Ciudad Juárez, is the Mexican half of El Paso, Texas. About 1.5 million people live on the Mexican side, about 900,000 people live on the Texas side. The binational metropolitan area is comparable in size of Denver. For the past decade and a half it has been an industrial boom town. Several hundred factories have sprung up there as NAFTA made it easier to manufacturer goods in low wage Mexico for export to the affluent American and Canadian markets. It is a hub of trade to the North, including the drug trade.
In 2008, there were about 1,400 murders in the Mexican half of the city. The violence has continued unabated in 2009 and 2010. There were 220 murders in Juárez in January 2010. "In 2009, more than 2,700 people were killed, making Juárez the deadliest city in the Americas and one of the most violent in the world."
By comparison, in 2009, there were 38 murders in Denver, 313 in Los Angeles, 453 in Chicago, and 461 in New York City. The closest historical parallel in U.S. history may be the gangland murders in Chicago during Prohibition.
The murders are often grusome and senseless. Yesterday, gunmen burst into a teenager's birthday party and slaughtered fourteen people, for no obvious reason. Beheadings, a face stripped off a body and put on a soccer ball, thousands of murder-rapes, and a seemingly random murder of a pregnant woman are a few of the recent horrors. In late 2008, one murder victim was found near a school hanging from a fence with a pig's mask on his face. In September 2009, eighteen people at a drug rehabilitation center were lined up against a wall and shot.
The drug trade is an important part of the violence, as are seemingly impotent police forces sometimes infiltrated by drug trade linked officers and poverty, no doubt exacerbated by a severe blow to the manufacturing industry that is the economic heart of the city, as a result of the current recession.
At the end of last year, Mexican President Felipe Calderon sent 2,000 U.S.-trained federal police officers to help restore order in this city. They joined about 7,000 soldiers and other local and state authorities already in the city. January's bloodbath seems to confirm that this isn't working, not yet, anyway.
The wave of murders in Juárez make up about a third of the drug war related murders in Mexico as a whole.
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