Operation Joint Chihuahua

The arrival of 3,200 Mexican troops into Juárez has slowed the killings down to an average of only 1 a day for the beginning of March, which is down from the 28 killed during the first three days of February.

There are 8000 troops on the streets of Juárez. Try to imagine a similar scene in the United States.

(In Michoacan, there was a grenade attack on the Uruapan city police chief's house and a police station. Try to imagine a grenade attack in the US.)

But the Mexican military is really serious about defeating the billion dollar drug cartels this time--they have new uniforms. What billion dollar drug cartel could possibly surmount that level of operational sophistication?

"Enrique Torres, the spokesman for Joint Operation Chihuahua, the federal government's initiative to battle the drug cartels, said the wave of new soldiers is part of an overall plan to regain the trust of the 1.7 million residents of Juárez.

Without getting into specifics, Torres said one of the obvious changes is that the latest platoons of soldiers are dressed in new uniforms. This will make it easier for residents to distinguish between Mexican soldiers and the cartel's commandos, who dress in military fatigues and are to blame for the ambushes and executions.

"These uniforms cannot be duplicated," Torres said. "They have markings that will be easy to distinguish."

Those markings were not revealed in an effort to keep the cartels from duplicating them."


Nunal's Mexican sources tell us that the un-duplicatable markings look like this:

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