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Operation Chihuahua
In response to an increase in drug cartel violence in the border city of Ciudad Juarez and other areas of Chihuahua state, the Mexican government announced Joint Operation Chihuahua on March 27. The operation involves an immediate and indefinite deployment of 2,500 federal troops into Ciudad Juarez and eight other Chihuahua cities: Palomas, Chihuahua city, Ojinaga, Buenaventura, Janos, Casas Grandes, Nuevo Casas Grandes and Asuncion. The operation officially begins March 31, though some public safety authority in the state was handed over to the federal government within hours of the March 28 arrival of the first troops.
Less than a week before, the police chief of Palomas, a town 60 miles west of Juarez, sought refuge in the United States after threats from cartels. Since the beginning of 2008, 202 drug-related murders have occurred in Chihuahua, an almost 100 percent increase over the same period in 2007. Chihuahua has seemed out of control for months; the Palomas police chief’s flight proved the catalyst that propelled the government of Mexican President Felipe Calderon into action.
Operation Chihuahua is the fourth large-scale counternarcotics security operation Calderon’s administration has launched. Unlike previous deployments, which took several days to unfold, troops began arriving in Juarez within 24-36 hours of the Mexican government’s decision to act. This operation also involves a relatively smaller force than in previous operations over the last year, suggesting Mexican security forces are spread increasingly thin as they continue to take on the country’s drug cartels. One of the objectives behind the Chihuahua operation is to clean up the state’s corrupt police forces. In previous large-scale operations the military has disarmed local law enforcement and investigated their officers for ties to organized crime. A similar move is likely in Chihuahua this week, though having fewer federal forces in such a large city will make attaining this goal challenging.
Rumors abound in both U.S. and Mexican law enforcement circles about what sparked the surge in violence in Chihuahua. Mexican media has reported that the trigger was a Sinaloa-cartel instigated war against the Juarez cartel. But the Juarez cartel — which has been in disarray since 1998 — was believed to have a long-standing partnership for more than a decade with Sinaloa, allowing Sinaloa to use the Juarez plaza for drug shipments into the United States. The two most popular theories explaining the rift are that an underground alliance between the Gulf and Juarez factions disrupted the Sinaloa-Juarez agreement, or that the Sinaloa cartel is attempting a hostile takeover on its own terms after being pushed out of Nuevo Laredo last year.
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