CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – Julián Cardona remembers the dark days of this border city, when bodies littered downtown streets and friends were kidnapped or fled…
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – Julián Cardona remembers the dark days of this border city, when bodies littered downtown streets and friends were kidnapped or fled north to the U. S.
That was a decade ago, when feuding cartels made Ciudad Juárez one of the murder capitals of the world.
Today, Cardona, a Mexican photographer who has documented much of the last decade’s carnage, says the city is experiencing a revival: violence persists, but mostly between local drug gangs, kidnappings are rare and, most notably, people are no longer afraid to leave their homes.
“Not everyone’s talking about crime… There’s more people out on the street,” he said recently while enjoying a breakfast of fried eggs and coffee in a café near downtown. “Things have definitely improved.”
Ciudad Juárez, a city of 1.4 million people, sits across the Rio Grande from El Paso, where President Donald Trump led chants of “Finish that Wall!” at a rally Monday of more than 6,000 supporters, and warned of dangers lurking beyond the border. Days later, Trump declared a national emergency to access billions of dollars to pay for his long-promised border wall.
“We’re going to confront the national security crisis on our southern border, and we’re going to do it one way or another,” Trump said Friday as he declared the emergency from the White House Rose Garden.
Even as many along the border have decried Trump’s calls for a wall and stressed the border’s safety, places like Ciudad Juárez have struggled to keep violence at bay.
El Pasoans for generations have lived in a symbiotic relationship with Juárez, sharing families and economies. Today, the city is a major trading partner for Texas and a key cog in the U. S. economy, said Jon Barela, chief executive of the Borderplex Alliance, an El Paso-based economic development and advocacy group.
Juárez is home to more than 360 manufacturers, from makers of U. S. car parts to semiconductors and surgical equipment, and sees more than $76 billion worth of trade with the U. S. each year, according to the alliance. It’s also home to more than 70 Fortune 500 companies, Barela said.
The drop in violence has helped the city strive, he said.
“Ciudad Juárez is undergoing a renaissance,” Barela said. “I’m hopeful that the really bad days of violence that took place there will never come back.”
But the shadows of Juarez’s violent past linger. Starting around 2008, warring Sinaloa and Juárez cartels, vying for control of the city’s lucrative transnational drug trade, touched off a murder wave that left bodies strewn across downtown streets and where gang lords hung the beheaded corpses of rivals from highway overpasses.
