far, no one knows the motive of the crime. The Washington Post reported that Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes put forward the preposterous hypothesis that the hit was "random." Mexico's secretary of government chalked it up to "delinquents" and ended up blaming the victims. He stated that the new strategy in the region would be focused on "the gang wars." The state attorney general presented a suspect who claimed the victims were associated with a gang called the "Artist Assassins" that works for the Sinaloa drug cartel. According to this story, the rival Gulf cartel carried out the mass hit as punishment and a warning to others.
Mexico's Drug War
Ciudad Juarez now holds the world record in homicides per capita. The city beats out war zones in the number of violent deaths because unofficially, it too is a war zone. This border city of two million is the frontline of one of the most violent and most ill-conceived war of our times — the war on drugs. On March 27, 2008, Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched "Operation Chihuahua," and since then thousands of soldiers have been sent in to beat back the cartels.
full article http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-carlsen/murder-capital-of-the-wor_b_450163.html#comments
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