Free The Fight to Save Juárez by Ricardo C. Ainslie

(though they acknowledged that it was impossible to know with certainty how much money was coming into cartel coffers), enough money to increase competition, and therefore violence, amongst themselves, as well as plenty of money to bribe and coerce police and other government officials. In Stratfor’s view, the picture amounted to a prescription for a “failed state,” that is, a state where institutions are so dysfunctional, if not under the outright control of criminal elements, that the state could no longer function as a state. The Stratfor report also added this interesting bit of analysis in summing up the stakes: it noted that in 2007 Mexico had exported approximately $210 billion worth of legal goods to the United States. By this accounting, the estimated $40 billion in drug money coming back to Mexico represented more than 16 percent of all exports to the United States. Just as important, the article went on to note, was that while the $210 billion was divided among many businesses and individuals, the $40 billion was concentrated in the hands of just a few fairly tightly controlled cartels. The long-term implication of this state of affairs might well be that the cartels would become so powerful as to be beyond the government’s ability to rein in or otherwise control. For Calderón and for Mexico, the time was now. By the spring of 2008 the crisis went beyond politics—except for the fact that within Mexico’s budding democracy politics was as hard and unforgiving as the cartel wars themselves.
    Everything that could be said about Mexico’s national crisis in relation to the drug cartels applied to Ciudad Juárez by many orders of magnitude. As the Mexican government began to roll out its intervention in Juárez, it became clear that getting to “the root of the problem,” as Guillermo Valdés, the head of the CISEN, had said, would prove to be much more difficult than anyone imagined. In Juárez the disease was so entrenched and insidious that even the federal government’s top intelligence operatives had difficulty wrapping their minds around it.

C HAPTER 5
    Public Relations
    The Monument to Fallen Police in Ciudad Juárez sits on a small knoll where two thoroughfares, Juan Gabriel (named for a native son turned Mexican pop idol) and Avenida Sanders, intersect. Its centerpiece is a bronze statue of a larger-than-life police officer standing on a cone-shaped pedestal. The officer is rendered in über-exactitude: wearing a sharply pressed uniform with a policeman’s day-to-day instruments of work—a gun and spare ammunition clips, a baton, a radio. The officer’s eyes are closed as if in deep reflection and his head is oriented toward a police cap lying on its side at his feet—a symbol for all the fallen comrades whose names are recorded on plaques on a semicircular wall that frames the statue. Along the perimeter, facing the wall, are three metal benches, like those found in almost every town square in Mexico, where visitors can sit and reflect on the fate that has befallen these public servants. The first time I visited the monument my impression was that there was something excessively self-conscious about the setting’s solemnity.
    The monument had been a year in the making when, in 2002, it had fallen to José Reyes Ferriz to inaugurate it by placing a commemorative plaque to mark its completion. At the time, he was serving a nine-month stint as interim mayor, having been appointed by the Chihuahua state congress following a mayoral election that had been nullified because of irregularities.
    The ceremony must have been infused with irony: grave and full of pomp as the police band played something formalized and fittingly reverential, yet tainted with the awareness that the police force was so full of corruption and prone to abuse of power that most citizens feared the police rather than revered them. At the time of the inauguration