Mexican Businesses Pitch In to Counter Violence in Monterrey The private sector in Monterrey, Mexico, is helping to promote and finance development in a violent neighborhood, Independencia. MONTERREY, Mexico - The fine-featured young man gazing off into the distance on billboards perched above the avenues of this desert city is not dreaming of a luxury car or a beach vacation. To the contrary, he wants to join the police force. As part of its effort to contain the criminal violence that has shocked this prosperous city, the state government wants to recruit and train 14,000 new, uncorrupted police officers by 2015. With its not-so-subtle suggestion that you, too, can look this good, the sign urges, "We Need You." It is no coincidence that the state government of Nuevo León is using the language of marketing to build its new police force. Behind much of its effort to restore stability are Monterrey's captains of industry. They have watched the city become a battleground in the country's drug war over the past two years, the horrors multiplying. Then in August, suspected members of the Zetas drug gang set a casino ablaze over unpaid extortion money, killing 52 people and traumatizing Monterrey. "I confess and make mea culpa that we woke up late," said José Antonio Fernández Carbajal, the chief executive of Femsa, one of the world's largest Coca-Cola bottlers and a big Mexican retailer. Mr. Fernández and other business executives are now in the thick of efforts to recover the city's peace. Their companies helped design the advertising image and campaign for the new state police force, and they are staffing recruiting booths and a call center. They are also paying part of the cost of government redevelopment plans, injecting money into community groups and sponsoring school programs. This burst of largess is relatively new for Mexico, where until recently corporate philanthropy had moved little past handing out toys to orphans at Christmas. Experts say it is still evolving. "In the last 5 or 10 years there has been progress both in terms of the quantity of the money and the quality," said Michael Layton, director of the Philanthropy and Civil Society Project at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. But I don't think Mexico has caught up to Brazil and other countries where the business sector has taken corporate philanthropy to heart. Javier García Justicia, a sociology professor at the University of Monterrey, contends that most companies here could give much more. "There are companies that have really climbed aboard," he said. "Others see it as a type of publicity," he added, noting that they have assigned unqualified people to their corporate responsibility teams and seemed mostly concerned with splashy newspaper advertisements. He advises a new alliance of Monterrey corporations known as Red Sumarse, which plans to strengthen nongovernmental organizations working on community development. The telephone company Axtel and the tortilla maker Gruma lead about 20 companies in a public-private partnership that is adapting an American program, Gear Up, to invest in school infrastructure and encourage children not to drop out. The history of Monterrey is entwined with the powerful families that founded its industries more than a century ago. To them, the fraying of the city's social fabric is personal. As the city's chaos grew, Lorenzo Zambrano, the chief executive of Cemex, the world's largest building-materials supplier, posted a furious message on Twitter. "He who leaves Monterrey is a coward," he wrote in a comment that still resonates, almost 18 months later. We have to take back our great city. The city's turmoil is also a sign of a Mexican reality that business leaders now admit was long ignored. "Violence is an expression of social inequality," Mr. Zambrano said in a recent interview.