4 October 2010
By Luis Chaparro
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – The violence unleashed by drug cartels on the streets of the northern Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez has forced residents to stay away from restaurants and have food delivered to their homes.
Eateries across Juarez, Mexico’s murder capital, are closed, for sale or show signs of having been torched. A few dining establishments continue operating and survive off less than half of their previous customers, the vast majority of whom have moved across the border to El Paso, Texas. More than 4,000 jobs have disappeared in the restaurant industry and about 40 percent of dining establishments have closed due to the high levels of crime in the border city, Restaurant and Prepared Foods Industry Association president Federico Ziga said.
Robberies, kidnappings, extortion and other crimes have made restaurants “unworkable” in the border city, Ziga said. More than 2,000 people have been murdered in Ciudad Juarez, according to press reports, since January, with an average of four people a day wounded by gunfire. Some 80 percent of businesses in Ciudad Juarez are victims of extortion rackets run by gangs, Ziga said.
Companies such as Meserosmoviles.com are now offering home deliveries of food from different restaurants to Juarez residents who fear going out. The delivery service was created to help residents who do not want to become another crime statistic in a city where an average of about 13 homicides occur daily and restaurants have not been exempt from the killing.
The federal government’s war on drugs has imposed “extremely high costs on social life in Juarez,” Colegio de la Frontera Norte researcher Julia Monarrez Fragoso said. A large number of business owners from Ciudad Juarez have moved to neighboring El Paso, with the number of restaurants in the Texas city rising about 40 percent in the past three years, the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce said. “Restaurants, bars and nightclubs have been opened. More people are out at night because the young people in Juarez don’t go out to have fun. They prefer to come to El Paso,” El Paso District 7 City Representative Steve Ortega said.
The situation has economists in Ciudad Juarez worried.
Ramon Chavira and Wilebaldo Martinez, who wrote a report about the economic problems in the Mexican border city, said failure to take immediate action could have dire consequences for Juarez’s economy. “Crime will produce a loss of economic dynamism and that, of itself, will continue reproducing the violence and crime as a result of unemployment,” Chavira and Martinez said in their report. “It is extremely difficult for the businesses that have moved to the city (El Paso) fleeing the violence in Juarez to return even if the security situation improves in Mexico,” University of Texas at El Paso sociologist Zulma Mendez said.
Ciudad Juarez has been the most violent city in Mexico since 2008, when the murder rate took off in the border city due to a war between the Juarez and Sinaloa drug cartels for control of smuggling routes into the United States.
Source: Latin American Herald Tribune.
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