CIUDAD JUAREZ MEXICO -- At night in this border city radio newscasts give a rundown of the days homicides -- 15 one day 12 the next -- a segment as regular as weather or sports. At least 291 people were killed last month and more than 1786 so far this year.
The runaway drug violence has brought 10000 soldiers and federal police officers to Juarez but the influx has not resulted in security or a decline in the death toll. That has forced Mexican leaders and their U.S. advisers to try a new strategy to stop the killing in a city that once seemed like a model for U.S.-Mexico economic integration.
We have to repair the social fabric here said Abelardo Escobar a cabinet member sent by Mexican President Felipe Caldern with a new rescue package for Juarez a $270 million surge in social spending.
The money is paying for schools hospital renovations student breakfasts a youth orchestra anti-violence training and drug treatment centers. There are funds to promote physical fitness build eco-friendly houses and support free concerts -- 160 projects in all.
The government calls the campaign Todos Somos Jurez -- We are all Juarez.
We need to build trust and a sense of belonging Escobar said. We need to give people hope again.
The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement brought hundreds of thousands of migrants to Juarez touted as a place where American industry and Mexican workers could meet halfway. Jobs were so plentiful that assembly plants sent buses to the poorest parts of southern Mexico to find recruits promising a cash bonus to anyone willing to get on board.
The Mexican government laid tracts of inexpensive housing in the desert but built few schools parks or libraries for the new arrivals and their families. Today in the citys northwest slums there is one high school for 400000 residents.
Escobar and others here say years of government neglect have produced a civic experiment gone awry allowing organized crime to fill a moral and social vacuum in a place of rootless newcomers and frayed family structures.
Parts of Juarez a city of 1.3 million still convey the sense of almost-America it once promised. But just off the wide boulevards lined with Starbucks Applebees and strip malls masked soldiers and federal police patrol the citys dusty treeless streets riding in the backs of Ford Lobo pickup trucks with automatic weapons and body armor.
Few believe the Todos Somos Jurez campaign can turn the city around anytime soon.
The Juarez and Sinaloa cartels are fighting each other for control of drug-smuggling routes into the United States and both are battling Mexican authorities. Last year 2754 people were killed in the city and 2010 is on pace to be the deadliest year yet. Ninety-eight percent of murders go unsolved.
U.S. officials have pledged more aid for community and social development as part of the $1.6 billion anti-narcotics Merida Initiative. But the violence in Juarez is so bad that the large U.S. Consulate here has been shut since July 29 after a car bombing downtown two weeks earlier was followed by threats of more attacks.
Six months have passed since Caldern came to the city to announce the Todos Somos Jurez campaign after gunmen massacred 14 people at a birthday party in a neighborhood of factory workers on the citys southeastern edge. Most of the dead were junior high and high school students.
Todos Somos Jurez is building a sports park there. It has helped Alonzo Encina get counseling after his 17-year-old son an honors student was slain that night.
But Encina was laid off this spring from the factory where he made car radiators and he now sells posters of Mexican saints and wrestlers from the back of his pickup. I live day to day he said. I feel half-dead. Im trying to go on.
Lost generation
From his office Juarez Mayor Jos Reyes Ferriz has a sweeping view of El Paso and the border crossings that feed into it. The two cities are split by tall fences and the cement-lined channel of the Rio Grande.
In El Paso there has been one homicide this year.
In Juarez someone is slain every three hours.
Juarez is a tremendous city of opportunity said Reyes Ferriz ticking off the citys industrial output: auto parts dishwashers televisions computers. We have more manufacturing jobs than Detroit and Atlanta combined.
The violence hasnt soured investors on Juarez the mayor insisted.
Foxconn the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that makes iPhones Sony PlayStations Dell computers and other Best Buy merchandise has hired 10000 people in the city and plans to take on 70000 more he said.
When the global recession pushed Juarezs unemployment rate to 20 percent in 2008 the murder rate soared the mayor said.
Many of the citys gang members and gunmen are the children of factory workers he and others said a lost generation that grew up in the streets while their parents were making car batteries and keyboards. A cartel foot soldier can make $160 a week carrying out assassinations kidnappings and beheadings.
Assembly plant workers make about $60 a week so Todos Somos Jurez will give them better child care recreation opportunities and job training. More than 120000 have signed up for the citys new health-care plan.
But the raft of promises seem to be outpacing the governments ability to deliver.
On a recent afternoon Daisy Campos 22 stood with her 3-year-old daughter outside a downtown health clinic deflecting the desert sun with a yellow umbrella topped with cat ears. She was glad to have insurance but the wait to see a nurse was two maybe three hours.
A day earlier Campos quit her job at a fruit market after a group of men executed two of her co-workers shooting one in the face right in front of her. I dont want to live here anymore Campos said. Her father is in Tennessee. Maybe she will go there she said.
A promise pending
Todos Somos Jurez has pledged to build a high school in the trash-strewn hills on the citys western edge among the scrap-wood shacks and creosote bush. It would be the neighborhoods first. Local officials laid the cornerstone several months ago and paved the street right up to the empty lot. But no one from the government has been back since said Jos Luis Contreras 26 who lives across the street and would like to go to school if its not too late for him.
Contreras and his 80-year-old grandmother run a small store. Three months ago thieves put a gun to her head and stole everything off the shelves.
Maybe it was just lies Contreras said of the governments plan watching dust swirl over the empty school site.
On the radio that night the state governor called the Juarez program an election gimmick of his political rival President Calderns National Action Party.
No one is sure what will happen when the $270 million runs out.
Arturo Valenzuela a trauma surgeon who stitches up the citys wounded -- killers and victims alike -- said the program should be expanded and made permanent.
I think Juarez is the most important city in the world right now said Valenzuela a community adviser to Todos Somos Jurez. This is the place to see where our whole human endeavor is going. If we can fix it we can fix any other place in Mexico.
CIUDAD JUAREZ MEXICO -- At night in this border city radio newscasts give a rundown of the days homicides -- 15 one day 12 the next -- a segment as regular as weather or sports. At least 291 people were killed last month and more than 1786 so far this year.
The runaway drug violence has brought 10000 soldiers and federal police officers to Juarez but the influx has not resulted in security or a decline in the death toll. That has forced Mexican leaders and their U.S. advisers to try a new strategy to stop the killing in a city that once seemed like a model for U.S.-Mexico economic integration.
We have to repair the social fabric here said Abelardo Escobar a cabinet member sent by Mexican President Felipe Caldern with a new rescue package for Juarez a $270 million surge in social spending.
The money is paying for schools hospital renovations student breakfasts a youth orchestra anti-violence training and drug treatment centers. There are funds to promote physical fitness build eco-friendly houses and support free concerts -- 160 projects in all.
The government calls the campaign Todos Somos Jurez -- We are all Juarez.
We need to build trust and a sense of belonging Escobar said. We need to give people hope again.
The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement brought hundreds of thousands of migrants to Juarez touted as a place where American industry and Mexican workers could meet halfway. Jobs were so plentiful that assembly plants sent buses to the poorest parts of southern Mexico to find recruits promising a cash bonus to anyone willing to get on board.
The Mexican government laid tracts of inexpensive housing in the desert but built few schools parks or libraries for the new arrivals and their families. Today in the citys northwest slums there is one high school for 400000 residents.
Escobar and others here say years of government neglect have produced a civic experiment gone awry allowing organized crime to fill a moral and social vacuum in a place of rootless newcomers and frayed family structures.
Parts of Juarez a city of 1.3 million still convey the sense of almost-America it once promised. But just off the wide boulevards lined with Starbucks Applebees and strip malls masked soldiers and federal police patrol the citys dusty treeless streets riding in the backs of Ford Lobo pickup trucks with automatic weapons and body armor.
Few believe the Todos Somos Jurez campaign can turn the city around anytime soon.
The Juarez and Sinaloa cartels are fighting each other for control of drug-smuggling routes into the United States and both are battling Mexican authorities. Last year 2754 people were killed in the city and 2010 is on pace to be the deadliest year yet. Ninety-eight percent of murders go unsolved.
U.S. officials have pledged more aid for community and social development as part of the $1.6 billion anti-narcotics Merida Initiative. But the violence in Juarez is so bad that the large U.S. Consulate here has been shut since July 29 after a car bombing downtown two weeks earlier was followed by threats of more attacks.
Six months have passed since Caldern came to the city to announce the Todos Somos Jurez campaign after gunmen massacred 14 people at a birthday party in a neighborhood of factory workers on the citys southeastern edge. Most of the dead were junior high and high school students.
Todos Somos Jurez is building a sports park there. It has helped Alonzo Encina get counseling after his 17-year-old son an honors student was slain that night.
But Encina was laid off this spring from the factory where he made car radiators and he now sells posters of Mexican saints and wrestlers from the back of his pickup. I live day to day he said. I feel half-dead. Im trying to go on.
Lost generation
From his office Juarez Mayor Jos Reyes Ferriz has a sweeping view of El Paso and the border crossings that feed into it. The two cities are split by tall fences and the cement-lined channel of the Rio Grande.
In El Paso there has been one homicide this year.
In Juarez someone is slain every three hours.
Juarez is a tremendous city of opportunity said Reyes Ferriz ticking off the citys industrial output: auto parts dishwashers televisions computers. We have more manufacturing jobs than Detroit and Atlanta combined.
The violence hasnt soured investors on Juarez the mayor insisted.
Foxconn the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that makes iPhones Sony PlayStations Dell computers and other Best Buy merchandise has hired 10000 people in the city and plans to take on 70000 more he said.
When the global recession pushed Juarezs unemployment rate to 20 percent in 2008 the murder rate soared the mayor said.
Many of the citys gang members and gunmen are the children of factory workers he and others said a lost generation that grew up in the streets while their parents were making car batteries and keyboards. A cartel foot soldier can make $160 a week carrying out assassinations kidnappings and beheadings.
Assembly plant workers make about $60 a week so Todos Somos Jurez will give them better child care recreation opportunities and job training. More than 120000 have signed up for the citys new health-care plan.
But the raft of promises seem to be outpacing the governments ability to deliver.
On a recent afternoon Daisy Campos 22 stood with her 3-year-old daughter outside a downtown health clinic deflecting the desert sun with a yellow umbrella topped with cat ears. She was glad to have insurance but the wait to see a nurse was two maybe three hours.
A day earlier Campos quit her job at a fruit market after a group of men executed two of her co-workers shooting one in the face right in front of her. I dont want to live here anymore Campos said. Her father is in Tennessee. Maybe she will go there she said.
A promise pending
Todos Somos Jurez has pledged to build a high school in the trash-strewn hills on the citys western edge among the scrap-wood shacks and creosote bush. It would be the neighborhoods first. Local officials laid the cornerstone several months ago and paved the street right up to the empty lot. But no one from the government has been back since said Jos Luis Contreras 26 who lives across the street and would like to go to school if its not too late for him.
Contreras and his 80-year-old grandmother run a small store. Three months ago thieves put a gun to her head and stole everything off the shelves.
Maybe it was just lies Contreras said of the governments plan watching dust swirl over the empty school site.
On the radio that night the state governor called the Juarez program an election gimmick of his political rival President Calderns National Action Party.
No one is sure what will happen when the $270 million runs out.
Arturo Valenzuela a trauma surgeon who stitches up the citys wounded -- killers and victims alike -- said the program should be expanded and made permanent.
I think Juarez is the most important city in the world right now said Valenzuela a community adviser to Todos Somos Jurez. This is the place to see where our whole human endeavor is going. If we can fix it we can fix any other place in Mexico.
