Inside Mexico’s Drug War, Americans Allege Abuse

NICHOLAS CASEY
The Wall Street Journal
July 19, 2010

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico—Two Americans were driving back to El Paso, Texas, last December after an afternoon across the border in Ciudad Juárez. A few blocks from the border, they were surrounded by Mexican army trucks and pulled from their Dodge Ram.

Mexico’s military is leading President Felipe Calderón’s war against the nation’s drug cartels, and Ciudad Juárez has emerged as one of the bloodiest battlegrounds. Nationwide, drug violence has claimed more than 25,000 lives since 2006—with government security forces accounting for an estimated 7% of the dead. In June alone, 103 police and soldiers were killed.

As the death toll rises, however, so have complaints about the military’s tactics in trying to break the drug cartels’ stranglehold on Mexican society. The human-rights office of the state of Chihuahua, where Ciudad Juárez is located, is investigating some 465 cases of alleged abuse and torture of Mexican citizens by soldiers. Gustavo de la Rosa, the office’s ombudsman in Ciudad Juárez, says he knows of about 70 cases in which soldiers are alleged to have planted evidence, including some involving suitcases packed with marijuana.

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This article was posted: Monday, July 19, 2010 at 9:35 am

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