OUTGUNNED COPS PATROL ONLY PART OF BORDER CITY

NUEVO LAREDO - When masked gunmen attacked a house in the upscale Campestre
neighborhood Thursday night, they fired rocket-propelled grenades and
semi-automatic rifles.

When about 80 members of the city's brand new police force reported for
duty last week, there weren't enough guns to go around. Officers had to
share their weapons, turning their guns in after their shifts.

While rival drug lords fire with impunity - wherever it strikes their fancy
it seems - the new police force is restricted for the time being to the
city's central district.

"We're waiting for more personnel and armaments," said Jesus Muro Garcia,
29, commander of the municipal plaza substation. "Their weapons are a lot
more powerful than anything we have."

Welcome to the streets of this Mexican border city, where an out-of-control
turf war among drug cartels has left more than 100 dead this year,
including almost a dozen police officers. And last month, the city's new
police chief was killed six hours after assuming office.

The escalating violence apparently has proved too unsettling for U.S.
Ambassador Tony Garza, who Friday, citing the "unusually advanced weaponry"
used in the Thursday night attack, announced he was shutting the consulate
for at least a week.

Since earlier this year, the State Department had issued a travel advisory
warning Americans to take caution when traveling to the border region,
specifically in Nuevo Laredo.

The advisory expired Thursday.

By most accounts, the recent attack was particularly brazen. According to
media reports, more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition were fired, turning
quiet Mexicali Street in the tony Campestre neighborhood into a virtual war
zone.

Using rocket-propelled grenades, assailants tore three big holes through
the blue outer wall of a once-charming house. Windows a full block away
were shattered. A 15-minute shootout ensued between those inside the house
and the attackers.

No one was believed killed in the battle, and no one has been arrested,
though Muro said several people at the home may have been kidnapped. He did
not know who lived there.

Rosa Estela Manzanales, 56, was sitting in her courtyard two doors down
when the first of several explosions shattered the calm of a humid late
July night.

"It was worse than a war," she said of the 8 p.m. attack.

"I thought it was only in movies, but right here," she said, pointing
around her, "with our grandchildren and everything. I don't know how we are
still alive."

She and 11 members of her family - children and grandchildren - dove for
the concrete floor of their humble home that sits amid opulent houses. She
and her family remained, trembling but quiet, until the last weapon had
gone silent.

The police arrived afterward, she said, to mop up the mess.

Manzanales said she knew the family in the blue house only casually. They
were recent arrivals to the neighborhood, renters she believed, who seemed
pleasant and well adjusted.

She has come to accept that the violence now has spread to her quiet
Mexicali Street, which was wilderness when her family settled it many
decades ago. But things are different now.

"You go out, and you don't come back," she said.

In all, 460 city police officers have been cleared to return to work six
weeks after 700 of them were yanked off the street in a massive
anti-corruption probe.

The returning officers have cleared a host of evaluations, including
polygraph and drug tests.

The entire force was tainted by indications that officers have been
rewarded by or intimidated into working for drug cartels fighting for
control of smuggling routes into South Texas.

But only those whose weapons have been delivered are back on patrol, Muro
said. Others mill about the downtown substation in their pressed black and
white new uniforms, filled with a restless nervousness.

"We don't have the arms necessary to do this job," said a five-year-patrol
officer who gave his name only as Carlos. "You see what they have -
grenades, sophisticated arms."

At least four of Carlos' colleagues from the substation have been killed in
the past year. Two were shot to death in broad daylight five blocks from
the police station.

Officials have said many city cops work as lookouts for the Gulf Cartel,
which is alleged to control the lucrative drug smuggling routes into South
Texas.

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman of the Sinaloa Cartel and his allies are vying
for the turf, which is believed to be part of the reason for the police deaths.

Muro said his family and friends all beg him to "do something else."

"A lot of times I think about leaving," he said.

But in the end, he notes, "I like the work."