The Fight to Save Juárez by Ricardo C. Ainslie Page A

they had been assassinated.
    It had only been five days since Francisco Ledesma’s execution. All of the men on the “For those who did not believe” list had been cut down in a hail of bullets save one, Romo, who had been
levantado
(“lifted”) in June of 2007, never to be seen again. He had apparently been one of the early victims of the Sinaloa cartel’s intelligence operation, in which they had been “lifting” key Juárez cartel operatives and torturing them for information at clandestine locations before killing them. The bodies of people who were lifted sometimes turned up in trash-filled vacant lots or in some dark corner of the city, but as often as not they simply disappeared altogether without a trace. If Romo’s family had held out hope that he’d turn up alive, those hopes were dashed by his appearance on the “unbelievers” list.
    Just below Francisco Ledesma’s name, the heading “For those who still do not believe” marked the second section of the narco-message. Beneath that heading were the names of seventeen other Juárez municipal police officers, next to which were noted the precincts in which they worked and their code names. The name at the top of this second group was listed as “Román Z-1.” The author of the poster had underlined Román’s name in red and placed a red cross next to it. Román’s was the only name highlighted in this fashion. Antonio Román was the operational director of the municipal police, the second in command, who just a few weeks earlier had sat next to Ledesma at the Police Academy when they’d participated in the course on the new judicial procedures.
    In Chihuahua, the two law enforcement organizations most associated with the workings of the Juárez cartel were the state ministerial police and the Juárez municipal police, of which the latter was the more important. The officers working for the cartel within each of these agencies were known as La Línea, or “The Line.” For days now, several state ministerial police commanders had been receiving anonymous calls to their private cell phones warning them “not to take sides.” Whatever ambiguity there may have been regarding the meaning of those calls was resolved on that morning of January 27, when the narco-message left at the Monument to Fallen Police was discovered—all of the officers on the “For those who still do not believe” hit list belonged to the municipal police. It was apparent that Sinaloa cartel operatives were trying to create fissures within La Línea by going after the Juárez municipal police, the core of La Línea, and warning the state ministerial police to stand clear. The fact that the Sinaloa people had the personal cell phone numbers of the state ministerial police commanders was an indication of their effective intelligence work. What the narco-message made clear is that the five officers had been killed as part of a deliberate effort to neutralize La Línea. The narco-message was, in essence, a public declaration of war.
    .   .   .
    The problems within the Juárez police seemed to evolve with every day that passed, like a puzzle or a conundrum that takes on new dimensions of complexity the deeper one explores its contours. For generations in Mexico the idea of corruption within police forces has simply been a given, a fact so pervasive and universal that it was accepted as a matter of course, as a reality of life. But what was going on within the Juárez police force took the familiar paradigm to an entirely different level.
    Reyes Ferriz first grasped the extent of the problem not long after he assumed office on October 6, 2007. At the time there were an estimated one thousand
picaderos
in the city, the so-called “shooting galleries” where addicts got their drugs and sometimes went to get high. They operated openly in many of