New tactic being tried to restore border towns

CIUDAD MIER (AP):

Schoolchildren once again chatter and scamper across the town plaza where drug gang gunmen last year torched the police station and left the remains of a dismembered man.

By night, townsfolk play volleyball across the plaza from the station, whose charred stone facade has been repaired. The plants are trimmed and streets that once echoed with gunbattles are quiet and clean. Ciudad Mier again is starting to look like it deserves its tourism promotion as a "magical town."

But most businesses are shuttered and there aren't many cars on the streets, which are often patrolled by Army trucks. The mayor estimates that about a third of Mier's 8,000 people have not returned. Most are still terrified by nine months of gang battles, killings and disappearances that caused them to flee a year ago.

"When we live through an experience in the flesh, people keep that image," said Mayor Albert González Peña. "And sometimes it's difficult to erase."

The confidence in Mier, or lack of it, has become a test of President Felipe Calderón's latest strategy in pacifying territory that had been overrun by drug gangs in a conflict that has killed roughly 40,000 people nationwide.

A battalion of 653 soldiers arrived in October and paraded through the streets behind a military band when Mexico's army opened its first 'mobile barracks', to safely house troops trying to re-establish control in violent areas.