Juarez Mayor Wages Own War on Drug Cartel

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. The drug gang, as well as cartels from Tijuana and Sinaloa, have been officially rebaptized with the names of their top henchmen.

“I decided to launch a campaign to rescue the name of Juarez,” Elizondo said, noting that drug trafficking plagues many cities, not just his. “We will not accept that people talk about a cartel of Juarez but not a cartel of El Paso, Brownsville or Los Angeles.”

Elizondo’s campaign is cheered by local business executives. But critics say it’s a classic example of how, in the war against drugs, style often wins out over substance.

“The problem isn’t the image,” said Jorge Chabat, an analyst of drug trafficking at the Center for Economic Investigation and Teaching in Mexico City. “It’s that the narcos exist, they operate in Juarez as in other cities, and they generate violence. They kill people. This is a fact.”

Like several other Mexican border cities, Juarez has a split personality. It is a booming manufacturing center with 200,000 people, many of whom work at U.S.-owned assembly plants known as maquiladoras.

It is also a city of criminal mayhem. Juarez has been shaken by the killings of scores of women in recent years, many of them factory employees. On top of that is fierce drug violence: executions, kidnappings and occasional wild gunfire at restaurants as traffickers try to kill rivals, a technique drug agents call “pray ‘n’ spray.”

But the worst moment for Juarez’s image came in November, when U.S. and Mexican agents descended on several ranches near the city, announcing that they had information about mass graves of victims slain by drug traffickers. U.S. officials spoke of possibly finding 100 to 300 bodies.

In the end, only nine corpses were found.

For Elizondo, the event was a nightmare.

“It was made to seem as if everybody in Juarez formed part of this criminal organization,” he said in a telephone interview this week. Tourist bookings plummeted.

Elizondo struck back. He took out an ad in the Washington Post emphasizing that Juarez is not a narco graveyard but a “competitive regional development pole.”

He persuaded Atty. Gen. Jorge Madrazo Cuellar to change the name the Mexican government uses when referring to the Juarez crime group to the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes cartel, after its alleged leader. Recently, Elizondo wrote to President Clinton and the heads of the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration, urging them to adopt the name change as well.

“I am waiting for their answer,” he said. “After that, we are going to carry out some other actions to reposition Juarez, reflecting what it really is: a community of work, investors, employment growth, production.”

Not everyone is convinced that the name change will stick. Chabat, the professor, cites practical problems: Cartel leadership changes often, what with arrests and executions.

He notes that the practice of identifying drug cartels by location or ethnic group is common.

“You have the Sicilian Mafia. I don’t think there was any protest from Sicily about this,” he said. “The Russian mafia is called the Russian mafia. This doesn’t mean all [Russians] are mafiosos.”

Others are more critical. Those hurt by the violence committed by the Juarez cartel say the mayor is trying to gloss over a serious problem. “It’s Mickey Mouse,” said Jaime Hervella, founder of the Assn. of Relatives and Friends of Disappeared Persons. “The executions keep on happening.”

For their part, U.S. anti-drug authorities seem puzzled. They say they have always referred to most Mexican narcotics groups by their leaders, although the DEA’s Internet page uses the Juarez cartel name. Asked about the issue, DEA spokesman Terry Parham sought to do some semantic spin-doctoring of his own.

The agency, he says, has been campaigning to have people drop the word “cartel” altogether.

“The word ‘cartel’ lends itself to, in a public-image way, some legitimacy,” he said in a telephone interview from Washington. “We’re promoting a change to refer to them as criminal organizations or criminal mafias. It’s to let the public know they’re criminals, not legitimate businessmen.”