The War for Drugs

HOW JUAREZ BECAME THE WORLD'S DEADLIEST CITY

In April 2007 Ciudad Juarez-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 Juarez employed 250,000 factory workers, and
were responsible for nearly one-fifth of the value of U.S.-Mexican
trade. The trans-border region of 2.4 million people had one of the
hemisphere's highest growth rates.

Just three years later, as many as 125,000 factory jobs and 400,000
residents have vanished. More than ten thousand small businesses have
closed, and vast stretches of residential and commercial areas are
abandoned. It is no surprise that the Great Recession temporarily
shuttered factories and forced layoffs in a city intimately tied to
American consumers. Mexico's economy contracted by 5.6 percent in
2009, far worse than the United States's "negative growth" of about 2 percent.

But Juarez has suffered from much more than recession. Its murder
rate now makes it the deadliest city in the world, including cities
in countries at war with foreign enemies. On average, there are more
than seven homicides each day, many in broad daylight. Some 10,000
combat-ready federal forces are now stationed in Juarez; their
armored vehicles roll up and down the same arteries as semis tightly
packed with HDTVs bound for the United States. Factory managers wake
up in El Paso-one of the safest U.S. cities-and go to work in the
plants of a city bathed in blood.

To Americans the most notable killing was the March assassination of
a U.S. consular employee and her husband on their way home from a
child's birthday party. Witnesses say their car was chased down a
boulevard that once symbolized peace between the United States and
Mexico and mutual prosperity. It rammed a curb within yards of the
bridge to El Paso. 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.

Three weeks later the army arrested the alleged killer-a member of a
gang aligned with the Juarez Cartel-but almost no one believes this
crime will ever be "solved." And with good reason. In recent years
less than 2 percent of Mexican homicide cases have concluded with the
sentencing of the perpetrator. In Juarez alone, there are some 200
unidentified corpses dating back to January 2008. As of June 2010
Juarez is in its 30th month of open warfare.

Can Juarez 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. For even if legal manufacturing returns,
salvation may remain a distant goal. The economic model-low-wage
export-oriented assembly-that investors celebrated also helped Juarez
become the illegal narcotics capital of the Western hemisphere,
perhaps indelibly.

A Tale of Two Cities

I first got to know Juarez during the 1990s, when I lived and worked
there as a graduate student in anthropology. It was exciting then:
Juarez was at the heart of debate over the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA). Coming fast on the heels of the Soviet collapse in
1989, NAFTA launched the current era of globalization. In Juarez I
had a front-row seat for the unfolding of free trade.

It was a place of head-spinning extremes-gleaming high-tech
industrial parks ringed by worker slums. One of the world's most
profitable Walmarts sat within view of settlements without decent
water, sewers, or paved roads. Amid the inequalities, however,
ordinary, middle-class Juarenses were enthusiastic about their city's future.

I recently returned to Juarez and was unprepared for the city's
shocking transformation. Friends cautioned against crossing the
border. Some had closed their businesses there, or had moved their
families north. A few warily ventured into Juarez, but they always
hurried back to the United States before dark. For the first time, I
heard the once-optimistic Juarenses lament their city.

Some see the roots of Juarez's violence in its recovery from the
Mexican Revolution, which ravaged what was in the 1910s and '20s a
frontier town. Certainly part of the city's personality-and maybe its
pathology-can be traced to that period.

Like its booming neighbor to the north, it needed schools, libraries,
and hospitals. Instead it got bars and whorehouses. Because of
Prohibition, El Pasoans had to find their entertainment across the
border, in the richly appointed American-owned casinos and
nightclubs. Juarez of the 1920s was like Las Vegas of the 1950s:
elegant, exotic, uninhibited.

Older Juarenses speak of the post-Revolution city as if it were two:
by day Juarez was a quiet Mexican town modeling itself on the
progress it saw in the United States. At night it morphed into a
world of exported vice and carnal pleasure. The growth of Fort Bliss
during World War II and El Paso's lingering blue laws reinforced that
split personality.

In the late 1960s an experiment in export-oriented manufacturing
seemed to give Juarez-by-day the upper hand. Under an agreement
between the U.S. and Mexican governments, American firms set up shop
across the border and imported materials duty-free from the United
States. The companies employed Mexican labor to transform those
materials into finished goods for export back, also duty-free. The
firms, called maquilas by the locals, found favorable conditions:
third-world wages, a government that promoted unionization in name
only, and no oversight of the treatment of manufacturing byproducts.
Moreover, maquila managers could work "overseas" during the day, and
return home at night, thereby avoiding Mexican poverty, environmental
problems, and crime. Success begets competition. The trickle of U.S.
firms that abandoned their costly Midwestern labor forces became a
torrent in the 1980s.

But while Juarez-by-day had triumphed for the time being,
Juarez-by-night had not been tamed completely. Factory managers loved
their assignments: they enjoyed the comfort and security of their El
Paso homes, and, when they wanted, the thrill of Juarez nightlife,
including the venues that everyone suspected were fronts for drug money.

Global Change Comes Home

In the summer of 1992, during my first visit to Juarez, a change was
snaking its way through the city's impoverished working-class
settlements. Deteriorating rural economic conditions, together with
relatively high maquila wages (typically $5-7 a day) prompted a huge
immigration to Juarez. The steady stream of potential workers-more
than a hundred new residents arrived each day in the 1990s-kept wages
down and the costs of housing and services up. Despite their improved
conditions, then, workers could enjoy few benefits from their labor.
They struggled to meet basic needs, including fees for schooling that
would qualify their children for factory work once they were old
enough to earn a living.

All the families I met relied on at least one factory salary. But
there were plenty of unemployed, too. Mostly young men, these idlers
were the right age to be working or in school, but instead they hung
around wearing baggy Dickie pants, hair nets, and other insignia of
cholo (gang) affiliation. My research assistant, a former Catholic
catechist, taught me to recognize and steer clear of the real cholos,
who were dangerous, and to salute and acknowledge the others, who
were just posing.

The settlements blanketing the steep ravines of the mountains
surrounding the city's center had no infrastructure to speak of, but
they did have corners. And boys hung out on those corners day and
night. They huddled on their haunches in winter and they lolled in
whatever shade they could find in summer. They were guarding turf;
they menaced the school kids and factory workers forced to cross
their paths, sometimes beating them bloody.

Some idlers were getting high, though not from illegal narcotics.
Rather, they mined stolen factory materials-paint thinner, acetone,
and buckets of solvent-soaked rags used to wipe down finished
televisions. They would distribute "sniffs" to their neighborhood buddies.

But in the mid-1990s life for these young men began to take on
another character. A friend who worked in drug treatment told me that
she and her co-workers were scrambling to identify new addictions, as
banned drugs supplanted the inhalants.

On a 1996 tour of settlements, my friend showed me some of the places
where dealers had set up shop. They were not selling injectable
narcotics-a syringe was an extravagance in these desperately poor
communities-but drugs that could be consumed directly. She spoke of
pills, though their identification was elusive. These small retail
outlets laid the groundwork for the harder stuff that would soon
follow. Over time I realized what the idle kids were up to. They were
working, perhaps earning only pennies, for the new dealers.

My observations in Juarez reflected a shift in global drug markets
that began far from the city. As globalization of manufacturing
ramped up in the 1980s, it did so in parallel with dramatic changes
in the production, distribution, and consumption of illegal
narcotics. In the early '90s the global pressures that disrupted the
trade routes for cocaine that ran from Andean jungles to U.S.
consumer markets converged on Juarez.

This was not obvious then. The local change that seemed most
consequential for Mexico's future was the 1992 election of an
opposition party member as mayor of Juarez. Francisco Villarreal
Torres, owner of a small chain of house-ware stores and a political
outsider, campaigned on promises of good governance and clean
conduct. His election proved the viability of the National Action
Party (PAN), which went on to win the 2000 presidential election,
thereby ending 70 years of one-party rule.

Villarreal's true rival once he took office was not his political
opponent, but Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the subordinate, rival, and
successor of famed rural drug lord Pablo Acosta, who died in a 1987
shoot-out with Mexican and U.S. forces. Carillo Fuentes moved
operations from the sparsely populated Big Bend region of Texas to
Juarez, a relocation that mirrored and exploited the
globalization-driven economic success of Juarez.

Acosta's business had focused on smuggling Mexican pot and heroin
across the border to U.S. buyers. Distribution was in the hands of
informal dealer networks, from which, reportedly, Acosta only
infrequently took a direct cut. With two significant changes to
Acosta's business model, Carrillo Fuentes would turn cocaine into the
cornerstone of a multinational, vertically integrated enterprise with
diversified products stretching from the Andes (and other source
sites) to United States (and other) markets.

In the past, Colombians had used Mexican marijuana smugglers to
transport only a small portion of their merchandise; the main
trafficking routes wound through the Caribbean. By some estimates,
cocaine importation and money laundering accounted for a third of
Miami's economic activity in the 1980s. But the 1993 killing of Pablo
Escobar decapitated the Medellin Cartel, and, beginning in 1991, the
Cali Cartel was weakened by seizures and arrests (though its leaders
remained at large until 1995). When the U.S. Department of Justice
began to seize Miami bank assets and prosecute the Colombian
traffickers' lawyers, the Mexican cocaine trade picked up pace and volume.

Seeing his opening, Carrillo Fuentes shifted from bagman to
distributor-the first of his two innovations. He also took advantage
of another vacuum: in the years prior to his rise, the prosecutorial
assault on crack-cocaine in the United States had jailed and killed
thousands of street-level dealers and their bosses. Carrillo Fuentes
filled that void with his own retail agents in U.S. cities.

Like any vendor, Carrillo Fuentes looked for new markets and new
products. And like transnational firms that sprawled across the city,
he saw a business opportunity in the booming factory-worker
population of Juarez. His second innovation-perhaps the single action
most responsible for the rise in violence-was to call an end to drug
traffickers' long-standing voluntary prohibition against local sales.

Local-market development began modestly enough. Sometime in 1990 or
1991-before the Colombian cartels had ceded their supremacy-residents
in a handful of Juarez's scrappy, tar-paper-and-adobe settlements
found their first samples of a narcotic previously limited to export
markets: cocaine. It was neither pure nor of high quality-cut several
times with talc and baking powder-but it was coke, for the first
time, for the Mexican masses.

Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, long-time human rights attorney and
director of the city's prison from 1995 until 1998, described to me
the explosion of tienditas, retail drug outlets. According to de la
Rosa, in 1990 there were fewer than 50 neighborhood dealers. By 1995
the number had climbed to 300. The current estimate exceeds 1,000.
Some of these tienditas are distribution centers, employing as many
as 50 roving peddlers. And the city is now saturated with
dealer-addicts, the "fivers" who sell just enough (about five hits)
to cover the costs of their own high. Charles Bowden, in his new book
Murder City, estimates that as many as 25,000 Juarenses may be
involved in petty drug sales. At the height of the Great Recession,
that meant one drug dealer for every four or five employed factory workers.

But this explosion of corner dealers was not responsible for the
city's dramatic transformation. That change came with the system of
dealer protection. Each corner dealer works not only under an officer
in the cartel, but in tandem with a beat cop. The cop protects the
dealer and his gang against encroachments by other neighborhood
gangs. The tiendita system is thus a logical extension of the rules
of the Mexican drug "plaza," the long-established formal arrangement
between traffickers and security forces.

When foreigners talk about the Mexican drug business and the drug
war, they talk about cartels carving up territory among each other
and then going after each other's turf. Mexicans, by contrast, begin
with the plaza, a government concession sold to a preferred bidder.
Trafficking drugs is effectively a licensed affair, the exclusive and
protected rights to which are controlled by the military and the police.

In the tiendita system, it is not only locally "licensed" dealers who
send their earnings up the chain of command. Beat cops, too, pay
their supervisors and commanders. Hence the Juarez name for what the
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) calls the "Juarez Cartel": la
linea-"police line."

Chronically underpaid Mexican police traditionally have made their
living livable with bribes-the famous mordita ("bite"). But
historically they did not defend violently their right to bite.
Street drugs changed that. De la Rosa told me that in the mid-1990s,
only two of the city's then-estimated 500 gangs were known to be
armed. Now, 80 percent of them are.

The Violence Intensifies

This local retail model was highly successful, and it quickly became
the industry standard. By 1997 it was dispersed widely across the
industrial north. Carrillo Fuentes had risen in seven years to become
Mexico's wealthiest and most powerful drug trafficker, with a fortune
estimated at $25 billion. His "assets" included General Jose de Jesus
Gutierrez Rebollo, the Mexican drug czar. In February 1997, just
weeks after his appointment to the job, an investigation revealed
that he had been on the Cartel's payroll. Carrillo Fuentes also
bought shares in a Mexican bank, a move that helped simplify his
money laundering efforts.

When Carrillo Fuentes died while undergoing plastic surgery that
summer, a violent power struggle predictably followed. But by today's
standards it was mild: a mere 72 deaths over eight months. Now, about
a hundred are killed every two weeks in Juarez.

The narcoguerra following Carrillo Fuentes's death introduced Juarez
to "message killings": bodies tortured, dismembered, and stuffed into
boxes, car trunks, and barrels. Also new and shocking were the
open-air executions: gangland-style killings at jam-packed
restaurants. At the time, such crimes were rare enough that the media
could follow them up and report on their continued lack of resolution.

The battle for succession remained mostly isolated to the top command
in both the Cartel and the police (the probable first victim of that
narcoguerra was a high-ranking federal police officer, killed by
commandos just four days after Carrillo Fuentes's botched surgery).
With the confirmation of new leadership-Amado Carrillo Fuentes's
younger brother Vicente, according to conventional wisdom-the killing
abated. But it never went away. And it never went back underground.
Restaurants and bars became safe again, but killings continued in the
neighborhoods where tienditas had taken root. There, factory workers
lived tensely with the growing groups of tough, largely unemployed
men and boys who moved constantly in and out of alliance with the
more organized gangs.

Meanwhile the city continued to gorge on the profits of local and
international narcotics sales. Though few admitted it, everyone knew
how the gaudy houses that popped up in the old moneyed enclaves were
financed. Ditto the origins of the flashy princesses who began to
grace the newspapers' society pages. City elites chose to overlook
the excesses of the trafficking business. "We tolerated the narco,"
an upper middle class friend recently told me. "That was our
mistake." I asked her why conventional, conservative-Catholic Juarez
put up with the traffickers. "Look at all those businesses up and
down the Avenida de las Americas," she said, "it's all money
laundering. But it gave us restaurants to enjoy and boutiques to shop in."

The price of permissiveness grew increasingly steep. In 1993 a
no-nonsense retired accountant named Esther Chavez Cano noticed
routine newspaper stories on the discovery of female corpses. The
details were gruesome: some were found tortured and raped, almost all
were tossed to the side of a road, as if they were litter. Chavez
Cano began a newspaper column in which she demanded action and
accountability. Her writing campaign soon launched a social movement
that garnered international attention for the same city that was then
proudly boasting of its manufacturing triumphs. She and those she
inspired tallied 427 women dead or disappeared between 1993 and 2007,
an undeniable symptom of the city's violent alter ego.

But these horrific killings of young women eclipsed a more prosaic
body count: that of the men who turned up dead all over the city with
increasing regularity. It is easy enough to see how the murdered
girls and women focused the world's attention on Juarez's perverse,
misogynistic, and violent appetites. Nonetheless, for every
publicized female corpse there are ten overlooked male counterparts,
according to government data. Whatever the explanation for the high
numbers of women killed, the one incontestable fact is that the
killing of both women and men began in earnest the very year that the
DEA says cocaine trafficking shifted from Miami to Juarez. This was
not a coincidence.

The World'S Deadliest City

I moved away from the border in 1999 but returned to visit in 2001. I
caught up with two friends, also academics, who had been raised in
the city's toughest neighborhoods. We met at a cute bar on the corner
of Avenida de las Americas and Avenida Lincoln. It was the kind of
place then multiplying around town: refrigerated air, an impressive
sound system, and swanky drinks. It shared a parking lot with a
California-style sushi bar that in 1997 had been the site of the
dinnertime execution of a businessman with suspected drug ties.

We talked about cholos. "Today's cholo is different," one of my
friends remarked. "Yesterday's cholo used to compete with merely his
attitude, his fashion, and his posture. If the cholos really needed
to fight, they fought with what they had available: rocks, stones.
And then they got knives. But now some of them have guns." Today,
"some" would be "nearly all," but as recently as 2001, guns were rare.

That summer I took pictures of a sixteen-year-old boy. He sported a
bandana and an oversized tee shirt depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe
and his initials in Gothic letters. He smiled so sweetly and eagerly
that he hardly looked tough in his portrait. He and his mother beamed
when I brought them copies. She surprised me with the pride she took
in her son's apparent cholo ambitions. I had never met such a parent.

That summer I was also surprised by what seemed to me an astronomical
increase in the number of kids just hanging out, guarding turf on
corners. Neighborhood toughs were now everywhere. And they belonged
to a bewildering array of ranked groups, mysteriously nested within
hierarchies that most of the teenagers I talked to only vaguely understood.

In 2001 I could see that what was once isolated in the bars and
nightclubs and conducted its affairs after hours, had woken up to
business in the daytime and set up shop close to home. The gap
between Juarez-by-day and Juarez-by-night was narrowing to a sliver.

Today, the sliver has vanished. The Juarez Cartel and its rival, the
Sinaloa Cartel, fight each other in the streets, and Mexican federal
forces allegedly fight the traffickers. Rumor has it that a third
trafficking organization, the Zetas, may have entered the market.

In any case, the violence escalates. There were many milestones along
the way: 1993, the year that femicide was first recorded, the year
when Amado Carrillo Fuentes reportedly assumed sole leadership of the
Juarez Cartel; 1997, the escalation of violence after his death;
2000, when, with considerable fanfare, the FBI announced its mission
to Juarez to locate the rumored remains of as many as a hundred
victims buried in narcofosas, "drug graves" (only four bodies were
found). Also crucial was 2004. That year, the United States lifted
its ban on assault weapons, making it that much easier for
traffickers to obtain their arms of choice. There are 6,600 gun shops
in the four U.S. border states. Of the 11,000 guns turned over to the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) by Mexican
forces in 2009, almost 90 percent were traced to U.S. gun shops.

Homicides in Juarez nearly doubled from 123 to 234 between 1993 and
1994. The rate stabilized for the next dozen plus years, dipping in
some, ranging from a low of 176 in 1999 to a high of 294 in 1995. The
2007 spike to 316 murders generated much year-end hand-wringing, but
within a month 2007 appeared to be the calm before the storm.
Violence exploded in January of 2008, with 46 killings. The total for
February was 49. And in March, when President Felipe Calderon
deployed thousands of troops to secure the city, the murder count
doubled to 117. Now it rarely dips below those levels. One hundred
deaths in a month would be considered a respite. May 2010 saw 253.

The familiar explanation for the spasm of violence that has seized
Juarez since January 2008 starts with Calderon's vow upon taking
office two years earlier to rid Mexico of all traffickers and his
rapid deployment of troops to cartel hot spots. But almost from the
start, skeptical observers have suggested that Calderon's forces
appear to be routing all traffickers but one: the powerful Sinaloa
Cartel, headed by Joaquin Guzman Loera, a.k.a. El Chapo ("shorty").
For Mexicans, schooled in the reality of the plaza, it is hard to
believe that security forces can fight traffickers; they are, as one
journalist put it to me recently in an email, indistinguishable from
each other.

Consider the evidence that Mexicans never forget or overlook: shortly
after President Carlos Salinas left office in 1994, his older
brother's wife was caught using a fake passport to withdraw more than
$80,000,000 from a Swiss bank, part of the fortune her husband
somehow managed to amass while working as a government bureaucrat.
The disgraced ex-president fled into self-imposed exile in Ireland, a
country that has no extradition treaty with Mexico.

His successor, Ernesto Zedillo, declared a U.S.-style war on drugs
and then appointed Gutierrez Rebollo as his drug czar, only to find
that Carrillo Fuentes was paying Gutierrez Rebollo his monthly rent
for a national concession.

Even the first opposition president in Mexico's modern history is not
free of suspicion. Shortly after Vicente Fox's election in 2000, he
spent a weekend at the private Cancun retreat of Roberto Hernandez
Ramirez, CEO of Banamex (Mexico's second-largest bank) and alleged
drug trafficker.

None of this explains the extent of Juarez's homicidal violence. One
major difference between 1997 and 2008, as Gustavo de la Rosa
Hickerson pointed out, is that the current war is being fought at
every level of the trade, down to the street-level vendor and his
protection and tribute network. As Charles Bowden puts it, this is
not a war against drugs, it is a war for drugs. One related theory
put forward by veteran observer Bill Conroy of Narco News is that the
army moved into Juarez to take the concessionaire role away from the police.

The story of the two cities of Juarez thus applies to the entire
country: what started in Juarez has become Mexico. The attempt to
cripple the drug business in Juarez has meant crippling the city;
doing the same in Mexico at large may mean crippling the nation.

Innocent Victims

President Calderon has sought to make his drug war palatable by
asserting that the country's war dead-estimated at 23,000 since
January 2006 for the country as a whole-deserved to die: their deaths
implicate them in illegal activities.

When he first learned about what Juarenses have come to call the
"massacre at Villas de Salvarcar," Calderon hinted that the thirteen
teenagers who died at the hands of professional executioners were
common criminals and city low life. He could not have been more
wrong. In fact they were honor students and athletes who had gathered
to celebrate a friend's seventeenth birthday. They had the misfortune
of belonging to a football club whose initials, "AA," were mistaken
for the initials of the Sinaloa cartel's local enforcers, the
Artistic Assassins. And so, in the middle of the night, while the
teens danced in a room cleared of furniture, they were gunned down.
Seven hours later, when the first daylight photos were taken, the
concrete floor where they died still glistened with their clotting blood.

The escalating war over the Juarez plaza coincided with a
particularly unpleasant moment in the global market system-in the
midst of massive factory layoffs prompted by the economic downtown
beginning in 2007. Locals easily grasp that little of the current
day-to-day violence in Juarez has much, directly, to do with any
cartel. Look at who dies with grim regularity: a gang of teenage car
thieves, a group of former cholos who opened a funeral home, a guy
pilfering doors from an abandoned neighboring house. Not all victims
are entirely innocent-the city is filled with scrappy, hard-working
men and women, some of whom have turned to Juarez-by-night for
survival now that Juarez-by-day has so little to offer them-but they
are not drug dealers or corrupt police, either.

Accommodating the drug business has become a shockingly ordinary part
of life. Working-class parents ask few questions when their studious
daughters and sons lose factory jobs while their wayward siblings
provide the household's only income.

In February I spent a day with the director of a nonprofit day-care
organization as she visited centers her group helped to launch. The
owner of one home-based establishment related with good cheer being
confronted by a nicely dressed middle-aged couple and their armed
bodyguard. They advised her to start paying a $1,000-per-month
protection fee. She and her family went into hiding for a few weeks
before they reopened-quietly, and with great trepidation. The
director laughed when I asked which cartel the extortionists work
for. "People like that don't work for anybody," she replied. "They
extort for a living because no one stops them!" The couple had shaken
down the entire block of small family-owned businesses. Little matter
that across the street stretched the vast army encampment, home to
troops sent to end the city's lawlessness.

Later my guide told me that Juarenses even have their own terms to
distinguish between organized crime and opportunistic crime. The most
common form of the latter is the secuestro express: a kidnapping that
lasts no more than a few hours, just long enough to pressure a family
to cough up an "affordable" ransom, but not long or expensive enough
to attract the interests of enterprises that might want a cut.

Night falls

For decades, the maquilas' critics longed for border businesses to be
in control, rather than simply in service, of multinational capital.
This is the irony of Carrillo Fuentes's innovation: he became the
Mexican-border trade baron who accomplished all that and more. His
generation of traffickers adapted the maquila model to their own use
by taking advantage of its infrastructure to move and market their
products. No wonder Forbes recognized their achievements by including
El Chapo Guzman in its 2010 list of global billionaires.

And what of the maquilas? The signs are not promising: in mid-January
university researchers calculated industrial park vacancies at 14
percent-a historic high, up from an already-alarming 10 percent the
year before. That month a Siemens customs manager was gunned down on
his way to work. In October his subordinate had met her end after
U.S. officials found drugs smuggled in a shipment. Mid-level staff
are frequent targets, prompting some companies to consider extending
their security measures beyond plant executives. It is probably just
a matter of time before manufacturing firms move on.

What will be left of Juarez then? In El Paso, there are nightclubs,
boutiques, fancy restaurants, and thriving industries. That city is
growing in ways that seemed unimaginable even a decade ago. Even the
mayor of Juarez has fled north of the border, and that was before he
received a threat to his life in February-a severed pig's head marked
with his name.

Those who haven't abandoned Juarez may be watching the death of it,
both day and night.