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Mexican City's Violence Keeps Visitors Away

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The Associated Press

Published: October 16, 2008

EL PASO, Texas - Mexican officials are trying to persuade Americans to visit Ciudad Juarez, touting the city in a new billboard campaign as a "land of encounters." But on the U.S. side of the border, that sounds like a cruel joke.

More than 1,100 people have been killed this year in Juarez, population 1.5 million, in a drug-related bloodbath so staggering that the city has been declared off-limits to U.S. soldiers looking to go bar-hopping, El Paso's public hospital is seeing a spillover of the wounded, and residents on the American side are afraid to cross over to visit family, shop or conduct business.

"We all like to make money, but the money I was making isn't worth it," said Fernando Apodaca, who spent at least one day a week for the past 18 years working in Juarez as an auto industry consultant. After his Cadillac Escalade sport utility vehicle was seized in a carjacking last month, Apodaca vowed he wouldn't go over the border again.

"I had a gun to my face. There's no law over there," he said.

Juarez, situated just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, has had more murders this year than New York and Chicago together had in all of 2007 - and those two cities have seven times the population of Juarez. Last weekend alone, Juarez had 37 killings.

Initially, the bloodshed involved drug cartels fighting each other. Then military troops, law enforcement officers and government officials became major targets.
Assassinations have become more brazen, and more and more innocents have been killed. Armed robberies, carjackings and kidnappings for ransom are also rampant.

Soldiers at the Army's Fort Bliss in El Paso are no longer allowed to travel to Juarez, whose nightclubs were once a popular place to party.

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