How many murders in juarez 2011

Vazquez and her mother searched for Dante and Juan Carlos, cellphone shop workers in their mids, and checked with the local and federal police here, to no avail. Nineteen days later, the strangled bodies of the brothers were found on the outskirts of this notoriously violent city. Witness testimony and other evidence led to three policemen, now in jail awaiting trial.

But the police pushed back. Policemen in civilian clothes, Vazquez says, approached her mother outside church and told her to stop making trouble. When Vazquez made a statement against the suspects last month, she says other policemen and relatives of the officers threatened her outside the courthouse.

Terrified, 20 members of the Vazquez family packed their bags and fled across the U. The year-old cousins were sitting in a van outside a family member's house when troops forced them into a military truck. Minutes later, soldiers arrived at the house of another Alvarado cousin, year-old Rocio Alvarado Reyes. She was carried away screaming at gunpoint in front of her young brothers and baby daughter. It was Dec. Considering the reality of the unknown number of the disappeared who have been killed, the cumulative Mexican homicide statistics for the year period in the table above , should be considered the minimum number of victims.

If the homicide rate is the measure, Mexico is not the most violent country in the hemisphere, but shares this dark spotlight with other populous countries in the region, now undergoing a crisis of violence.

One-quarter of all global homicides are concentrated in four countries — Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela. According to data reported by Insight Crime , Venezuela was the most violent country in the region in with a murder rate of 89 per , The Observatorio Venezolano de Violencia reported more than 26, murders in There were more than 61, murders in Brazil the most populous country in Latin America in , and Insight Crime notes that security conditions in Brazil are getting worse.

These processes each have differential time lines and cycles; they are not all unified and identical, but they have collectively produced the hyper-violence and lawlessness. From the s onward, primarily U. The companies did not pay more than subsistence wages and did not provide much training, nor did they construct schools, hospitals, or parks in worker neighborhoods.

The captive maquila worker population lived in these often squalid, precarious conditions with little protection from the state or its employers, with the exception of the bus service that brought the factory workers, in recycled yellow U. The laid-off border workers were left with nothing to fall back on as the U. Crime became the main economic opportunity for unemployed youth.

Third, ongoing political problems in Mexico after a flawed transition to democracy brought the consolidation of free trade and neoliberal policies begun in the s. These policies abandoned the working class and poor, who represent the vast majority of the Mexican population, in a time of reduced employment and wages. In contrast, the neoliberal model championed by the since discredited President Carlos Salinas and continued by the new National Action Party PAN administrations from onward removed much of the social safety net and broke down the old patronage networks that kept drug traffickers in line.

Democracy neither improved the conditions of the poor nor allowed them more access to political decision-making. Poorly planned judicial reform and the federally mandated military intervention only worsened an already desperate situation.

Human rights violations and homicides including the femicides sky-rocketed. The U. As the U. The marginalized masses of unemployed and semi-employed workers—especially the youth who are ignored and isolated in a rigid class hierarchy and now in a heavily consumer-oriented, neoliberal Mexican society—became the shock troops for cartels, gangs, and kidnapping and extortion rings. Illegal operations flourished with little opposition and even overt cooperation from criminalized police forces.

Mexico became a world leader in the kidnapping and extortion of legitimate businesses, as organized crime groups expanded into domestic drug sales, the undocumented-immigrant trade, carjacking, kidnapping, extortion known as cobrando la cuota , prostitution, and sales of pirated music, movies, and other goods. Opponents of this mafia-like criminal expansion, whether politicians, journalists, unbribable policemen, or activists, were tortured and decapitated, and their bullet-riddled bodies or body parts were hung from bridges and monuments or strewn in the streets.

Local enforcer gangs like La Linea and the Aztecas fought a bitter war, often using unrestrained violence that targeted civilians and drove up the murder count. Southern Pulse argued that these local gangs will likely continue fighting over turf, but the larger conflict between the Sinaloa and Juarez Cartel has already come to an end.

And as Molloy argued to Proceso magazine , Juarez's murder statistics may not be telling the whole story. The homicides registered by the State Attorney General do not always account for victims found in mass graves.

One such grave discovered 25 kilometers southeast of the city in November containing 19 bodies. Without accounting for the number of Juarez's disappeared, the city's current homicide rate may be deceptively low. Even as violence in Juarez is apparently dropping, other cities across the country continue to struggle with spiking homicides.

Acapulco, Monterrey, and Culiacan have all seen rising crime. Mexico as a whole registered 12, murders over the past year, a one percent drop from Other parts of the country looking to follow Juarez's example would do well to absorb the fact that, disappointingly, there may be only so much that the government can do to dramatically improve security in the short term.

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