![]() It was a place of head-spinning extremes-gleaming high-tech industrial parks ringed by worker slums. In Juárez I had a front-row seat for the unfolding of free trade. Coming fast on the heels of the Soviet collapse in 1989, NAFTA launched the current era of globalization. It was exciting then: Juárez was at the heart of debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). I first got to know Juárez during the 1990s, when I lived and worked there as a graduate student in anthropology. The economic model-low-wage export-oriented assembly-that investors celebrated also helped Juárez become the illegal narcotics capital of the Western hemisphere, perhaps indelibly. For even if legal manufacturing returns, salvation may remain a distant goal. As of June 2010 Juárez is in its 30th month of open warfare.Ĭan Juárez be saved? Will the factories reopen, as they have after past economic downturns, or is the city too dangerous for the business of making legal consumer goods? The economic questions are, perhaps, beside the point. In Juárez alone, there are some 200 unidentified corpses dating back to January 2008. In recent years less than 2 percent of Mexican homicide cases have concluded with the sentencing of the perpetrator. Three weeks later the army arrested the alleged killer-a member of a gang aligned with the Juárez Cartel-but almost no one believes this crime will ever be “solved.” And with good reason. Though the killing took place practically under the noses of armed forces stationed in the highly sensitive area, just a few bullet casings were recovered from the scene, indicating that the executioners took their time to clean up and cover their tracks. ![]() It rammed a curb within yards of the bridge to El Paso. Witnesses say their car was chased down a boulevard that once symbolized peace between the United States and Mexico and mutual prosperity. consular employee and her husband on their way home from a child’s birthday party. To Americans the most notable killing was the March assassination of a U.S. ![]() cities-and go to work in the plants of a city bathed in blood. Factory managers wake up in El Paso-one of the safest U.S. Some 10,000 combat-ready federal forces are now stationed in Juárez their armored vehicles roll up and down the same arteries as semis tightly packed with HDTVs bound for the United States. On average, there are more than seven homicides each day, many in broad daylight. Its murder rate now makes it the deadliest city in the world, including cities in countries at war with foreign enemies. ![]() Mexico’s economy contracted by 5.6 percent in 2009, far worse than the United States’s “negative growth” of about 2 percent.īut Juárez has suffered from much more than recession. It is no surprise that the Great Recession temporarily shuttered factories and forced layoffs in a city intimately tied to American consumers. More than ten thousand small businesses have closed, and vast stretches of residential and commercial areas are abandoned. Just three years later, as many as 125,000 factory jobs and 400,000 residents have vanished. The trans-border region of 2.4 million people had one of the hemisphere’s highest growth rates. In April 2007 Ciudad Juárez-the sprawling Mexican border city girding El Paso, Texas-won a Foreign Direct Investment magazine award for “North American large cities of the future.” With an automotive workforce rivaling Detroit’s and hundreds of export-processing plants, businesses in Juárez employed 250,000 factory workers, and were responsible for nearly one-fifth of the value of U.S.-Mexican trade. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |