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

the police rank and file as well as their commanders,” the editorial observed, specifically referencing, as a way of underscoring the point, the still-fresh arrest of Saulo Reyes in El Paso. Given this state of affairs, the need for federal forces was obvious.
    Patiño appeared to be walking a fine line. What could not be said or acknowledged by the federal representative was that at that moment there were insufficient federal forces to address the emerging crisis in Juárez. Too many other cities were already in the line of fire. It seemed that Patiño had been dispatched to reassure the people of Juárez but was not in a position to deliver substantive assistance beyond the two hundred officers he’d promised the mayor, a force that, technically, was not an increase given that they were already allocated as reserves in the event of a crisis.
    One comment Patiño made during the press conference especially incensed
El Diario
. The federal intelligence officer volunteered at one juncture that the state’s crime problem was “more perceptual than real,” noting that several other states had higher indices of violence when compared to Chihuahua. It was clear that Patiño had gotten tangled up in his own words, and the farther he went to try to explain himself, the deeper he dug himself into a hole. Patiño noted that 73 percent of the crime in the state was robbery, while only 1 percent was assassinations, prompting
El Diario
to editorialize with a big dollop of sarcasm: “So watch out for the thieves, but never mind the
sicarios
!” (the common term for hit men). Since robberies were under the purview of the municipal and state police authorities while organized crime (and, hence, cartel-related executions) fell under the purview of federal authorities, the Patiño statements were taken to mean that the federal government was sidestepping its responsibilities. In the end, Patiño’s visit to Juárez failed miserably in its mission to reassure, drawing instead a flood of media criticism.
    The federal government appeared to be vacillating. On the one hand, they had taken the very significant step of informing Mayor Reyes Ferriz and, in a separate briefing, Governor Reyes Baeza, that according to their intelligence sources, there was a coming war. On the other hand, they were not mobilizing meaningfully to face the anticipated cartel violence, which was already at the city’s doorstep. It appeared that the federal government had yet to fully grasp the full implication of its own warning.
    The two hundred federal police started to arrive two days after Patiño left Juárez. For José Reyes Ferriz, that infusion represented a meaningful intervention. The state government, by contrast, continued to put the mayor off, remaining noncommittal and dragging its feet about increasing the number of state ministerial police units in Juárez. One detail from Patiño’s press conference seemed stuck in the mayor’s craw. He’d learned that on Patiño’s second visit a meeting had taken place in Chihuahua City, where the federal intelligence officer had met with the governor, the state attorney general, the head of the state ministerial police, and key state legislators. This was the second time in as many weeks that the mayor had been excluded from key meetings concerning the fate of his city. That fact did not sit well with Reyes Ferriz.
    .   .   .
    The arrival of two hundred federal police in Juárez in mid-February of 2008 at first seemed to catch the cartels off guard. There was a short-lived dip in the number of executions, as the cartels appeared to be taking a wait-and-see attitude toward this new development. But the respite was brief. Within two weeks that lull had completely evaporated.
    José Reyes Ferriz was an avid soccer fan. Sometimes when he had work commitments that overlapped with important matches, his wife called in