Defense Attorneys In Lawless Juarez Besieged on All Sides

'This Is Nothing Like Before. I Don't Even Take Narco Cases. Not Anymore.'

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- It is common for lawyers everywhere to cover their office walls with diplomas. The Mexican criminal defense attorney Salvador Urbina is making a different statement. His walls are hung with swords -- a hundred sabers, daggers, cutlasses and Japanese katanas, the blades kept sharp.

The weapons are real, but Urbina no longer sleeps in the city where he practices law. It is far too dangerous. He now spends his nights across the border in a bland suburb of El Paso and commutes to the deadliest city in Mexico each morning. After he began receiving death threats, Urbina got his family out. He will not discuss the specifics of the threats.

"But I know that they can come for me at my office at any time," Urbina said quietly. "They can come and get me just like they got the Escobedos."

On Jan. 6, two well-known defense lawyers were assassinated by a hit squad here. Mario Escobedo Salazar, 59, was shot in the head in his office in this gritty border city. His son Édgar Escobedo Anaya, 33, also a lawyer, was left dead on the sidewalk outside. In 2002, another of Escobedo's sons, also a defense attorney, was killed by state police during a car chase.

The Escobedo legal clan was involved in a complex case involving the serial killings of women in Juarez. But as Urbina said, "since no one has been arrested, we have no way of knowing who killed the Escobedos or why."

The newspaper El Diario reports that at least 12 lawyers have been slain in Ciudad Juarez in the past three years. They were attacked while sitting behind their desks or ambushed on the streets. The cases remain unsolved, and no suspects have been arrested. The killings are the most sensational evidence that the legal profession along the Mexican border is under extreme stress, as lawyers are swept up in a vicious turf war -- between drug traffickers, street gangs, police and the Mexican military -- that left 5,700 people dead last year.

"This is nothing like before. I don't even take narco cases. Not anymore. They are very hard. I have family, and the risk is that if the client doesn't feel satisfied and doesn't think you're doing a good job, what do you do? I don't think anybody is taking these cases these days," said criminal defense lawyer Sergio Alonso Cisneros, who apologized for seeming nervous during a brief interview. He explained, "My wife just called to tell me not to come home, because the army and police have surrounded our block because our neighbor was just shot."

Lawyers in Ciudad Juarez describe a chaotic legal landscape in which they are threatened by their clients, opposed by biased judges and harassed by the Mexican military, which has sent 2,500 troops to the city and has taken over law enforcement duties here, mostly by running heavily armored patrols and setting up roadblocks, but also by pursuing its own investigations, interrogations and detentions.

"In this environment, it is almost impossible to do your job," said Héctor González Mocken, a criminal defense attorney and a leader of an association of Juarez lawyers, whose own office wall features a large portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

González said that one by one, the institutions and professions in Ciudad Juarez are being undermined. Teachers have been victims of extortion rackets shaking them down for their Christmas bonuses. Doctors stage protests, asking for more protection when they work on gunshot victims in the emergency room. Business leaders are kidnapped. More than 60 police officers in Juarez have been killed, and some officials are assumed to be working for or alongside the cartels. Journalists are also routinely threatened -- or worse. In November, one of the city's most experienced crime reporters, Armando Rodríguez, was assassinated in his front yard as he got ready to drive his daughter to class.

There are about 2,000 lawyers in Ciudad Juarez, but only about 200 work in the criminal courts, and an even smaller number accept defendants charged with violent crime or drug dealing. Those defense lawyers have taken the drastic step of formally requesting that the state dispatch police officers to guard their offices and more vigorously investigate the threats against them. Some lawyers are begging the state police to give them "panic buttons" to call for immediate help in case of attack.

Ciudad Juarez is notorious. The investigative magazine Proceso last week featured Juarez on its cover under the headline: "City of Terror." More than 1,600 people were killed here last year. According to El Diario, which tracks the carnage, 133 people were killed in the city last month.