Juarez Mexico

The two victims rest at the same 45-degree angle, embraced by seat belts that at this moment seem an odd precaution, given the manner of death. Gunmen had pulled alongside the forest-green Chevy Tahoe on a gritty downtown street and, in broad daylight, pumped 52 shots into where the bodies now lean. Onlookers, at least 125 of them, press wordlessly against yellow police tape.

High-powered assault weapons illegally purchased under the ATF's Fast and Furious program in Phoenix ended up in a home belonging to the purported top Sinaloa cartel enforcer in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, whose organization was terrorizing that city with the worst violence in the Mexican drug wars. In all, 100 assault weapons acquired under Fast and Furious were transported 350 miles from Phoenix to El Paso, making that West Texas city a central hub for gun traffickers. Forty of the weapons made it across the border and into the arsenal of Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, a feared cartel leader in Ciudad Juarez, according to federal court records and trace documents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Mexican federal police and army agents seized three Lear jets, thousands of dollars in cash and more than two dozen suspected drug traffickers--including uniformed police officers--in a major blow to Mexico's most powerful drug cartel, authorities said Monday. The Mexican attorney general's office said it linked the jets and the 25 detained pilots, passengers and police officers--some of whom are federal agents--to the Juarez drug-trafficking cartel.

To say the topic of screenwriter Sabina Berman's latest movie is bleak would be an understatement. So would labeling the decision to film in Mexico's deadliest city a "challenge." The film, "Backyard" ("El Traspatio") is a fictionalized account of the unsolved rapes and murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez, the violent Mexican border town that faces El Paso. Berman, a writer most known for comedies, had to be convinced the project made sense; she was sold after years of research and talking to survivors and some of the thousands of women who work in the vast network of multinational maquiladora assembly plants along the U.S.-Mexico border that served as the pool for victims.

Gunmen walked into a border restaurant and fired more than 100 rounds at a single table, in an incident that left six people dead and three others wounded in what may have been part of a war for control of the Juarez drug cartel. One of the dead was a prison official who was gunned down outside, apparently after he walked from a nearby bar to investigate the shooting.

The bodies of four strangled doctors, piled atop one another by the side of the road. A bleeding lawyer, hit five times in a shootout on city streets and now in critical condition in a local hospital. Six bullet-riddled bodies in a steakhouse, sprayed with more than 100 rounds by assailants toting AK-47s. At least 17 people have been slain here, gangland-style, since the July 4 death of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who ruled Mexico's premier narcotics-smuggling organization.

Outside the gaily painted gates of the Elena Garro Federal Kindergarten, the grown-ups are afraid. If daily drug-related killings haven't sown enough alarm in this gritty border city, parents now confront written messages left near several schools warning of unspecified harm unless teachers hand over their annual year-end bonuses.

Mexican Atty. Gen. Sergio Garcia Ramirez, angered by the weekend slayings of a TV newscaster and two others by police, suspended the head of the federal police in Juarez and vowed to press an investigation. One federal police officer and three city police officers have been arrested in the machine-gun attack Saturday in downtown Juarez, just across the Texas border.

Federal agents in Texas have raided six El Paso warehouses allegedly used as staging points for the 20 tons of cocaine shipped to Sylmar and seized last week in the world's largest cocaine bust. With the investigation expanding into Mexico, federal police in Ciudad Juarez also raided three houses there tied to at least one of the suspects arrested in Los Angeles.

As FBI agents and Mexican police began digging for possibly scores of bodies on desert ranches Tuesday, aghast Mexicans wondered how a drug cartel became so powerful that it could maintain clandestine burial grounds practically within sight of the U.S. border.

The two victims rest at the same 45-degree angle, embraced by seat belts that at this moment seem an odd precaution, given the manner of death. Gunmen had pulled alongside the forest-green Chevy Tahoe on a gritty downtown street and, in broad daylight, pumped 52 shots into where the bodies now lean. Onlookers, at least 125 of them, press wordlessly against yellow police tape.

Outside the gaily painted gates of the Elena Garro Federal Kindergarten, the grown-ups are afraid. If daily drug-related killings haven't sown enough alarm in this gritty border city, parents now confront written messages left near several schools warning of unspecified harm unless teachers hand over their annual year-end bonuses.

More than 20,000 people marched through the border city of Ciudad Juarez on Friday to demand that authorities stop a years-long wave of violence that has left hundreds dead, many of them young women. The protesters, most of them students who were given the day off to participate in the march, walked through downtown Juarez, a city of 1.3 million across from El Paso, shouting: "Enough! We don't want any more violence! We want peace!"

The rerun of last summer's Ciudad Juarez mayoral election is proving as close and contentious as the first round, with one side declaring victory, the other demanding a recount and a razor-thin margin separating the candidates. By late Monday, Jesus Alfredo Delgado, the National Action Party candidate whose victory last July was overturned because of campaign irregularities, had 137,614 votes, or 46.5%, with all but 2% of the ballots cast Sunday counted.

President Vicente Fox's National Action Party, or PAN, clung to a slim lead Sunday night in the Ciudad Juarez mayoral election, a closely watched race climaxing at a time of increasing national political turmoil and polarization. With 91% of the ballots counted in Mexico's largest border city, the PAN's Jesus Alfredo Delgado led with 127,557 votes, or 47.1% of those cast, to 123,080, or 45.4%, for Roberto Barraza of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

The mayor of Juarez is shocked--shocked!--that his border city is more commonly associated with corpses than corporations. So Mayor Gustavo Elizondo is doing something about it: He has successfully petitioned Mexico's attorney general to change the names of the country's top narcotics mafias. According to a recent directive to Mexican judicial authorities, the Juarez cartel no longer exists.

Lingering over dinner with a friend from out of town, they were the last to leave the Caribe Restaurant at about 3 a.m. Despite the hour, they stopped to window shop at a furniture store. Earlier, they had learned that the baby they were expecting was a boy. At 28, Linda Bejarano was a popular television anchorwoman and the mother of two girls. Her husband, Manuel Gomez, once the spokesman for an opposition gubernatorial candidate, was a successful talk show host.

Police and soldiers are preparing to exhume 100 to 300 bodies from two mass graves near the Mexican border city of Juarez believed to contain the remains of victims of a notorious drug cartel, law enforcement officials said Monday. At least a dozen U.S. citizens are believed to have been among the victims, who have included former informants for the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI, said U.S. officials speaking on condition of anonymity.

As FBI agents and Mexican police began digging for possibly scores of bodies on desert ranches Tuesday, aghast Mexicans wondered how a drug cartel became so powerful that it could maintain clandestine burial grounds practically within sight of the U.S. border.

Police and soldiers are preparing to exhume 100 to 300 bodies from two mass graves near the Mexican border city of Juarez believed to contain the remains of victims of a notorious drug cartel, law enforcement officials said Monday. At least a dozen U.S. citizens are believed to have been among the victims, who have included former informants for the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI, said U.S. officials speaking on condition of anonymity.