CHAPTER 27

No Accidents

In an article that appeared in the Washington Post on February 24, 2010, just a week after president Felipe Calderón’s second visit to Juárez in the aftermath of the Villas de Salvárcar killings, William Booth reported that for the first time American intelligence agents would be embedding with Mexican law enforcement in an effort to help pursue drug cartel leaders and their hit men operating in Ciudad Juárez. The agents, the article continued, would be operating out of a Mexican command center, where they would share drug intelligence gathered from informants and intercepted communications.

Just a month earlier I had visited the Intelligence Center, which was on the second floor of the Emergency Response Center (known as the CERI), when José Reyes Ferriz had invited me along to attend a security meeting. The building is a solid, squat structure made of native stone with a sky-blue glass façade. Heavily armed soldiers and federal police guarded the entrance. The bottom floor of the CERI is a large space enclosed by thick glass walls, where army and federal police monitored information coming in on the city’s anonymous tip line and from emergency calls. Each workstation had three computer monitors, where pairs of agents were supposed to work the calls, identify their locations, and track the location of nearby law enforcement patrol units (this was the system that had presumably failed to respond to the calls coming from Villa del Portal Street).

The security meeting was held on the second floor, in a large operations room at the front of which was a long oval table covered by a forest-green tablecloth; a bottle of water had been placed in front of each seat. The mayor chaired the meeting, sitting at the head of the table. Seated to his right was the city district attorney; to her right was her immediate predecessor, an army colonel who was transitioning out. A federal police inspector who had been overseeing the placement of three hundred security cameras throughout the city sat at the other end of the table, across from the mayor. Next to him was José Luis Lara, an engineer who was in from Mexico City as the chief consultant on the security camera project. To his right was Gerardo Ortiz Arellano, the head of the municipal prison.¹ Finally, there was Julián David Rivera Bretón, the former army general who was now heading up the Juárez municipal police following Roberto Orduña’s resignation almost a year earlier.

Each of the principals had brought their personal aides to the meeting, who, standing, were arrayed around the table, periodically responding to various requests from their respective bosses. The federal police appeared to be hosting the meeting—their uniformed staff attended to the needs of the participants, offering them coffee and sodas or opening up the bottled waters and pouring them into glasses. The discussion around the table that day centered on how to track convicts once they were released from the municipal prison. The mayor asked if prison personnel were routinely obtaining addresses and if someone was checking in on the ex-cons after their releases. Ortiz Arellano, the director of the prison, noted that social workers were already doing that, but the mayor was insistent that the procedures in place were not adequate—as often as not former prisoners disappeared from the addresses they’d given upon release. The mayor later summarized his frustration, noting that the municipal police arrested approximately three thousand people a year. “The majority,” he told me, “are let out within a day or two.” Of those three thousand, only 150 or so were ever actually sentenced. “Your chance of getting off for anything from murder to car theft to rape to assault in Juárez is 95 percent” the mayor told me. “Those odds look good to most criminals.”

The mayor and the others reviewed the newly implemented Crime Stoppers program. A complication was that it only took calls related to local crime, that is, crime that was under the auspices of municipal police. The federal police were triaging calls to the corresponding authority depending on whether they fell under the federal, state, or municipal purview, but there was considerable confusion in the public’s mind about what law enforcement entity was responsible for what kind of crime.

At the conclusion of this meeting, the federal police inspector approached the mayor and asked if he cared to see the progress they had made with the security camera program. The cameras had gone up all over the city and were being used to monitor criminal activity from this site as well as from the federal police command center in Mexico City. The inspector led the way to a workstation, where two federal police officers sat in front of a large computer screen. “We’re going to show you an execution that we caught on the cameras last week,” one of the officers said as he began rolling video. On one corner of the footage was the date and time code, which whirred as a function of the speed with which the officer ran the footage. The first image was of a city street with a fair amount of traffic at an intersection with a traffic light. The main boulevard was two lanes running in either direction while the other street, perpendicular to it, had a single lane in each direction. As the agent fast-forwarded the video, cars zipped across the screen and beyond in the blink of an eye. “Watch this maroon SUV,” the officer said. “It’s the car carrying the hit team.” The car in question drove up to the stoplight and then made a U-turn, going off-camera. “They’re scouting the hit,” the agent narrated. “This car,” he said, pointing the cursor at a white Mercury, “is also involved. And so is this one,” he said, drawing our attention to a pickup truck. Over the course of several minutes, those three vehicles made a series of passes through the target area.

It was evident that the video had been closely studied. “These hits all have the same basic profile,” the agent said. The vehicles involved in the execution had first moved through the busy intersection prior to the hit. To the untrained eye, they were easily lost in the ordinary flow of traffic. The officer explained that the team actually carrying out the hit typically traveled aboard one or two vehicles. There were also several scout cars, as well as a car that would block others from pursuing the hit team once it completed its work. “Finally, there’s always a car that remains behind to ensure that the targets are all dead before it leaves the crime scene,” he added. Each of these players had been identified. The time code at the top of the screen made it clear that the video spanned a little more than ten minutes.

For the execution, the federal police officer rolled the tape in real time. The maroon SUV came into view from the opposite direction it had taken during the first two passes. The lookout cars were positioned on both sides of the street. The escort car then made its way through the intersection. At that point, the maroon SUV pulled up and the sicarios could be seen jumping from the vehicle, weapons in hand. A group of six men ran off camera, where they took down their target before scampering back into the SUV, almost leaving one of them behind. The maroon SUV then headed down the cross street to the right, where two getaway cars had already been positioned. The so-called “verification” car was also in position just past the intersection. Just then, the pickup truck that we had seen make several practice runs through the intersection rounded the corner and blocked the street down which the sicarios had just made their getaway. To my surprise, at that moment two municipal police cars arrived at the scene of the execution. Rather than giving chase, they jumped out of their patrol cars and ran to the victim. The pickup truck continued to block the getaway route and the police paid it no mind. I found it hard not to draw the inference that the police were either afraid of a confrontation or were in collusion with the sicarios. The final image was of the white Mercury, the verification vehicle. Once the blocking vehicle left the crime scene following the getaway path, the verification vehicle proceeded slowly down the street, eerily merging into the afternoon traffic as if nothing had happened. The federal police officer froze the frame at that point, with the Mercury at the top of the screen.

Those of us standing around the workstation fell silent. Even in this city of so many executions, so many deaths, it was rare to actually see one live. Typically, one saw photographs or video taken in the aftermath, or one managed to arrive soon after, but it was unusual to see images of an execution as it was taking place. But the silence also pressed an obvious question. Why had the municipal police done nothing? It seemed to me that perhaps the federal police officers had left the white Mercury floating at the top of the screen as if posing a question.

The mayor broke the silence. “Who is the victim?” he asked. He was told the victim’s name, but there was no information as to why this man had been executed. The mayor asked if the vehicles’ license plates could be brought into focus. He was told they were working on that. What was perfectly evident, however, was the sophistication and planning that had gone into pulling off this execution. The operation had involved six different vehicles; the federal police agent estimated that the entire team consisted of fifteen to eighteen men. They had carried out a precise, highly choreographed hit wherein every actor knew his exact role. They had rehearsed the hit in every detail, making practice runs before executing their target. Each person had done his job to perfection; the execution was carried out flawlessly.

The Mexican federal agent swiveled in his chair, turning from his computer screen to look at the mayor. “Here’s another hit by the same team,” he said. We were now looking at a Soriana shopping center. According to the date on the video, this hit had taken place several days later. The maroon SUV, the white Mercury, and the pickup from the prior execution were again playing key roles. The other vehicles were different. This time, two men in a beige pickup truck were sandwiched in between two sicario cars at the exit to the shopping center. A hit-team van then closed off the adjacent lane, sealing the unsuspecting vehicle off from any possibility of egress. As before, the sicario team’s vehicles had made several dry runs through the target area some fifteen minutes prior to the execution. The white Mercury, parked across the street, was again the verification car. Another vehicle pulled up alongside the target, and the smoke from the blazing gun barrels firing at the occupants in the beige pickup truck was plainly evident on-screen. When the shooting stopped, the targeted vehicle coasted out into the boulevard on its own accord, as if piloted by an invisible ghost. The pickup continued rolling slowly through four lanes of traffic until it hit a curb across the street. One of the sicario cars had pulled into the intersection, blocking traffic as the other vehicles slipped off down the street and disappeared from view. As before, once they’d verified that the two men in the pickup truck showed no signs of life, the white Mercury exited from the scene, merging into traffic as horrified drivers attempted to maneuver around the bullet-ridden beige pickup, aware, now, that within it lay one or more additions to Juárez’s tally of the dead.

.   .   .

The CERI, where I saw this footage, was the location of the Intelligence Center to which the February 24 Washington Post article had referred, indicating that American FBI, DEA, and possibly other law enforcement agencies would be working in collaboration with Mexican law enforcement, especially the federal police and Mexican Army intelligence personnel. Historically, U.S. law enforcement had kept its Mexican counterparts at arm’s length. The legacy of corruption and cartel infiltration into Mexican operations at all levels was too widespread and too well known to allow for meaningful collaboration. Information leaked by corrupt authorities readily endangered the lives of informants and agents in the field. Memories of Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, the DEA agent who was kidnapped in 1985 and tortured extensively prior to dying at the hands of a drug cartel in Guadalajara, formed the backdrop to those fears. U.S. authorities knew that the old federal judicial police had had a hand in the agent’s assassination and had played a role in the Mexican government’s efforts to cover it up and block a meaningful investigation.

Mexican law enforcement, in turn, had similarly kept the Americans at a distance, if for different reasons. In the past, working too closely with the Americans might have translated into pressure to launch operations that were “inconvenient.” While there had long been a DEA and FBI presence in Mexico, along with other American intelligence services, relationships with Mexican officials were typically tense for a variety of reasons, including legitimate Mexican apprehensions about American operations in their territory for reasons of national sovereignty, a long-standing factor in U.S.-Mexican relations. Thus the notion of close collaboration between American and Mexican intelligence agents was jarring and novel to most who came across the Washington Post article. The article also reported that recently, U.S. agencies had grown more comfortable with the prospect of such collaboration, having developed a new respect for Mexican law enforcement, at least at the federal level. American agents would now be working closely with Mexican federal police who were recent graduates of DEA and FBI training programs.

A DEA spokesman in El Paso confirmed the Washington Post report to El Diario the following day, stating that “closed door meetings” had been taking place between American and Mexican federal agencies, not further identified. However, the story appeared to have taken both American and Mexican governments by surprise: the respective ambassadors claimed they knew nothing about the reported development.

It is likely that the national criticism of Felipe Calderón’s strategy in the war against the cartels had also made such collaboration more tenable. Calderón was already more inclined to work with the United States than his predecessors. In just the first three years of his administration his government had extradited far more cartel operatives to the United States than any prior Mexican president.² Leading up to and especially in the aftermath of the Villas de Salvárcar massacre, the Calderón government had been feeling considerable political pressure over its policies: there was a chorus of people, even within Calderón’s own party, who increasingly viewed the federal government’s efforts as teetering on failure. In Juárez, two years of federal intervention had produced no change in the violence. On the contrary, there were more and more dead, and people felt less and less safe. Mexico had taken down many big-name cartel capos, but there was otherwise little to show for the government’s efforts in terms of a reduction in violence (or, apparently, in the availability of cocaine and other drugs in the United States). Such a circumstance lent itself to permitting greater collaboration between Mexican federal law enforcement and American law enforcement.

.   .   .

Saturdays at the Barquito de Papel (Little Paper Boat) were always busy. The two-story, lemon-yellow venue decorated with brightly colored children’s blocks on Insurgentes Avenue catered to families with young children, and it was a favorite for birthday parties and special events among Juárez’s middle class. On Saturday, March 13, one of the Mexican employees at the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juárez was hosting a birthday party for her child at Barquito de Papel, and most of the attendees were fellow consular couples with preschoolers. It was around two in the afternoon, and after the children had had time to romp around on the various playscapes and the usual round of balloons, presents, and cake, the party was breaking up.

Two couples left the Barquito de Papel at the same time. Jorge Salcido and his wife, Hilda, had come in separate cars. Jorge loaded up the Salcidos’ three children (two, four, and seven years of age) into the family’s white 2009 Honda Pilot and headed out of the establishment’s parking lot with Hilda following in her car. Jorge Salcido was thirty-seven years of age and worked as a production manager at a Dallas-based Ciudad Juárez assembly plant called Affiliated Computer Services, Inc. Hilda worked at the consulate. Just moments after the two cars began heading east on Insurgentes Avenue, a wide street with two lanes in each direction, a commando group in a Ford Explorer pulled up to Jorge Salcido’s car as he idled at a stoplight and began firing at him, killing him instantly. Hilda jumped out of her car and ran up on the sicarios, screaming at them to stop, that her children were in the car, but they paid her no mind. They finished their job and then coolly boarded their vehicle and left. Hilda was fortunate not to have been killed. She was also fortunate that her children were not killed, although two of them, the four-year-old and the seven-year-old, were wounded (one having been grazed by a bullet and the other cut by shards of flying glass from the car’s shattered windows).

Lesley Enríquez and her husband, Arthur Redelfs, left the party at the same time as the Salcidos. They’d just strapped their seven-month-old daughter into the back seat of their white Toyota RAV4 before pulling out into the flow of traffic on Insurgentes Avenue. Lesley Enríquez was three months pregnant. She and her husband lived in El Paso, although Lesley commuted into Juárez every day to her job at the U.S. Consulate. They initially headed west on Insurgentes, driving in the opposite direction the Salcidos had been traveling, before jagging north toward Chamizal Park and Malecón Avenue (which runs east-west next to the Rio Grande) on their way toward the international bridge. They were unaware of the fact that all the while they were being followed by a black Suburban.

Just as the couple reached the back side of city hall, less than a hundred feet from the turnoff to the Santa Fe International Bridge, the assassins aboard the Suburban came up on them and raked their vehicle with AK-47 and 9mm fire. With Redelfs dead or mortally wounded, the car veered across the lanes into oncoming traffic, striking two more vehicles before coming to rest almost directly beneath the windows of Mayor Reyes Ferriz’s office. Above the crime scene, the Santa Fe International Bridge made its ascent over the Rio Grande before sliding back down into El Paso on the other side. It being Saturday afternoon, typically a heavy day for foot traffic as Juarenses crossed over to shop, a line of pedestrians filled the entire span of the bridge; many of them witnessed the cold-blooded assassination from that vantage. It was 2:40 p.m.; the interval between the two executions had only been ten minutes.

The municipal police, their redoubt only a hundred yards away—testimony to the indifference of the cartel operatives to local law enforcement—quickly arrived at the scene on Malecón Avenue. Both of the adults in the vehicle were clearly dead, Lesley from a shot to the head, Arthur from multiple wounds. But the police could hear the weak cries and whimpers of the little girl still strapped into her car seat behind her parents. They assumed she was wounded and worked feverishly to pry the car’s door open, a task made difficult because it had been crushed by the impact with the other vehicles, but it turned out that she was only frightened by the violence and the bloody sight of her bullet-riddled, lifeless parents in the front seat.

There had been some forty documented murders of Americans over the course of the drug war, but none of them had been employees of the U.S. government, with the exception of a U.S. Army soldier murdered in a Juárez bar a year earlier when sicarios had killed several people at the establishment. Scattered across Mexico over the course of three and a half years, those murders had hardly raised a stir, but the targeted assassination of three individuals with ties to the U.S. Consulate in Juárez was another matter.

The executions sent shock waves through both the Mexican and the U.S. governments. In a public statement, President Barack Obama expressed his outrage and sadness, and other American officials vowed to “break the power” of the Mexican drug cartels. But the stronger gesture came from the U.S. State Department. The day following the consulate executions, on March 14, 2010, they released the following statement: “The Department of State has issued this Travel Warning to inform U.S. citizens traveling to and living in Mexico of concerns about the security situation in Mexico, and that it has authorized the departure of the dependents of U.S. government personnel from U.S. consulates in the Northern Mexican border cities of Tijuana, Nogales, Ciudad Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey and Matamoros . . .” Further on, the State Department Travel Warning also noted that “recent violent attacks have prompted the U.S. Embassy to urge U.S. citizens to delay unnecessary travel to parts of Durango, Coahuila and Chihuahua states.” The U.S. embassy in Mexico City instructed its employees to postpone all travel to the troubled states. In short, the U.S. government was resorting to extreme measures to protect its personnel, the kind of measures it typically employs in war zones like Iraq, Libya, or Pakistan.

Even as the U.S. government updated its travel warnings, both the U.S. and the Mexican governments simultaneously sought to lower the incident’s public profile. The U.S. government issued a statement asserting that its directive authorizing the departure of dependents of employees at the six consulates and temporarily postponing all travel to the three states had already been “in the pipeline” prior to the three executions in Juárez.

U.S. officials were also quick to point out that neither Lesley Enríquez nor Hilda Salcido had been involved in “sensitive” operations within the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juárez that would have made them cartel targets, underscoring the fact that neither worked in drug- or intelligence-related areas. Lesley Enríquez’s job (she had dual citizenship, Mexican and Canadian) was in the American Citizen Services section and involved assisting U.S. citizens needing travel-related documents such as passports and consular reports of births abroad, in addition to occasionally helping American citizens get the remains of loved ones who happened to have died in Mexico back to the United States. Hilda Salcido, also a Mexican citizen, had been employed by the consulate for thirteen years and worked in the Consular Services section, which meant she had some exposure to Mexican citizens seeking visas to travel to the United States. Four days after the murders, the FBI in El Paso issued a statement indicating that “at this point we have no reason to believe any of the three victims were targeted because they were U.S. citizens or because of their jobs, but the investigation is continuing.”

In a flurry of hypotheses and freewheeling flights of fancy, each of the victims (or their spouses) was woven into one scenario or another in an attempt to make sense of the executions. One of the primary strategies for defusing the crisis was to suggest that perhaps the sicarios had made a mistake. Under this theory, the target had been Jorge Salcido, whose status as a non–U.S. citizen who was also not a U.S. government employee conveniently distanced the killings from anything related to the consulate. The U.S. consul, Raymond McGrath, told El Diario that “from the first hours on Saturday, after the attacks, the available information has been that the attack against Lesley Enríquez and Arthur Redelfs was a mistake. . . . As for Mr. Salcido, we don’t know yet.” Many in the media pounced on that explanation and gave it play. CNN, for example, headlined a story that noted that the authorities had “not ruled out a case of mistaken identity.”

Within this narrative, Lesley Enríquez and Arthur Redelfs had been killed because they, like Salcido, had also been traveling in a white SUV, a fact that purportedly had confused the sicarios, leading them to wipe out both vehicles rather than running the risk that their prey might elude them. It was also reported that Salcido had been the object of extortion threats, requiring him to change his home, work, and cell phone numbers. One of the Mexican newspapers reported that “it has been said” that Jorge Salcido might have been a former municipal police officer or state ministerial police officer, implying that perhaps he had links to the cartels. But Narco News, a popular website for people following Mexico’s narco-war, cited anonymous law enforcement sources suggesting that Lesley Enríquez had perhaps been the main target. On at least two occasions, according to those sources, an individual “in consulate-related settings” had tried to pressure Enríquez into “doing something with a document” without the proper paperwork. Reflecting on the universe of theories, Narco News speculated that Salcido might have been the individual pressing Enríquez.

One of the more persistent theories initially making the rounds centered on Arthur Redelfs, who was a detention officer with the El Paso Sheriff ’s Office. His job was to ferry prisoners from their holding cells to their courtroom appearances when they had hearings. That meant that Redelfs routinely handcuffed prisoners, which may have meant tense exchanges with prisoners. The idea that Redelfs had been the target as revenge for some unknown conflict with prisoners was seemingly buttressed by the Mexican Army’s arrest of a man named Ricardo Valles, purportedly a member of El Paso’s Barrio Azteca gang, considered a “sibling” of Juárez’s much-feared Los Aztecas. Valles claimed to have received orders from within El Paso’s county prison, a Barrio Azteca stronghold, instructing him to kill Arthur Redelfs. He claimed that he then followed Redelfs to the party at Barquito de Papel. The killing of Jorge Salcido had been a mistake, Valles maintained, due to the fact that he was in a white SUV similar to the one that Redelfs was driving. The motive, Valles asserted, was that Redelfs had threatened and mistreated Barrio Azteca prisoners. Redelfs’s coworkers in the Sheriff ’s Office scoffed at that idea, noting that he was too smart to have tangled with Barrio Azteca gang members, and Redelfs’s family described him as mild-mannered and friendly, a man whose personal qualities made him anything but prone to hostile interactions.

Finally, one of the more bizarre theories was that perhaps the killings had been a consequence of a directive issued by the consulate the day prior to the murders forbidding consular employees from entering a nearby bar called El Reco. The bar was presumably a narco hangout, but the idea that the bar owner, even if he was affiliated with a cartel, would carry out such an execution out of revenge seemed far-fetched, even though McGrath acknowledged it as merely “a hypothesis” that was “floating around.”

It all added up to a tangle of contradictory and irreconcilable theories and speculations, most of which were, on their faces, implausible or simply too far-fetched. The concreteness of the government’s theory (emphasizing that since neither of the consulate employees had been working in an area related to security or drug investigations, it was unlikely that they would be cartel targets) ignored everything known about the cartels and how they operate. It pretended that narco-logic was linear, as if it were beyond the cartels to select targets because of their symbolic value or because of the message that they might be intending to send. In fact, both governments knew that the cartels were masters of this kind of communication; there were countless examples of it. But the one theory that neither government put forth, the one theory that the media did not pick up, was the most obvious one: that one of the cartels was sending a message to American authorities that it viewed the high-profile involvement of American FBI and DEA agents in Juárez as an escalation. One of the cartels was answering that escalation with an escalation of its own. The message to the U.S. government was that there were plenty of “soft,” vulnerable targets for the cartels to strike (in fact, the U.S. Consulate in Juárez is one of the largest in the world), and they could do so with ease if they so chose.

Supporting this thesis was the fact that the Washington Post story was covered extensively in the Juárez and El Paso media for several days. Even though there had been collaboration between American and Mexican federal agents for some time, the public announcement, whether or not it actually signaled a change or escalation, altered the perceived dynamics of the war in Juárez. And the cartels were not easily intimidated; they were brazen and bold and any student of their tactics knew that striking at the underbelly of American interests in Mexico was not beyond them if they deemed it necessary or useful (in March of 2011, cartel operatives killed ICE Special Agent Jaime Zapata in San Luis Potosí, even though the agent had clearly identified himself to the sicarios).

The video of the executions I saw during my visit to the CERI left me with an appreciation for the sophistication involved in cartel hits. In fact, when I described the videotape to a former American intelligence official, he said that it was evidence that the sicarios had undergone extensive training and were highly disciplined. Sicarios did not commit impulsive mistakes. They also knew the difference between a Toyota RAV4 and a Honda Pilot (even if both were white). They knew the difference between a Texas license plate and a Chihuahua license plate. These sicarios were professionals, not a ragtag group pumped up on cocaine and armed with AK-47s. There were plenty of the latter among the cartels’ hit squads, gangbanger types who were enforcing neighborhood retail drug markets and carrying out petty vendettas against rival groups, but assignments to take down important, high-level targets in coordinated hits were given to seasoned professionals. Those people knew what they were doing.

At this point, in early 2010, Ciudad Juárez was still averaging more than seven or eight executions per day. In 2009 alone, 2,607 people had been killed in the streets of Juárez with hardly a blip on the American government’s radar. Now, the execution of three people with links to the consulate sent the U.S. government into a state of heightened alert. For once, the United States seemed to be waking up to the problems that all of Mexico was facing, not only Juárez. “For the Mexican [federal] government, the massacre at Villas de Salvárcar was the turning point, the moment when they finally saw the full dimension of what was taking place here,” José Reyes Ferriz later told me. “For the Americans, it was the assassinations of those three people related to the consulate. That was a watershed moment for them.”

.   .   .

Mexican president Felipe Calderón must have felt thoroughly thwarted once again by the events in Juárez. He was scheduled to arrive in the city on Monday, March 16, to follow up the Todos Somos Juárez efforts, which had now been underway for a month. Calderón had expended great effort to make Todos Somos Juárez a success. The consulate executions of necessity changed the president’s agenda. Rather than coming to Juárez to assess the progress of his government’s most important initiative, Calderón was arriving amid another political furor; he was stepping into an international crisis that had already elicited comments from President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. When Calderón stepped off of the presidential plane, the focus was not on the Mexican federal government’s efforts to rebuild the city and reignite its hope; instead, the focus was on the consulate executions and what they portended for the future, not only for Juárez but also for Mexico and U.S.-Mexico relations. Indeed, this may have been an additional motive behind the execution of the three individuals associated with the consulate.

The timing of the U.S. State Department’s updated Mexico Travel Warning and war-zone directives regarding consular dependents in six border cities coincided with Calderón’s arrival in Juárez. That reality no doubt propelled the Mexican president into an atypically aggressive stance toward the United States. When asked for his reaction, Calderón said pointedly and forcefully that “this is a binational problem and therefore the fight against drug trafficking is a responsibility of both governments.”

However, there were other considerations also weighing heavily on the president’s mind. With local, regional, and national elections just three months off, the timing of the consulate murders could not have been worse for a president whose poll numbers continued to drop and whose party, therefore, was at risk for losing substantial influence. Calderón himself was not up for reelection. By law, Mexican presidents serve a single six-year term, and the next presidential contest would not be until July 2012. But the stakes in the coming elections were high. In addition to federal congressional seats, mayorships and governorships were up for grabs all over the country, and a weakened president spelled problems for the president’s party, the PAN. That, in turn, potentially spelled problems for the United States, who had found in Felipe Calderón a unique and strong ally.

Notes

1. Ortiz Arellano had been appointed by Mayor Reyes Ferriz in October 2009 to run the municipal prison. He was subsequently removed from that post in May 2010. In November 2010, he and his twenty-eight-year-old son were executed in Juárez.

2. Vicente Fox, Calderón’s predecessor, had opened the doors to extradition of Mexican citizens to the United States. Under Calderón, extraditions of narco-traffickers had more than doubled.