Violence from drug cartels forces residents of Mexican border town to flee

Описание: (23 Nov 2010) SHOTLIST
Ciudad Mier, Tamaulipas - 19 November 2010
1. Tracking shot from inside vehicle of empty street
2. Car driving down empty street
3. Wide of burnt-out building
4. Tracking shot inside burnt-out building, showing damage
5. Burnt-out cars
6. Close of bullet holes on vehicle window
7. Various of burn-out cars
8. Men with furniture removal van
9. Wide of man carrying empty cardboard box
10. Removal van driving away
Ciudad Miguel Aleman, Tamaulipas - 18 November 2010
11. Men unloading supplies from truck
12. Chain of men, passing boxes inside, from truck
13. Wide of people in shelter sitting on chairs
14. Wide of man cooking in shelter kitchen
15. Close of tortillas being warmed up
16. Boys writing in notebook
17. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Displaced person from Ciudad Mier, Identity not revealed:
"It's (Ciudad Mier) lawless. There is no water, no electricity, nothing. We live in defenselessness. There is not security at all."
18. Men assisting elderly woman into shelter
Ciudad Mier, Tamaulipas - 19 November 2010
19. Pan of pickup truck leaving Ciudad Mier, zoom in to bullet casings on ground
20. Various of burn-out armoured truck
STORYLINE
Shell casings carpet the tarmac on a bullet-riddled street on the edge of the old colonial town of Ciudad Mier in the Rio Grande Valley, abandoned by most of its 6,000 inhabitants who risked their lives in the cross-fire of a nine-month battle between warring drug cartels.
Nobody lives in the 65 single-storey white houses across the border from Roma, Texas, except for abandoned pets which roam the streets of the Casas Geo development.
Like 90 percent of those who once lived in Mier, they have fled to a shelter in the nearby city of Miguel Aleman, Mexico's first such haven for people displaced by drug violence.
Hundreds of Mexican families have fled the border towns up and down the Rio Grande Valley but Ciudad Mier is the most dramatic example so far of the increasing ferocity of the turf-wars between rival drug cartels, and the government's failure to mount An effective fight back.
The state and federal governments say it's safe to go back and that people are returning. One official even invited tourists to return but the scenes witnessed by The Associated Press say something else.
Even during daylight hours, a Mexican army squad patrols the town nervously.
A bullet-riddled army pickup truck lies in the yard of the local military outpost, a metallic casualty of an ambush last weekend which locals say killed four soldiers. The Army does not officially recognise it even happened.
Only about 400 people remain in Mier. Most went to Texas or to safer cities in Mexico. Some 300 others are staying in a Lion's Club-turned-shelter in nearby Ciudad Miguel Aleman.
They express no desire to return although a shootout last week just one block away from the shelter sent them diving for cover in the clean auditorium with tiled floors covered in foam mattresses.
A woman living in the shelter who did not want to be identified said the gangsters had no idea of they pain they are causing to all of Ciudad Mier,
"It is not only one person, the whole town is missing loved ones," she said, off camera.
"It's lawless. There is no water, no electricity, nothing...There is not security at all," she told AP Television.
About half the houses in Ciudad Mier have bullet holes from the war that broke out between the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel on 23 February, 2010, when the Gulf Cartel roared back into town to retake it from the Zetas.
Both regard the old town as a lucrative trafficking route in a rural border area.

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