Mexico beefs up Juárez troop presence

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — Mexico has deployed 1,500 more troops to the northern border city of Ciudad Juárez, where drug-related homicides have surged in recent weeks.

The extra soldiers will begin patrolling the city today, said Enrique Torres Valadez, spokesman for the joint security operation of soldiers and state police in Ciudad Juárez.

A total of 2,500 troops arrived Saturday night in the city across the border from El Paso, Texas, Torres said. About 1,000 of them are relieving soldiers already on duty there.

Drug-related killings in Ciudad Juárez declined to about one per day after the army sent some 5,000 troops there in March, bringing the number of soldiers patrolling the streets to about 7,000.

As homicides declined, some troops withdrew. But the Chihuahua state attorney general's office said last week that killings in the city have risen again to an average of eight to nine per day.

President Felipe Calderón has relied heavily on the military in his frontal attack on drug trafficking, deploying more than 45,000 troops across the country to crush brutal cartels.

The offensive has led to the capture of several drug kingpins, but few high-profile arrests have taken place in Ciudad Juárez, even though it had about 1,600 drug-related killings last year, more than any other Mexican city. Through mid-June of this year, there have been 800 killings in the city of about 1.3 million people.

Nationwide, more than 10,800 people have been killed in drug violence since Calderón launched his offensive in December 2006.