The fight to save Juárez : life in the heart of Mexico's drug war /

Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican city with a population of approximately l.3 million, is located just across the border from El Paso, Texas. Since 2007, Juarez has been at the center of a turf war between the two leading Mexican drug cartels; at the same time, it has been the focus of Mexico's federal government in its intensified campaign against the cartels. Ainslie, born in Mexico City, is a psychologist, author, and documentary filmmaker who currently teaches at the University of Texas. His portrait of Juarez as a city under siege is unrelentingly grim. The rate of murders, kidnappings, and other forms of violence became astronomical. The corruption, already a problem before 2007, became endemic as both the municipal police and the military were infected with money from the competing cartels. Journalists were intimidated, co-opted, or targeted by the cartels for death. At the center of Ainslie's narrative is the mayor of Juarez, Jose Reyes Ferriz, a figure both heroic and tragic as he strives to fight against a scourge powered by forces that he cannot control, including the insatiable demand for drugs north of the border. This is a tough, depressing, but necessary read if one is to understand the consequences of the war on drugs.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist

Psychologist and U.T.-Austin instructor Ainslie (Long Dark Road) presents an unrelenting look at the drug cartel battles of Ciudad Juarez, just over the Rio Grande from El Paso, Tex. Juarez's mayor, Jose Reyes Ferriz, first learned of the coming war between the established Juarez cartel and the Sinaloa cartel shortly after he was elected in late 2007 and he spent his entire three-year term trying to curtail the killings, which in some months "surpassed those in war-torn cities like Baghdad." Corruption was so endemic in the municipal police force that Reyes invited in the army, with 5,000 federal troops arriving in March 2009. The municipal police force was officially disbanded, then re-formed later that year as the "new police." Two facts stand out among the continual descriptions of assassinations. The first, often repeated, is that the violence is driven by American drug consumption, and the second is that the vast majority of assault weapons used by the cartels are from the U.S. Despite a wide-ranging intervention ordered by the Mexican president, following a massacre of innocent youths in the Villas de Salvarcar neighborhood in January 2010, there is no Hollywood ending to this report-only a continuation of the violence. Although not easy to read, this is an important work for any reader concerned about Mexico. Agent: James D. Hornfischer, Hornfischer Literary Management. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

One of the clearest accounts yet of the causes for the violence in Ciudad Jurez and the convoluted politics behind Mexico's attempts to keep it from dragging the whole nation down. Ainslie (Education/Univ. of Texas; Long Dark Road: Bill King and Murder in Jasper, Texas, 2004, etc.), a psychologist and filmmaker with dual Mexican and American citizenship, interviewed scores of Jurenses over some of the worst years for violence (2007-2010). By chance, they coincided with the mayoral term of Jos Reyes Ferriz, who is effectively the central figure of the narrative. A member of Mexico's deeply entrenched Institutional Revolutionary Party (known by its Spanish initials PRI), Reyes Ferriz was at odds with the party's old regime leadership as represented by the governor of Jurez's state of Chihuahua, Jos Reyes Baeza. This political rift stemmed as much from Mexico's decade-old experiment in democracy, which allowed parties other than PRI to win elections, as it did from the increasingly violent wars for control of the drug traffic to the United States by rival cartels based in Juarez and Sinaloa, which Mexican President Felipe Caldern has tried to fight with the national military. It's a complicated story with tangles of threads leading all over the place--from PRI's repression of student and leftist dissent in the 1960s and '70s to the expiration of the U.S. assault weapons ban in 2004 that led to a radical spike in the appearance of deadly AR-15 automatic rifles in the hands of cartel operatives. Though occasionally miring the story in repetitious regurgitation of news clips, Ainslie does best when focusing on the often heartbreaking stories of the long-suffering people of Jurez. A hard-nosed, cleareyed analysis of a legacy of institutionalized corruption and its dire consequences for human lives.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.