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The failure of the doves in the Nueva Laredo quagmire

Houston Chronicle:

White doves of peace have been appearing across this border city since spring, pale symbols of the fragile hope that residents' resolve can succeed where government force has failed in ending a gangland war.

Emblazoned on flags, bumper stickers and storefront posters as the most visible sign of a budding citizens movement, the doves carry the simple message that the struggle for calm in Nuevo Laredo is worth the trouble.

"The idea is to create a consciousness in society that we have to demand security," said Carlos Martinez, principal of a private high school and a founder of the movement.

"How? That's what we're asking ourselves," he said. "The only formula that we've found is to broadcast messages of peace."

In addition to distributing the doves, Martinez and others — business executives, teachers, clerics and assorted community activists — have organized marches, written politicians and gone on radio and television calling for nonviolence in a city that has become notorious for drug-gang warfare.

Like the organizers of other Mexican civic movements against crime, the Nuevo Laredo activists have had little success so far in stemming the violence that has left nearly 120 people dead here this year. They say they have stitched together their movement as best they can, copying no other.

...

Through the long months of escalating bloodshed, many Mexicans shrugged off the violence as a media exaggeration, a fight that didn't concern them or an evil hoisted upon them by American narcotics consumers. But that was before the June assassination of Nuevo Laredo's police chief, a July gun battle involving rocket-propelled grenades and the August killing of a city councilman.

The city has become the focal point of a nationwide crackdown on gangland violence, dubbed Operation Secure Mexico. Nonetheless, Nuevo Laredo's murder rate accelerated this summer despite the presence of 1,200 federal paramilitary police, 460 municipal police and several hundred troops.

Some people are moving out. Others have hunkered down, waiting for the plague to pass.

But a growing few are speaking up, however quietly, however ineffectively so far.