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.
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
RSS