Juarez Drug Wars
Newsweek becomes the latest current affairs publication to explore the growing, epidemic drug violence problem in the border town of Juarez in Mexico. One fact to note from the piece is the comparison of deaths in El Paso, Texas, which Juarez borders, compared to the Mexican location. El Paso has been fifteen murders this year, Juarez has seen 1,300 and counting.
This is the latest in a number of explorations of the problem of drug trade violence in Mexico which continues to grow.
The drug war in Juárez escalated dramatically at the start of the year when the Sinaloa cartel—which originated in the Pacific state of the same name—began trying to muscle in on the Juárez cartel’s turf. The focus of the fight, which has also drawn in the formidable Gulf cartel, is the city’s prized “plaza,” or drug-smuggling corridor. Mexican President Felipe Calderón responded to the turmoil by dispatching 3,000 balaclava-clad soldiers and federal police to the state of Chihuahua, where Juárez is located, earlier this year. Yet the narcotraffickers, with their vast arsenal of high-powered weaponry, haven’t shied from taking them on. (Or trying to buy them off: the cartels have infiltrated virtually every law-enforcement institution in the country, from local police departments to the Mexican attorney general’s office.) The result has been an orgy of violence, growing more public and more spectacular by the day. Beheadings, burnings, dismemberments and mutilations have become routine.
