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

Juárez’s working-class neighborhoods. During Reyes Ferriz’s campaign in the spring and summer of 2007 he had given speeches about attacking the
picaderos
. “I started getting messages saying, ‘Don’t even think about it,’” Reyes Ferriz told me one afternoon in his office. “The police would tell people close to me: ‘Tell the candidate not to get involved in this.’”
    Once elected, Reyes Ferriz instructed his newly appointed police chief to move on the
picaderos
, but the difficulty of the situation became immediately evident: “I was at home one night when Guillermo Prieto called. ‘We have a problem,’” the police chief said. The police had arrested four suspects and were in the process of taking them to a nearby precinct when four Hummers had arrived. “They were brand new, and there were sixteen to eighteen guys with automatic weapons in them,” Reyes Ferriz recalled. “They surrounded the patrol cars and demanded that we turn over the people we’d detained.” “What do we do?” the police chief had asked the mayor. “Release them,” was Reyes Ferriz’s reply. “They’re just going to kill the police.”
    What had most troubled Reyes Ferriz about the incident was the narcos’ brazenness; he found the ease with which they displayed their power in public and their utter disregard for municipal authority to be revelatory. And there was something else: it was impossible to avoid the troubling suspicion that perhaps some of the police officers had themselves alerted the Juárez cartel to the operation as it was taking place.
    â€œThat’s when we saw clearly the nature of the situation,” Reyes Ferriz would later recollect. The police were in the hands of the drug traffickers. And the narcos had vehicles, automatic weapons, and the capacity to mobilize quickly and at will. “We’d only been in power one month . . . That’s when the light went on in my head. . . . I’d known that the police were infiltrated, but the extent to which they had been delivered . . .” The mayor paused midsentence as if to transmit the full weight of his bafflement. He’d come to understand that the narcos controlled virtually everything within the force.
    .   .   .
    The “unbelievers” listed on the narco-message were municipal police who apparently had not accepted the fact that “La Gente Nueva” (The New People, as the Sinaloa operatives in Juárez sometimes referred to themselves) were now a force with which to be reckoned. The prevailing assumption was that the officers on the list were aligned with the Juárez cartel, but it was impossible to know with certainty that every officer on the list was a narco-cop; some may have been on the list because they had not acceded to the Sinaloa pressure.
    It was clear that an operation was underway for control of the Juárez municipal police. For Reyes Ferriz, the post-Christmas meeting in his office with the federal intelligence officer, just a month earlier, was taking on a different meaning. Far from an abstract possibility, that war was now something irrefutable and concrete, a shift captured in the bullet-riddled bodies of the recently assassinated police turning up dead in the streets of the city.
    The Sinaloa message targeted the shock troops of the Juárez cartel. La Línea served the cartel in myriad ways. Their most important function was that they were the cartel’s muscle: they coerced and they threatened people, they lifted and they assassinated people as directed by the cartel. La Línea enforced discipline and settled scores, and in Juárez they were deeply feared by the citizenry because of their ruthlessness and brutality. At the time, the municipal police were the only force in the city. There were but a handful of state ministerial police or federal police, and