CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — The first successful car bombing by a drug cartel brings a new dimension of terror to a Mexican border region already shocked by random street battles, bodies dangling from bridges and highway checkpoints mounted by heavily armed criminals.
The attack, seemingly lifted from an al-Qaeda playbook, demonstrated once again that the cartels are a step ahead of both an already guarded public and federal police, who have recently taken over command from the military of the battle against traffickers in Ciudad Juárez, a city across the border from El Paso.
“It’s a lot like Iraq,” said Claudio Arjon, who owns a restaurant near the scene of the attack and was surveying the damage from behind police lines Saturday morning. “Now, things are very different. It’s very different. It’s very ugly.”
People in Ciudad Juárez already live under siege. Like many restaurant owners, Arjon closes his business long before dark every day to avoid criminal gangs that threaten him and his clientele.
Parents take separate cars to the same place so one can warn the other of dangers up ahead.
Ambulance drivers and emergency room doctors come under fire from gang members trying to finish off wounded rivals.
A car bomb was the one thing nobody was expecting. It was a carefully planned attack designed to catch the extremely wary population and security forces off guard.
Among the three people killed was a private doctor who rushed to treat a man who was reported as wounded at the scene before the bomb went off. Among the injured was a local TV cameraman.
“In all my time working, nothing like this had ever happened to me,” Channel 5 cameraman Luis Hernandez said in an interview with Milenio television.
The Red Cross in Ciudad Juárez is instructing rescuers to look out for anything unusual — a parked car or an abandoned bag — that could be a bomb.
“They have to think with their heads and not their hearts,” said Gilberto Contreras, president of the Red Cross in the city.
