The militarized war on drugs, strict U.S. immigration policy, maquiladora development, and misogyny are all part of the cocktail fueling cycles of crime and abuse in a violent border city.
Julián Leyzaola Pérez gained a reputation as an anti-crime crusader as police chief of Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez—and for the human rights abuses that occurred under his watch. He could likely become Tijuana’s next mayor.
Bocafloja’s poetry explores the changing nature of conceptions of death in Mexico and the effect of living in a permanent state of terror as a consequence of repressive drug policies.
In the most recent issue of NACLA, anthropologist Howard Campbell examines how Ciudad Juárez became the world’s most violent city after Mexican President Felipe Calderón deployed thousands of soldiers and federal police to fight the cartels. Campbell, a professor at the University of Texas-El Paso spoke with NACLA to further explain the political, social, and economic forces that led to this hyper-violence in Mexico.
On June 10, a new movement was born in Mexico. A peace caravan of hundreds of people from all over the country arrived to the border city of Ciudad Juárez to sign a national social pact with the goal of ending the militarized drug war in Mexico. This drug war has killed approximately 40,000 people since Mexican president Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006. This pact was appropriately signed in brutalized Ciudad Juárez, an epicenter of drug war-related violence, where 7,000 of these killings have taken place.
Last week, President Felipe Calderón spent two days in Ciudad Juárez, ostensibly to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the signing of Treaty of Ciudad Juárez, the pact that transferred power from the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz to the provisional Revolutionary government of Francisco Madero. Harking back to the city’s glory days, Calderón called Juárez a “heroic city,” and presided over a parade of 700 soldiers and a huge amount of sophisticated military equipment (and a contingent of university students dressed as Pancho Villa’s cavalry).
