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Violence in Monterrey

Monterrey, Mexico's modern northern city with gleaming glass towers that rise against the Sierra Madre, where students flock to world-class universities, includingthe country's equivalent of MIT.

But drug violence has painted Monterrey with the look and feel of the gritty border 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the north as two former allies, the Gulf and Zetasgangs, fight for control of Mexico's third-largest — and wealthiest — city.
The deterioration happened nearly overnight, laying bare issues that plague the entire country: a lack of crediblepolicing and the Mexican habit of looking the other way at the drug trade as long as it was orderly and peaceful.

Monterrey was used to being Mexico's definition of opportunity. The city of 4 million"regios" — a nickname for Monterrey residents that means "people of the regal mountains" — represented the future as money poured into northern Mexico from free trade and the opening of scores of assemblyplants.
The city's many CEOs drove their own luxury cars unaccompanied to the trendiest Japanese restaurant or the top spot for roasted goat, the state's specialty, in the wealthy enclave of SanPedro Garza Garcia.
Some drug lords and their families retreated to the safety of Monterrey as well. In the home of the country's industrial heavyweights, including the world's third-largest cementmaker, Cemex, and bottling giant Femsa, they could easily blend in with executives showing off their wealth.

Then-leader of the Gulf cartel, Juan Garcia Abrego, was arrested in the nearby town ofJuarez in 1996. Two years later, a U.S. sting led to criminal charges of money laundering against employees at three Monterrey-based Mexican banks.
Despite sporadic violence and the known presence of drugtraffickers, the city enjoyed a tranquility that gave it a provincial feel.
That started to change four years ago, when the Sinaloa cartel began battling the Gulf cartel for a piece of Monterrey's...