Mr. Calderón, along with several cabinet members and the United States ambassador to Mexico, is to meet privately with the federal police, then inaugurate a scholarship program to keep students from dropping out and update citizen groups on the government’s steps to curb the drug-related violence that is a near-daily fact of life here.
But there was a sense Mr. Calderón was arriving with little more than promises.
“We are fed up, Mr. President,” read a front-page editorial in the city’s leading newspaper, El Diario de Juárez. “Nothing has changed.” It excoriated what it called the government’s failed attempts to prevent crime and “the useless structure of its federal and state prosecutors.”
The relentless violence here has forced Mr. Calderón to acknowledge that merely concentrating firepower on the drug gangs is not working.
In an about-face, the Mexican government has begun refocusing much of its energy on attacking social issues in Ciudad Juárez, in what officials say privately could be an experiment for other Mexican cities that are consumed by drug violence.
American officials say they have encouraged and supported the new approach, pointing to the lack of opportunity here.
On Monday, after the killings on Saturday of an American consular official and her husband, and the husband of another consular official, a State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, said during a briefing Monday that the case underscored the common threat that drug violence posed to both the United States and Mexico. And he said the countries would continue to work together to fight back.
“I don’t think anyone expected that this would be fixed in a relatively short period of time,” he said. “This is a long-term challenge.”
The consulate remained closed Tuesday.
Across the Rio Grande in El Paso — where the consulate employee, Lesley A. Enriquez, and her husband, Arthur H. Redelfs, lived — relatives were making funeral arrangements.
Ms. Enriquez, 35, and Mr. Redelfs were killed in broad daylight as they drove home to El Paso after a children’s birthday party.
At almost the same time, Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros, the Mexican husband of another consulate employee who had also been at the party, was killed as he drove home with his two children, ages 4 and 7. They were wounded and are being treated in a hospital in Juárez.
Mr. Redelfs was an officer at the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, where he worked in the county jail. The couple, who were expecting their second child, had been married for several years, said Mr. Redelfs’s brother, Reuben.
“He was a wonderful man,” Reuben Redelfs said. “We just regret this senseless act of violence.”
American officials said they had several theories about the killings, but the strongest one was that the three were killed by a drug gang to send a message to both the Mexican and United States governments.
United States officials have repeated their support for Mr. Calderón’s battle against Mexico’s drug gangs, which first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration have backed with more than $1 billion in aid. The money has been spread across an array of agencies charged with fighting the drug war. It has bought helicopters for the army, X-ray equipment for customs, training for judges and a new police academy for federal police recruits.
The tipping point in the reconsideration of Mr. Calderón’s strategy occurred five weeks ago, when gunmen killed 15 people, most of them students celebrating a birthday party.
After Mr. Calderón was forced to back down from his initial claim that the victims were gang members settling accounts, his government began to outline a list of social programs to help the embattled residents of this city reclaim their streets.
Mr. Calderón has visited the city twice since then, facing the fury of mothers who have lost their children. He is likely to face more anger when he arrives on Tuesday.
“There are two myths that have fallen here in Juárez,” said Lalas Tapia, a local teacher who organized a protest for Mr. Calderón’s visit involving many families who have lost members to the drug wars.
“It’s not true that the violence is just between the drug gangs,” he said Monday. “And this will not end soon. It has already been two years.”
