by John Burnet
Mexico’s drug cartel war has killed more than 28,000 people in four years, but some of the collateral damage has not been as noticeable. A trio of famous, Prohibition-era cantinas in Mexican border cities, having survived more than 80 turbulent years, are in deep trouble.
On a recent weekday, a headline in Mexico’s El Diario newspaper screams: “Juarez is the Center of the Country’s Narco-War.” That can’t be good for business at the Kentucky Club, a venerable saloon that’s been here since 1920, three blocks from the international bridge that connects Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas.
“Actually, in these times, the wave of violence here in Juarez is tremendous,” says Raul Martinez, who has been the doorman at the Kentucky Club for 25 years. “Before, we had to turn people away, we were so full — $10 or $20 wouldn’t get you in. Now, I wish we had customers” (NPR).
Historian David Romo calls both El Paso and Juarez home. The day after a gunfight in Juarez sent a bullet across the border — into the wall of El Paso City Hall no less — he describes how violence has changed local business in both cities, and his own life.
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(Texas Tribune)
Juarez, a city of 1.3 million hugging the border with El Paso, Tex., may now be the most dangerous place in the world — riskier even than Baghdad or Kandahar. This isn’t the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, or Cité Soleil in Port-au-Prince, pockets of danger in a larger whole. In Juárez, it’s everywhere (TheStar).
Slideshow A drug war has turned Ciudad Juárez into a bloodbath
Photo credit: Michael Olson, Public Media Texas
Despite a rising death toll and rampant lawlessness Juarez Mayor José Reyes Ferriz said in Austin Monday that his city is on the right track when it comes to combating violent drug cartels and corruption.
So far this year there have been more than 650 drug-related murders in Juarez, Mexico. Four years ago the federal government sent thousands of troops and federal police to fight drug related corruption in Juarez city government. Mayor Reyes Ferriz said their presence is having an effect — even though the death toll continues to rise.
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“A systematic, nationwide shift to the use of such tactics would work
against drug traffickers’ interests,” said Allyson Benton, an analyst
with the Eurasia Group. “It would dramatically raise the level of both
Mexican and U.S. governmental involvement in the fight against
organized crime” (El Paso Times).
“If you shutdown every gun shop in the Unites State criminals in Mexico would still be armed. So what we are facing is a failed drug policy, but we can never admit that. It is a sacred cause here. We are a 12-pack nation that won’t let anybody have a joint” — Charles Bowden.
Charles Bowden speaks about narco violence in Juarez on
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.
Charles Bowden on “The War Next Door”
In the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez, a US consular employee and her husband were shot dead on Saturday while driving in their SUV. In a separate incident nearby, the husband of a Mexican employee at the US consulate was shot dead. The shootings are believed to be the first deadly attacks on US officials and their families by Mexico’s powerful drug organizations. We go to the US-Mexico border to speak with reporter Charles Bowden. “There is no serious War on Drugs,” Bowden writes. “Rather, there is violence, nourished by the money to be made from drugs. And there are U.S. industries whose primary lifeblood comes from fighting a war on drugs.”
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“It is entirely possible that when the mayor stops being the mayor of Juarez in October and if the situation doesn’t come under control, they may come target his own family or himself here in El Paso, Texas” — UTEP Prof. Tony Payan (KFOX)
