TROOPS MOVE INTO DRUG-WAR CITY

Bid To Prevent Collapse Of Law And Order

Hundreds of heavily armed soldiers fanned out across Mexico's
bloodiest drug war city yesterday, trying to prevent a collapse in law
and order just south of the U.S. border.

Sirens blared as the army staged one of its biggest troop buildups in
years in Ciudad Juarez, a desert city across the border from El Paso,
Tex., where near-daily clashes between drug gangs and police have
terrified residents.

Infamous in the 1990s for the unsolved murders of hundreds of women,
Ciudad Juarez is now engulfed in the worst drug violence in Mexico as
cartels in league with corrupt cops fight over one of the country's
most profitable smuggling routes.

More than 2,000 people have been murdered in the area over the past
year, and drug gang hitmen showed their power last month by forcing
the city's police chief to resign with a threat to keep killing police
officers until he quit.

Ciudad Juarez is prized for its location smack in the middle of the
border, with road and rail links deep into the United States. The
Pacific-coast Sinaloa gang, led by top fugitive Joaquin (Shorty)
Guzman, is one of several fighting for control of the city.

Mexico's police forces are tainted up to the highest levels by
corruption and direct links to the drug cartels, and President Felipe
Calderon has staked his reputation on a nationwide army-led crackdown
on cartels.

Ciudad Juarez is now the most crucial battleground of a war that
killed more than 6,000 people across Mexico last year and is scaring
off investors in cities near the border.

The army expects to have 7,500 soldiers and federal police stationed
in Ciudad Juarez by the end of the week, with a further 2,000 troops
in the rest of Chihuahua state.

Six local bishops pleaded in newspaper ads this week for an end to the
killings that are "staining the state with blood."

Troops rolled past U.S.-style shopping malls in Ciudad Juarez
yesterday to set up checkpoints at bridges running over the border and
at the city's international airport, briefly shut last week after bomb
threats.

Calderon has about 45,000 soldiers across Mexico fighting cartels but
has never before sent so many troops to one city.

At least four main cartels are fighting for control of Ciudad Juarez,
and gangs of unemployed youths have joined the fray to extort
businesses, kidnap residents, rob banks and work as hitmen.

Residents fear the city could go the way of Colombia's Medellin at the
height of the drug war there in the 1990s, when murder rates hit 6,000
deaths a year.

Guzman, Mexico's most-wanted man, wants to seize Ciudad Juarez from
local drug boss Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, and officials say the
shadowy La Linea cartel from the western state of Michoacan and the
feared Zeta hitmen from the Gulf of Mexico cartel are also at war here.

Ciudad Juarez, which boomed in the U.S. Prohibition era and now bulges
with factories making goods for export, has pockets of normality
during the day. Cars cram its shabby streets, residents sit in parks
or walk their children to school.

But at night, the city once famed for its sex and tequila-fuelled
party life is ghostlike and residents adopt a self-imposed curfew from
dusk till dawn.