Once Upon A Time In Ciudad Juarez

The city of Ciudad Juarez—better known simply as ‘Juarez’—is the largest city in the Mexican State of Chihuahua, located opposite the Texan city of El-Paso on the Mexican-United States border. Only the Rio Grande river stands between the two. In 2010 El-Paso received an All-America City Award for outstanding civic accomplishments. That same year, Juarez became the murder capital of the world. According to the State Attorney General’s Office there were 3,622 murders in Juarez in 2010, equating to 9.9 murders per day. To make matters worse, these homicides were often used as gruesome displays of gangland pride: decapitated bodies hanging by their armpits on overpasses; mass graves filled with dozens of tortured corpses; streets and their inhabitants burnt to the ground. Unsurprisingly, the tourism market quickly evaporated, and between 2009 and 2011 at least 50% of the restaurants and 18% of the bars in the city ceased to operate.

Since 2010 however, the murder rate in Juarez has been steadily declining year by year. The most recent figures show approximately 797 murders in 2012, 530 in 2013, and 429 in 2014. Meanwhile, local news tallies suggest that in March this year there were only 22 murders—the lowest number of homicides per month since 2007. Confidence in the safety of the city is on the rise, with shops, restaurants, and bars reopening and the nightlife scene going through something of a revival. In the light of such astonishing figures, it is arguable that Juarez has become a paragon of urban reform and rejuvenation, with Enrique Pena Nieto, Mexico’s President, declaring Juarez to be ‘a success’. However, questions remain over the precise causes of the falling homicide rates, and whether Juarez’s peacetime boom will remain. It may be that Juarez’s revival is less a success story, and more a fairytale concealing a concerning reality.

The official line is that the law enforcement agencies, under the guidance of retired Lieutenant Colonel Julian Leyzaola, have worked to successfully cut ties with the cartels and end corruption whilst simultaneously pursing a coherent and effective multi-agency approach to crime, dividing the city into quadrants to allow for smaller patrol regions. Somewhere in this doublespeak controversy reigns supreme—Leyzaola was appointed head of the municipal police in Juarez in 2011 and has proved to be a hugely divisive figure, generating much criticism regarding alleged human rights breaches in his attempts to clean up the police forces, first in Tijuana, and then in Juarez.

The lack of transparency of government actions in Juarez has been the source of much ire, and has led to confusion as to how exactly the murder toll has been reduced so greatly. Varying, often conflicting, conjecture has been put forward. Sandra Rodriguez, an eminent writer for SinEmbargo and former veteran beat reporter for the local El Dario newspaper, posits that the armed forces have been supporting the strongest of the rival drug cartels, namely the Sinaloa cartel, supplying them with arms and soldiers to enable the dominant cartel to finally overcome its weaker rivals and end the internecine conflict between the cartels. Some commentators have also argued that the army and the federal police have been attempting to surreptitiously purge the undesirables from the social strata through targeted social cleansing. Regardless of the veracity of these allegations, it is nonetheless apparent that, at the very least, the police in Juarez has adopted an overly heavy-handed approach to tackling crime.

Arguably, a strong and forceful police modus operandi offers a short-term solution to crime levels spiralling out of control. However, the overly brutal approach adopted by the federal police in Juarez will surely have the negative consequence of further isolating sections of society whilst simultaneously ignoring the primary causes of the societal discontent.

This civil disquiet, which the gang culture preys upon, has root in the global economic crash. Juarez is a key manufacturing region as well as being a gateway into the State of Chihuahua and, as such, has garnered a substantial population of low-skilled labourers both foreign and domestic. Many members of the Juarez working class used to work in maquiladoras—Mexican assembly line factories that provide low wages and demand gruelling hours. However, the discontent of the working classes only truly exploded upon the economic collapse which shook the world in 2001 and 2008, with the managers of the maquiladoras forced to lay off huge swathes of workers to combat the recession and new competition from Asia.

The State welfare system was woefully ill-prepared to deal with this huge rise in unemployment.  Many residents of Juarez were unable to pay rent and had to leave their homes, with multiple families having to band together in one house, forced to live in cramped and squalid conditions in the poorer neighbourhoods. Many simply left the city. In January 2010, a report published by the Colegio de la Frontera del Norte estimated that 116,000 of 416,000 homes in Ciudad Juarez stood empty. As businesses collapsed, many factories were similarly abandoned. With high unemployment and decreasing living conditions, the gang culture thrived as people flocked as an alternative means to make money. The gangs became more powerful and the inter-cartel wars more bloody.

It has been many years since the economic crash, and the bloody inter-cartel conflicts appear to be on the wane in Juarez. Recently, a ‘Juarez Is Waiting For You’ campaign was launched to augment the improving community morale and encourage tourists to make Juarez one of the stops on their peregrinations through the Americas. The hope is that tourists will once again flock to enjoy the bars and restaurants in this city. However, this does not mean that Juarez has been ‘a success’.  The forceful approach of the federal police may have quashed the rising levels of violence in the city, but it remains to be seen at what cost. If the Sinaloa cartel indeed exists as a monopolistic crime syndicate within the city, standing in strained agreement with the police and other minor cartels, then the declining homicide rate serves only to mask the rise of a dangerous and toxic crime organisation. Similarly, the police’s heavy-handed approach may have further alienated the working classes and set off a social time-bomb.

The Juarez government needs to step in to improve welfare or else find the lowest classes of Juarez entirely dissociated from the rest of society. New criminal figures will bloom in place of old, while those in jail may not stay there forever. Indeed, the leader of the Sinaloan cartel, Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, miraculously tunnelled his way out of a high security prison in July this year, prompting fresh allegations as to the extent of corruption in Mexican government and its security forces. Given the opaque nature of the governmental acts in Juarez, it is difficult to assess the fragility of the city’s proclaimed success story. It may be that this is a fairytale close to collapse.

Related