Fear Grips Families on Mexico Border

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico | Elodia Ortiz drops her children at school in the morning, picks them up in the afternoon and makes an occasional trip to the supermarket. Anything else, she says, is too dangerous.

Parents in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, are afraid to venture into the streets amid a turf war between two powerful drug cartels that has left more than 4,500 people dead during the past two years.

Their fears spiked last weekend when hit men attacked two white SUVs leaving a birthday party, killing parents from two U.S. Consulate families in front of their screaming children.

The violence has risen to such levels in Ciudad Juarez that everyone feels at risk in the city of 1.3 million, where innocent people have been increasingly caught in the crossfire. Hit men have gone to wrong addresses or shot indiscriminately into homes, mowing down not only the targeted people but anyone nearby.

Mothers have driven into daytime shootouts, bending over their children to protect them. Toddlers have been fatally pierced by bullets while playing on the swings at city playgrounds. Waitresses have been slain for having the misfortune of serving marked men.

"We're shut in our house," said Ortiz, a mother of five, as she stood outside Vicente Guerrero elementary school, her 7-year-old daughter clinging to her as she shyly eyed other students walking by. "We have to get to school, we have to work. But we're afraid when we leave."

Families in Ciudad Juarez started taking precautions years ago. At night, some couples drive in separate cars so one spouse can call the other on a cell phone upon seeing something suspicious. Many restrict their children to socializing at the homes of neighbors and relatives instead of meeting up at cafes and discos.

But even those measures are sometimes not enough: In January, gunmen barged into a private party of youths inside a small subdivision and killed 15 people in what families say was a case of mistaken identity.