JUAREZ CRIME PLUMMETS AFTER TROOPS POUR IN

CUIDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - The military surge in this Texas-Mexico border
city, now crowded with trucks carrying stone-faced young men wielding
assault rifles, does not scare Ana, a middle-aged airport worker.

Ana, who asked not to be further identified in a city where contract
killings go for as little as $100, prefers the thousands of young men
in dark camouflage to the drug thugs, muggers and rapists who killed
1,600 people in Juarez last year.

"There are places now where you can finally breathe again," she
said.

So far, President Felipe Calderon's decision to pour in 5,000 more
soldiers and Federal Police since mid-March is working, crime
statistics show, although some drug cartel killings continue. And
residents are giving the buildup a welcome as warm as the balmy spring
weather.

But the question, analysts say, is what next?

What if the armed forces, the only institution able to take on drug
cartels, fail over time because of the corrupting influence of drug
trafficking, the army's inexperience at police work, or growing human
rights violations?

"The government has played its last card, but it's a strong card,"
said Oscar Maynez, a former forensics official in the state of
Chihuahua who teaches university courses in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.

"Probably the strategy is to force them [the cartels] to tone it down;
no more public executions," he said.

The 5,000 fresh soldiers and police joined more than 2,500 sent in
March 2008.

Maynez said using the military for civilian law enforcement was
unavoidable but must be temporary. "The army is a force that takes
over, they patrol the city, and they go back to their barracks," he
said.

City officials said they intend to use the soldiers' presence, which
could last throughout the year, to rebuild a municipal police force
infiltrated by the drug cartels and to dismantle the cartels'
infrastructure of safe houses and killers.

For now, many residents who take late-night bus rides home after
working in U.S.-owned assembly plants, or cabbies who risk their lives
every night if they pick up the wrong fare, are happy to see streets
lined with soldiers 24/7.

Convoys of soldiers in trucks, sometimes mounted with massive machine
guns, pass by on major thoroughfares every few minutes. Federal police
wearing ski masks and sunglasses are also present along with municipal
police, transit police and even bicycle police downtown.

Texans Welcome

Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said it's about time for Americans,
particularly Texans, to return to the city that offers cheap health
care, ample shopping and something not seen in a while - relative safety.

"We had a problem, and it was a very serious problem in the city, but
the situation has changed," he said in an interview. "We had 10
killings a day. Now that the military arrived, we have one a day ...
and crime has dropped 98 percent."

"We are recovering our city, and soon we hope to recover our visitors,
our friends," he said at the foot of the monument to Mexican founding
father Benito Juarez. "To those [Texans] who come to see their
dentists, six months have passed, and now they have to come back to
see their dentists."

Arturo Arias, 61 and a former fireman, welcomed the soldiers despite
the inconvenience of occasionally being waved over at checkpoints and
having his vehicle searched.

"There are negative people who are complaining, but if you are not
doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about," he said.

The military, opinion polls show, is one of the most popular
institutions in the country, along with the Roman Catholic Church.

But soldiers were used alongside police to repress urban democracy
movements and Indian peasant rebels in the 1960s and 1970s, and some
in Juarez worry whether they will become more like the infamously
corrupt police.

Diana, 24 and also fearful of being further identified, said soldiers
recently robbed a neighbor's house under the pretext of looking for
drugs.

"The soldiers are the same, there's just more of them," she
said.

Some Still Afraid

El Paso resident Ruben Lopez, 40, reluctantly takes an occasional taxi
fare from El Paso into Juarez but still fears the drive.

"They are still killing people over there every day," said Lopez, who
moved from Juarez to El Paso 22 years ago. He said the very presence
of the military is a sign of how dangerous the city remains, and he no
longer goes there to socialize.

"No more happy hour, no more Tecate [beer]; Juarez is like Iraq," he
said.

A local hotel worker, 42, put it more bluntly: "The government is part
of the drug dealing. Unless there is a negotiated solution, the
violence won't stop."

President Calderon has said he will never negotiate with drug
criminals and has denied any official ties to the cartels.

Alfredo Quijano, editor of the Norte daily newspaper, said the
fundamentals of the drug war in Juarez work against the government.
The fight, he said, is not so much over drug routes to the U.S. but
drug distribution to the estimated 100,000 users of cocaine,
amphetamines and other drugs in the city of 1.7 million.

Distribution by the local Juarez cartel, he said, has been challenged
in recent years by the Sinaloa cartel, whose purported leader, Joaquin
"El Chapo" Guzman, recently made the Forbes magazine list of
billionaires.

The newspaper's analysis of the 1,600 killings last year found that
nearly all the victims were members of local gangs, police or
consumers who had bought from the "wrong" cartel. No drug bosses were
among those slain.

The local drug distributors - teenagers, mostly - know that they
cannot take on the military so now they are lying low, Quijano said,
and the cartel operators "are probably off on vacation in Acapulco."

Given the broad base of drug users, the gangs will probably outlast
the military over time, he suggested.

At an estimated cost of $250,000 a week to maintain the soldiers and
police, a cost shared by the federal and city governments, time and
money may be running out, he said.

"The money they are spending is money that is not being spent to pave
the streets, and that can be maintained for a while, but not forever,"
said Quijano. "It's like a fire that I'm trying to put out on my own,
but it just keeps getting bigger, so I call for help. The problem is,
what are we going to do when the army leaves?"