Thousands of soldiers have smothered drug violence in Mexico's bloodiest US border city but police corruption and complaints of rights abuses could hurt their early successes.
Drug killings have plunged by 80% in Ciudad Juarez, a desert city on the border with Texas, since President Felipe Calderon sent in 10,000 soldiers and federal police at the start of March, the state attorney general's office says.
After taking control of city police forces in one of Mexico's biggest operations in years, masked and camouflage-clad soldiers now stand guard outside banks and supermarkets and patrol the streets in convoys.
But with such a large army presence, complaints of human rights abuses are growing and there are signs that ruthless drug hitmen driven out of the city are taking their turf wars further south in Mexico, stretching President Felipe Calderon's nationwide army-led crackdown.
The Zetas, the armed wing of the Gulf drug cartel, are trying to muscle in on smuggling routes in the western state of Jalisco and killed a state prosecutor this month, police say.
In Ciudad Juarez, people who lived in fear of encountering decapitated bodies dumped on streets or hung from bridges are emerging from their houses and the local economy is showing signs of life.
"Things are improving. It was so chaotic before," said waitress Diana Castaneda, referring to the 1,600 drug killings in the city last year. "People are coming again from El Paso."
In another boost to Calderon's more than two-year-old drug war, police caught a leader of the Juarez cartel, Vicente Carrillo Leyva, in Mexico City on April 1.
Calderon, a conservative who took power in late 2006, is staking his presidency on stemming the drug violence that killed 6,300 people last year and is worrying Washington.
US President Barack Obama will visit Mexico this month, and is sending high-tech gear and hundreds more agents to the border to fight the smuggling of drugs, weapons and cash.
Despite the sharp fall in murders, Ciudad Juarez residents worry the violence will return if troop levels drop.
Major troop deployments in other drug hotspots such as Tijuana, across from California, have given brief respites from the mayhem, but murders have escalated as soldiers moved elsewhere to fight the cartels on other fronts.
Women mistreated
Reviving old concerns about rights abuses in the drug war, Mexico's human rights commission accuses soldiers and federal police of committing abuses by clumsily targeting women and children in house raids and at military checkpoints.
"I saw how federal police opened a woman's shirt and checked her bra (for drugs) in the middle of the street, in front of many people and surrounded by armed soldiers," Gustavo de la Rosa, a Ciudad Juarez-based human rights commissioner for the surrounding state of Chihuahua, said.
At other checkpoints, soldiers have held up traffic to search groups of school children and their mothers, leaving many crying, de la Rosa said.
Federal police officers and an army spokesman consulted by Reuters denied any wrongdoing. "There are some colleagues doing bad things, but they are few. Most of us are dedicated to protecting our citizens," said one federal policeman.
But local used car dealers say federal police started running protection rackets as soon as they arrived last month.
"They asked for the vehicle papers and told us they were going to confiscate them if we didn't get a thousand dollars together within an hour," said a salesman who declined to give his name because of threats from police about the incident.
Endemic police corruption is a big problem for Calderon's drug war as cops openly aid traffickers and work as hitmen.
Mexico's army is seen as mostly uncorrupted by cartels and federal police are better paid and better equipped than the country's often overweight and incompetent patrol officers.
Calderon's government has promised to cleanse police forces and eventually take the army off the streets, but federal police have faced constant corruption allegations.
In early 2007, federal cops were caught on police cameras extorting money from tourists at road checkpoints in Tijuana.
"What's missing is a social policy," said Hugo Almada, a sociologist in Ciudad Juarez, pointing to poor education and a lack of employment prospects. "Ten thousand soldiers and police can have a temporary impact on crime, but not on the social reality. We may win a savage war and gain an empty victory."
Kidnappings, armed robberies and disappearances of young women are still going on right under soldiers' noses, carried out by small gangs working out of cars, said Daniela Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for the Chihuahua attorney general's office.
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