CIUDAD MIER, Mexico - Shell casings carpet the road outside a bullet-riddled subdivision on the outskirts of this colonial town in the Rio Grande Valley, abandoned by most of the 6,000 inhabitants following a nine-month battle by warring drug cartels.
Nobody lives in the 65 one-story white houses across the border from Roma, Texas, except the abandoned pets that 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.
While Mexicans increasingly have fled border towns up and down the Rio Grande Valley, Ciudad Mier is the most dramatic example so far of the increasing ferocity of war between rival drug cartels, and the government's failure to fight back.
The state and federal governments say it's safe to go back and that people are returning. The scenes witnessed by The Associated Press say something else.
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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 that locals say killed four soldiers. The Army does not officially recognize it even happened.
A man named Rogelio, 72, a migrant who retired after years of lawn work in Milwaukee and Chicago, has a question for them:
"Where were they nine months ago?" He asked not to give his last name for fear of reprisals. Almost everyone in town has had a relative kidnapped by the gangs, he said.
Only about 400 people remain in the town. Most went to Texas, or to other Mexican cities. Some 300 others are staying in a Lion's Club-turned-shelter in nearby Ciudad Miguel Aleman with no intention of returning, even though the clean auditorium with tiled floors covered in foam mattresses doesn't feel much safer: A shootout a block away sent them diving for cover last week.
Terrified refugees lower their voices so as not to be heard by the cartel lookouts. A heavily tattooed young man with a flashy, embroidered baseball cap and gold chains lounges on the sidewalk outside and interrogates a reporter: What are you doing here? Who have you interviewed inside?
About half the houses in Ciudad Mier have bullet holes. The Casas Geo subdivision seems frozen in time; most residents left in the summer, and it was empty by early November. The houses show how people lived when the battle reached its height: armoires and wooden wardrobes pushed up against the windows in a vain bid to stop the bullets.
