The first successful car bombing by a drug cartel has brought a new dimension of terror to the Mexico-US border region already shocked by random street battles, bodies dangling from bridges and highway checkpoints mounted by heavily armed criminals.
Thursday’s attack, seemingly lifted from an al-Qaeda manual, demonstrated once again that the cartels are a step ahead of both an already guarded public and federal police, who have recently taken over command from the military in the battle against traffickers in Ciudad Juarez.
“It’s a lot like Iraq,” said Claudio Arjon, who owns a restaurant near the scene of the attack and was surveying the damage from behind police lines on Saturday morning. “Now, things are very different. It’s very different. It’s very ugly.”
People in Ciudad Juarez already live under siege. Like many restaurant owners, Arjon closes his business long before dark every day to avoid criminal gangs that threaten him and his clientele.
Parents take separate cars to the same place so one can warn the other of dangers up ahead. Ambulance drivers and emergency room doctors come under fire from gang members trying to finish off wounded rivals.
UNEXPECTED
The car bomb, which killed at least three people, was the one thing nobody was expecting. It was a carefully planned attack designed to catch the extremely wary population and security forces off guard.
A street gang tied to the Juarez cartel lured federal officers and paramedics to the site of the bomb by dressing a bound, wounded man in a police uniform and calling in a false report of an officer shot, Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes said.
Among those killed was a private doctor who rushed to the scene to help treat the wounded man. Among the injured was a local TV cameraman who had been filming the paramedics treating the man. Even in a country where beheadings and drive-by shootings are routine, they could not imagine the cartels would choose that vulnerable moment to strike.
“In all my time working, nothing like this had ever happened to me,” Channel 5 cameraman Luis Hernandez said in an interview with Milenio television.
The Red Cross in Ciudad Juarez already instructs their personnel to wait until police cordon off the scene of an attack before treating the wounded — but that wasn’t enough on Thursday when the attackers clearly waited until everyone was in place before striking.
Now, Red Cross officials say they are instructing their rescuers to look out for anything unusual — a parked car or an abandoned bag — that could be a bomb.
“They have to think with their heads and not their hearts,” said Gilberto Contreras, the president of the Red Cross in the city.
Federal police said the bombing attack was in retaliation for the arrest earlier in the day of a top leader of the La Linea gang, which works for the Juarez drug cartel. Investigators were still trying to determine what type of explosives the attackers used.
Brigadier General Eduardo Zarate, the commander of the regional military zone, said as much as 10kg of explosives might have been used. He said it might have been detonated remotely, adding that burned batteries connecting to a mobile phone were found at the scene.
A senior US law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the Mexican investigation is ongoing, said it is possible Mexican drug cartels were receiving bomb training from foreign groups — but it is just as likely they are learning on their own.
“They could be looking at the Internet and there are publications out there,” he said.
EXPERIMENTING
There have long been indications that the drug gangs were experimenting with explosives — and steadily improving their know-how. Gunmen have stolen explosive substances from transport vehicles and private companies. In a raid on a US firm in the northern state of Durango in February last year, masked gunmen stole 900 cartridges of Tovex water gel explosives.
While Mexican federal police have training in post-blast investigations, no security force in the country has experience with patrolling cities that could be mined with car bombs or roadside explosives.
“There’s no way the Mexicans are prepared for it,” said Eric Olson, a senior associate at the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute. “I hate to say it, but the cartels seem to have no limits to the violence and terrible things they are willing to do.”
Olson said the best way for federal police to confront this new threat would be to improve their intelligence capabilities — an area he called a serious weakness.
“It requires operational intelligence. It requires: ‘We know this is going to happen or likely is going to happen in this neighborhood,’” he said. “That kind of refined intelligence is extremely difficult anywhere, but it doesn’t seem to be available in a place like Ciudad Juarez.”
The cartels, on the other hand, “have an amazing intelligence capability,” he said. “They are far ahead of law enforcement. All that keeps law enforcement from getting ahead of the curve.”
Mexican cartels — armed with billions of US dollars and networks of informers among corrupt police forces — have long demonstrated their ability to target the highest-ranking security officials and government officials.
Last month, cartel gunmen killed 12 federal police in the western state of Michoacan. A jailed suspect later described the carefully planned ambush to police, making it clear the gang knew exactly where the police patrol was going to be and when.
Reyes said the city authorities have “started changing all our protocols, to include bomb situations.”
NARCO-TERRORISM
Attorney General Arturo Chavez told a press conference on Friday that the nature of the explosives used in the attack was still under investigation and that there was “no evidence anywhere in the country of narco-terrorism.”
It didn’t seem that way to many frightened Mexicans — or police.
“It’s terrorism,” a federal police officer muttered at the bombing scene on Saturday.
Yuriria Sierra, a columnist for the Excelsior newspaper, questioned the attorney general’s remarks.
“With a population terrified to go out because they don’t know if they will come home, we still can’t talk about narco-terrorism? We don’t need al-Qaeda to live in fear,” she wrote.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS