Ciudad Juárez is Mexico’s fifth largest city, with 1.3 million people. It cannot be separated from its so-called alter ego, El Paso in Texas, on the other side of the Rio Grande; both cities lie in a flat desert valley that divides Mexico and the United States. The hub of this border metropolis is a series of looping concrete bridges across the river. They arch into the air at intervals across the horizon, linking the dense and sprawling cityscape of Ciudad Juárez, which is dominated by its miles of shanty dwellings (colonias) with the neat urban contours of El Paso. Together they form the largest binational metropolitan area in the world.
The international boundary divides and defines these two cities. Although they share geographies and histories, they have markedly different understandings and experiences of security, well-being and governance. The gulf between them was highlighted when President Donald Trump arrived in El Paso in February 2019 for a rally of 6,000 supporters and warned of dangers lurking on the other side of the Rio Grande. Leading chants of “Finish that Wall!” Trump used the visit and rally in the run-up to declaring, days later, a national emergency over central American migration in order to access billions of dollars to pay for his promised border wall.
Yet few in either city sensed any crisis that would justify Trump’s rhetoric, or his urgent call to forcibly separate cities like El Paso from their southern egos. For the inhabitants of this cross-border metropolitan area, the danger that Trump referred to had already passed.
Between 2007 and 2012, Ciudad Juárez experienced a wave of violent killings that reached 10,000 deaths in five years, accompanied by other violent crimes such as carjacking, extortion, torture, and disappearances. Most of this violence was linked to competition among drug cartels, but its roots were in the “subsoil” of corrupt and dysfunctional public administration and rule of law in Mexico. The killing spree itself was exacerbated by the Mexican army troops and federal police who were deployed to halt the narco-traffic turf battles. In contrast, El Paso basks in its reputation as one of the five safest U.S. cities. Downtown Ciudad Juárez is a tense, no-go area with too many broken windows, derelict buildings, and rubbish-filled streets, safer than it was a decade ago yet still prone to eruptions of violence.
This chapter explores the explosion of civil warfare in Ciudad Juárez through the changing nature of the border and the relationship between Juárez and El Paso in the decade since 2005, when another U.S. president, George W. Bush, began building the first fixed barrier in the shape of a border fence between the two cities. I look at why the historically binomial relationship ruptured and how everyday life in Ciudad Juárez diverged from that in El Paso, becoming securitized through a combination of wars against drugs and terrorism, and continues today as part of the discourse that frames migrants as a threat to U.S. national security.
As a result of this securitization, the period from 2006 to 2013 saw the emergence of three distinct, competing security cultures comprising different practices, values, and goals. Kaldor described a security culture as a “style or a pattern of doing security that brings together a range of interlinked components (narratives, rules, tools, practices, etc) and that are embedded in a specific set of power relations” (Kaldor 2018, 38). In Ciudad Juárez, there is a border security culture, a public or citizen security culture, and a neoliberal security culture. Each seeks to describe the city’s predicament differently, articulate a particular set of threats and risks, identify distinct referent objects as requiring protection, and prescribe responses to the violence. In their narratives each culture constructs its own account of the ways in which the city is insecure; each has its geographic specificity, reifying and seeking to protect a different type of urban space, along with key symbols and markers. From each culture emerges a set of practices that include border checks, human rights defenders, and private security guards.
In section 2, I look at how these cultures emerged, shaped by events both within and beyond the city, principally the war on terror and the war on drugs, and how these wars broke long traditions of cross-border harmony. Sections 3, 4 and 5 explore how the cultures map onto regional, national, and global trends and enact different portrayals and practices of security and insecurity. Even after peak violence in Ciudad Juárez abated after 2012, these cultures have persisted, in tension with one another, compounding the challenge of normalizing life in the city.
Section 6 looks at attempts to recover Juárez’s urban capabilities that have to navigate these cultures. The conclusion is that insecurity in Ciudad Juárez can be seen in terms of a failure to reconcile the tensions among security cultures, to harmonize the use of public spaces and align policies, and to develop a consensus attitude toward the frontier that both unites and divides Ciudad Juárez from El Paso.
Ciudad Juárez sits at a historic crossing point between Mexico and El Paso, Texas, midway along the 2,000-kilometer-long national border. For more than a century, it has been where armies, traders, and migrants moved back and forth. Juárez’s main park, El Chamizal, is on land returned to the Mexicans by the United States in 1964 after decades of disputes about the boundary line. Giant Mexican flags fly along the edge of the road to show where the United States ends and Mexico begins, but in reality the demarcation in Juárez has never been that clear-cut. Since Mexican independence at the start of the twentieth century, the frontier has been the crossover between tides of Mexicans seeking work north of the Rio Grande and a contraflow of U.S. consumers heading south in search of alcohol, cheap drugs, divorces, dentists, and colorful entertainment.
The fence is eighteen feet high and has three layers of steel mesh. It extends another six to eight feet underground and is held in place by concrete blocks set on the desert floor. Cameras and lights are poised to track any attempt on the fence, and the sandy ground is dotted with sensors to detect the slightest movement. The sand is swept every day by U.S. border guards as carefully as any up-market beach resort. Why? So it can reveal fresh footprints. It is hard to see how a costly new structure made of concrete could provide any additional deterrence.
We are in a wide, flat no-man’s land between the Rio Grande and the fence, which marks the boundary between Mexico and the United States. Ahead is a deep concrete culvert built to contain the river when it is in flood. The currents are so treacherous when this happens that most of the migrants who die crossing here die of drowning. We watch two young boys—so-called halcones (hawks) or lookouts—on the Mexican side of the river, who in turn are watching U.S. border guards as they patrol the fence in their SUVs. It feels like a desolate place from which to survey the “promised land.”
As is the case with other cities in this volume, Ciudad Juárez became (re)defined through a catastrophic and sudden security failure. The process of seeing the city as an insecure environment came not only, and not even principally, from its citizens but also from external actors and national, regional, and global trends. Ciudad Juárez today is, more than ever before in its history, a city fabricated by the perceptions and understandings of outsiders. This is particularly true of the border security culture, which emerged as part of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) with its spin-off domestic practices under the imperative of U.S. Homeland Security. The key space in this culture is the U.S.-Mexico border, designated by U.S. federal policy makers as an unsafe space following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and reimagined by Trump as the key entry point of a tide of immigration that threatens American culture, identity, and safety.
The second culture, struggling to assert itself, is public or citizen security. It emphasizes the need to protect and empower citizens against drug violence as well as forms of structural violence, particularly oppression of women, made graphically visible in a series of murders—femicides—in the 1990s. Public security has been advanced by civil society groups as a rights-based culture that draws attention to high levels of poverty, deprivation, and human rights abuses. The key spaces in this culture of violence and fear are public areas: streets, parks, and public monuments. They became symbols of insecurity, where individuals were likely to suffer violence. But they also served as sites of resistance, with citizens using street furniture, such as lampposts, to post memorials and demand protection.
The third security culture, which is distinctive though not unique to Ciudad Juárez, is a neoliberal framing of security in which the object to be protected is explicitly not the state (as in national security) nor the population or individuals (as in public/citizen security). It is the operation of the free market. In the case of Ciudad Juárez, this means securing and enabling the unfettered operation and growth of manufacturing. The key space surrounds the industrial plants, known as maquiladoras. These are the defining features of the cityscape, where transnational corporations (TNCs) transform raw materials into electronics and automotive, plastics, and engineering components for export across the border.
International businesses have turned Ciudad Juárez into a workshop of global products. Their presence has changed not only the aesthetics of the city but also its social relations. These businesses have created an underclass of manufacturing labor populated by immigrant workers in Ciudad Juárez and a management elite largely based in El Paso. The maquiladoras create their own security dynamics through a set of practices such as private security guards and bespoke transport arrangements and concessions, all designed to protect the manufacturing plants and to ensure a steady flow of new investment and output. The neoliberal security narrative in Juárez is a powerful counterculture. It asserts a pro-business agenda as the authentic representation of the city’s capabilities and its hope of future security and prosperity.
These three cultures are grounded in different kinds of urban space: the border crossing, the manufacturing plant, the public and private habitats of citizens, and the protection of diverse urban capabilities. Although distinct, they also overlap in terms of the daily experience for residents who must navigate combinations of them. A confused visitor is tempted to ask: “Will the real Ciudad Juárez please stand up?” How can a city that attracts the headline “Murder Capital of the World” be the same one that gives rise to headlines such as “The City of the Future,” “U.S. Companies Are Still Rushing to Juárez,” or “Big Businesses Boom in an Unlikely Mexican City”?1
Past and Present: Juárez at the Crossing Point of People, Drugs, and Power
The explanation for the paradox that business is still attracted to the city despite the violence starts with the fact that Juárez sits on a frontier. For decades workers from rural areas in Mexico and Central America have sought the key transit point of Juárez—whose original name, Paso del Norte, means “Gateway to the North.” After the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, preferential tariff arrangements encouraged the development of new manufacturing plants and jobs to serve the North American market. U.S. agricultural producers were able to flood the Mexican market with cheap produce, undercutting local firms. As a result, an estimated 1.3 million Mexican agricultural jobs were lost,2 fueling an exodus of cheap labor from Mexico’s heartland. From 1990 the population of Juárez swelled from just under 790,000 to 1.3 million.3
Despite infrastructure spending, trade agreements, and governance assistance, public services could not keep pace with the massive population influx. While Juárez’s shantytowns proliferated largely unregulated, urban planning concentrated on creating shopping, lodging, and business facilities for American investors and consumers. Changes aimed at forging one metropolis within a free-trade area marked the start of a diversion of fortunes between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.
The city’s attributes as a transit hub for legal commerce also made it ideal for trafficking in illegal drugs and people. Juárez’s reversal of fortune in the 2000s was in part due to its capture by cartels that exploited these advantages. In 2006, the new center-right Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, unleashed his so-called war on drugs against the growing power of the drug cartels across Mexico. Calderón’s election also created a power vacuum that severed existing patronage deals between cartels, security forces, and city officials.4 In March 2008, the frontline of the war on drugs moved to Juárez, where leaders of the Sinaloa and Juárez drug cartels competed to establish new parallel structures within the city administration and security services and to control cross-border drug-trafficking routes.
The president deployed five thousand troops in Conjunto Chihuahua (Joint Operation Chihuahua), two thousand to Ciudad Juárez itself, and 180 military vehicles, three aircraft, ten operating bases, and nearly fifty mobile checkpoints.5 Far from imposing order, the presence of soldiers quickly made the violence worse.
Descriptions of military vehicles patrolling the city, soldiers in face masks, checkpoints, and closed streets reminded observers of the Green Zone in Baghdad. The police force barricaded themselves in local hotels to avoid attacks by gangs of criminals, citizens were left to protect themselves, shops and businesses closed.6
Calderón’s war on drugs in many ways mimicked the practices and rhetoric of the GWOT launched by George W. Bush. It was an attempt at swamping city streets with military might and weaponry, checkpoints, de facto curfews, and random house-to-house searches.7 As in Iraq and Afghanistan, the federal government went after high-value targets, decapitating the drug cartels by capturing their senior leaders.8
Violence plumbed new depths. Murder in Juárez had been staged previously as public display. The 1990s murders of women had resulted in bodies left on waste ground as a warning to others. After 2008, the brutality and depravity of drug killings was an essential part of the morphology of the violence. Assassinations took place at traffic intersections, and bodies were left in public parks, hanging from bridges, or dumped at public statues, accompanied by warning messages. Media coverage fed into this pornography of violence with lurid descriptions and photographs of corpses.
Border Security
The confluence of events that engulfed Juárez after 2007 has been described as a “perfect storm.”9 At the same time that flows of goods, drugs, and people surged, civic authority weakened, opening power struggles within and among both criminal and civic elites. Juárez was in the crosshairs of a double war: against drugs and against terrorism. Both changed the attitude of U.S. authorities toward the border. Rather than being viewed as a benefit to economic growth, the Mexican frontier began to be portrayed as a source of insecurity, an Achilles heel in the fight against global terrorism, and a channel for illicit traffic. Construction of the border fence beginning in 2005 was the symbolic and physical marker of an expanding regime of national security and the alienation of outsiders, which included redefining Juárez as a threat to the American nation. The U.S. Border Patrol, previously a checkpoint contingent, became reconstituted as guardian of the nation’s frontline and protector of “the American people against terrorists and the instruments of terror.”10
The GWOT strategy of preemption and deterrence found an echo in new border procedures. A 2002 agreement with the United States called “Intelligent Frontiers” formalized antiterror cooperation between the countries, including the exchange of information and strengthened U.S. legal control of three key border points, including the one between Juárez and El Paso. The logic of the new regime was “enforcement through deterrence,” and it was implemented through increasing use of technology and a dramatic escalation in the provision of resources.11
The Border Patrol in El Paso consists of eleven stations and six checkpoints. Three forward operating bases are located closer to the border. with agents in residence and rotated every ten days. Not only is the terminology of the operation deliberately militarized, but many of the 2,600 agents, male and female, are predominantly army recruits who receive military-type training, including marching and squad drills and in firearms. Job ranking is along army lines. Teams patrol in pairs in marked SUVs, follow strategic plans, and rely on advanced surveillance technology that includes sensors, cameras, and FLIARs (forward-looking infrared systems).
Since 2003, the number of U.S. border agents has doubled to more than 20,000, and a system of fourteen watchtowers and fifty-two cameras was installed. Most illegal traffic is people; only 15 percent of illegal immigrants are drug traffickers, and despite the high-tech efforts, border guards estimate they catch only 20 percent of those who cross.12 All illegal crossings are routinely investigated by the FBI as a potential security issue.13
Global Warriors at the Mexican Border
Juárez also sits in the shadow of Fort Bliss, the largest inland military site in North America; there the U.S. Army carries out basic training, war gaming, and communications development. The area includes an Air Force base for bombers and drone testing and the White Sands missile range. It is the hub for military deployments in the GWOT, with regular rotations to the Middle East and Afghanistan, handling 10,000 active troops and more than 30,000 reservists. Between 2005 and 2011, the U.S. Department of Defense invested $6 billion on facilities to service the nearly 90,000 residents, including military families, attached to the base. The local economy around El Paso boomed as a result.
After 9/11, the United States brought together twenty-three domestic agencies, including the U.S. Customs Service and elements of the Immigration Service, into a comprehensive border security agency. The resulting Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) was as an arm of U.S. National Security Strategy and counterterrorism. CBP includes the Air and Marine Operations Division and the Intelligence Group. This consists of 500 people who not only monitor activity at the border but also track aircraft movements. CBP uses a wide range of listening and surveillance technologies as well as human intelligence to monitor movements of cartels and people traffickers from the Gulf Coast to Honduras and Guatemala. Preference is given to recruits who have experience of long tours in Afghanistan or Iraq.
The Intelligence Group sees ISIS “as a current threat to border security.”14 There are periodic rumors that Middle Eastern jihadists have penetrated drug-trafficking routes into Texas.15 Most locals dismiss the claims as fanciful, and Border Patrol agents interviewed said they had never found any sign of foreign groups attempting to use the crossing.
The GWOT culture securitized border management and wider U.S.–Mexican relations. In 2007, the U.S. government agreed on the Merida Initiative, a $2.5 billion package of assistance and a military response to support President Calderón’s war on drugs.16 From 2008 to 2015, the United States spent $1.3 billion as part of the initiative on training, equipment, and technical assistance, including aerial surveillance drones, effectively managing Mexican security policy.17
National Security
U.S. national security concerns did not simply foment a culture of border security that centered on the threats from terrorism and that has evolved in the Trump populist discourse into raising the cultural, social, and criminal threats posed by immigration. Security fears also began to shape Mexican responses to the violence in Juárez, which framed cartel activity as a war and focused on the mounting homicide rate. The decision to deploy the army reinforced the sense of a military battle, with the cartels portrayed as a threat to Mexico itself, an existential challenge to state power.
This rhetoric ignored the social and domestic political roots of violence and depravity in the poverty, unemployment, and lack of public services, including the chronic failure of law and order in a city, in a country where over 93 percent of murders still go unpunished and largely uninvestigated.18 The rhetoric sought to cast not only perpetrators but also victims as subversive agents who were attacking the integrity and stability of the state. As Melissa Wright argued, the government’s response not only cut off public safety from national security, but the two were “inversely related as a dualistic binary.”19 Those who were killed or abducted were seen as complicit in their tragedies, part of an underclass that was prone to suffer violence.
The Mexican military response produced exactly the opposite result to the one intended: the annual murder toll rose from 316 in 2007 to 1,607 in 2008. By January 2009, the dispatching of several thousand federal police was accompanied by a further jump in deaths to 2,643. The government claimed that the rising murder rate was proof that the strategy was working and that pressure on the cartels had led to their killing each other.
According to local commentator Victor Quintana, writing in a Mexico City newspaper,
Either Calderón is mistaken or he intends for us to be mistaken: the army and the federal police in Juárez were not part of the solution, as he claims, but part of the problem. Not only did they convince a number of small criminal groups to unite and to arm themselves in defense against them, or to ally themselves with them, escalating the level of violence, but they also committed countless abuses of human rights: forced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, torture.20 Both the violence and the military response overwhelmed the city. Street crime and turf battles between the lower echelons of the drug cartels and street gangs added to the toll on public safety. Soldiers and federal police demanded extortion payments and invaded private homes, claiming they were hunting down cartel leaders. The security presence generated fear and disrespect: “In El Paso if I have a car crash I call the police. In Juárez I would give a guy on the street $8 to look the other way and not call the police. If I get pulled over by the police at two in the morning I am praying.”21
An estimated 450,000 of the population of 1.3 million fled the city between 2007 and 2011, leaving residential areas abandoned. Those who could not afford to leave began erecting walls around housing developments and barbed wire around children’s playgrounds. Juárez’s civic identity, built around street gatherings, drinking, and partying, unraveled. Office workers in El Paso who typically crossed the river for their lunch in one of the many restaurants at the Mexican end of the bridges stayed away. Queues at the bridges lengthened as weapons inspections were stepped up. Fearing being caught in shootings at traffic intersections or picked off the street as random kidnap victims, residents stopped going anywhere that might suddenly turn into a killing zone. They swapped anecdotes about how to avoid violence: being fair-haired could ensure you stood out and so were not targeted as part of a drug cartel. On the other hand, if you appeared Mexican and dark might mean you were not noticed at all. Belonging to an organized group carried risks as much as it offered safety and solidarity.
There are five hundred to nine hundred street gangs now of armed, murderous, unschooled, and unemployed young people…. Nothing can immediately roll back the violence, because it is now part of the fabric of the city, a place where in two years twenty-five per cent of the houses have been abandoned, forty per cent of the business shuttered, at least a hundred thousand jobs lost, and where a hundred and four thousand people have fled.22 The violence forced a retreat into segregated and gendered spaces: the increase in private security guards and closed neighborhoods made it particularly difficult for women to go outside.
Carola Chavez lives in Juárez and commutes daily to El Paso to work in an American bank.
Between 2008 and 2010 it was drastic. People didn’t leave their houses. The streets were empty. There were a lot of house parties. You heard horror stories—usually about people who were drug trafficking, but then it also happened to random people. Everybody knew someone affected. Now you can sense the difference. We are traumatized. That seed of fear has been hard to shake off even though new places are opening up and the parks are full again.23 Juárez’s migration history has always tested citywide social cohesion. A population that comprises so many people passing through the city emphasizes fluidity over fixity. Organized civic resistance often has been muted and civil society groups marginalized. A group of human rights workers described the weakness of public security in Juárez:
We need programs that have to do with everyday life. There is also a problem of culture. We don’t get a response from the government or society [to human rights abuses]. With so many migrant communities we have different types of solidarity, and we need the resources of outside experts and a more professional approach.24 The government’s attitude toward public safety, portraying the violence as within and between cartels, was abruptly challenged in January 2010, the year the murder rate peaked. On one Saturday night, four SUVs pulled up outside a working-class colonia in Juárez. Two dozen men with assault rifles entered a house where a group of teenagers were having a birthday party. The massacre left fifteen dead. The Villas de Salvácar shootings became a new benchmark of insecurity in the city. Not only were innocent children killed, but it turned out to be a case of mistaken identity, as some of the teenagers belonged to a football team called AA, the same initials as Artistas Asassinatos, a gang affiliated with the Juárez cartel. The massacre highlighted the failure to protect citizens even in their own homes. Residents described living in the city after the massacre as living in a blanket of fog, from which it was impossible to imagine a way out.25
The city’s topography also contributes to its problems. On the desert floor, Ciudad Juárez sprawls in all directions. It is crisscrossed by large freeways, which allow easy access to the border bridges but that bisect communities. Dust is everywhere, blighting attempts to create green spaces. Downtown the streets are long lines of broken windows, derelict buildings, and boarded facades. Once you turn off the main freeways, most roads are unpaved, and street lighting is sporadic.
Casa Amiga stands out in the middle of densely packed rows of houses. It is smart, freshly painted in bright colors. This women’s refuge is a unique landmark in a city where there is a chronic lack of public services. It is also a bellwether of the city’s social turmoil. When the drug violence spiraled and the army arrived, Casa Amiga began to see more cases of domestic abuse, and it suffered direct attacks by the army. Its then-director, Irma Casas, describes receiving threatening telephone calls at night and Molotov cocktails lobbed over the wall: “Fifteen soldiers would arrive with arms and take it on themselves to burst in.” Casa Amiga receives no support from city funds but relies on foreign companies, churches, and mostly U.S. donors to survive. Ms. Casas says that government security policies ignored the city’s social problems, were short-term, and militarized the situation.26
Neoliberal Security
The third security culture in Juárez is rooted in its economic identity. The phenomenon of the maquiladora, a plant that produces manufactured goods for export, began in 1966 as a result of an agreement between the U.S. and Mexican governments that removed tariffs on finished goods sold in the United States. Juárez’s maquila economy is the city’s most distinctive physical and symbolic feature, producing a landscape of vast, gated low-rise industrial plants within reach of the international border. Many of the plants make electronics for the global car industry. The “citizens” of the maquila economy are names such as Bosch, Honeywell, Panasonic, and Lear Corporation, for whom security is a set of values and operating practices geared to maximizing the competitive efficiency of manufacturing, in the face of threats such as violence, corruption, dysfunctionality, and increased border controls. Their tools include private guards, cheap female labor (women have smaller hands and skills based on sewing, which can be adapted to the detailed work of electronic components), and a private transport network of buses that convey workers to and from the plants at the start of each shift. The city’s road system is also designed in a way to create so-called industrial corridors for delivery trucks.
The neoliberal security culture seeks to safeguard business interests, protect the free market, and ensure continuity and expansion of manufacturing despite an environment permeated by violence, corruption, and conflict. The culture frames threats in terms of loss of competitiveness, investment, and global market share. The free market must be protected as the principal guarantee of the city’s survival, the representation of its capabilities, and the ultimate weapon against insecurity.
Neoliberal security is not merely about private forms of security, although its practices assume private means rather than dependence on public policy. Its scope is more profound than privatizing security, in that it draws on discourses of globalization and presumed connections between security and development to advance a premise of economic growth as the indispensable driver of the city’s security.
Although neoliberal security replicates the private enclaves familiar in many violent cities, such as the hermetically sealed factories and offices and the gated executive housing in El Paso, Juárez’s manufacturing plants promise not only physical safety but also zones of exception to normal urban rules.27 The maquiladoras benefit from a permissive attitude by government authorities and civil society that enables them to act exclusively without restraint from or reference to the norms and regulations of life elsewhere in the city.
One effect of the violence in Juárez was to erode the usual distance between business and security concerns. In its place emerged a security culture that, while retaining a culture of exceptionalism for businesses, sought to fuse manufacturing interests and the security agenda. International companies (in contrast to small businesses, which are forced to make cuotas or extortion payments) remained largely free of direct attacks by either cartels or security forces. However, the spike in violence after 2007, and particularly the way it was reported outside Mexico, threatened to damage the city’s reputation, deterring international investment and jeopardizing manufacturing growth.
Drug violence in Juárez surged at the same time as global recession and increased competition from China after it joined the World Trade Organization. More than ninety thousand regional jobs disappeared between 2007 and 2010. The maquiladoras lost 52,637 jobs in 2008 alone. Most business accounts of the period emphasized the threat from recession and competition rather than from drug violence. They portray the industrial zones as safe havens from the city’s killing spree and, indeed, a bulwark against corruption and organized crime. The narrative of the neoliberal security culture suggests that failure of the cross-border regional economy presented as much of a risk to civic stability as the drug war.
There has always been an economic dimension to insecurity in Juárez. Young women who supplied labor to grow the maquiladoras were murder victims in the 1990s because they defied cultural prejudices that saw women’s place as in the home. The rapid growth of the maquila economy made the city vulnerable to global economic swings, boom and bust, and the fortunes of a few leading firms.28 Average manufacturing wages of $422 per month are almost the lowest of any production center along the U.S. border or in the interior of Mexico, with women earning an average of $300.29 Resilience to the economic cycle as well as corruption and violence is weak.
At the core of the neoliberal security culture in Juárez is a form of external intervention by global companies, which generates transactional dynamics between locals and outsiders that is infused by an asymmetry of power. As part of this dynamic, locals attempt to mitigate their insecurity through working with and for the internationals and conforming to their norms, while companies leverage their power as investors and employers to exact favorable terms, including bespoke security provisions from civic, federal, and international authorities. As well as special rights of passage, foreign companies have a privileged voice and access to governing elites that allows them to promote their own agendas on security, civic organization, and urban planning. In Juárez, this influence is amplified further as companies are also able to appeal to U.S. policy makers—at federal and state levels—on the grounds that what is good for business in Juárez is also in the interests of U.S. national and regional economics.
An important element in the vocal business constituency are the consultancy firms that specialize in onshoring, providing advice and attracting foreign investors on the basis of Juárez’s favorable fiscal regime—the equivalent of an offshore tax haven. Manuel Ochoa is a senior director of Tecma, a leading onshoring consultancy. From his office in El Paso he describes how he helped to reassure nervous foreign investors during the peak violence:
We are not the target [of the cartels]. None of the killings have happened inside the industrial parks. We had violence and global recession, but companies already there kept the engine running. It meant people were not looking for other sources of revenue and joining cartels.30 In contrast to border security, the practices of neoliberal security culture rely on desecuritizing the frontier and liberalizing cross-border flows. Business has negotiated privileged rights at the border crossings, which mitigates the increased security introduced after 2005. The FAST (Free and Secure Trade) program prescreens commercial traffic in order to expedite deliveries of goods. Government rhetoric and policy link security with economic development. In 2014, the government said that the new national police force “would be placed at the disposition of private companies and [that] it would be activated [sic] based on three threats, one of which includes threats to production or sources of income.”31
To protect entrepreneurs and reassure visitors, the city government created a heavily policed green zone for businesses in December 2010. Under the plan, 120 federal police maintained a twenty-four-hour guard on a small commercial area close to the border. Checkpoints were positioned every five hundred meters to inspect cars and keep an eye on racketeers.
Urban planning in Ciudad Juárez also serves the economic and business agenda. In the 1960s an area close to the border was redeveloped as a so-called global economic vision to cater to the growing business community and the influx of U.S. tourists and businesspeople. The Zona Pronaf was modeled on a U.S. shopping center and was designed to offer a “solid example of actual Mexico: progressive dynamic, working.”32 Until the worst of the violence in 2010, it was seen as one of the most secure areas in the city.
The power of the manufacturing plants not only enables them to bypass the restrictions of border security but also produces contradictory outcomes for citizens’ security. The top three firms in the city—Lear, Delphi, and Foxconn—combined operate twenty-six plants and employ forty-seven thousand workers, allowing these companies to dominate the local economy and keep wages low. As violence increased and household poverty rose, their plants also acted as safe havens for workers who preferred to spend long hours inside factories, which have no windows (to avoid distracting workers), but provide heating and lighting rather than be on the street or go home. Thus there are hidden and perverse forms of symbiosis between a city where business, crime, and violence all have reached high levels of organization.33
Responses to Violence: The Retaking of Ciudad Juárez
In the aftermath of peak violence, city, state, and national authorities sought to reimpose order and mobilize the population against the drug cartels. Troops were withdrawn in 2010, and federal police detachments followed a year later. Municipal police authorities were strengthened, and police officers were retrained and professionalized.34 New civic plans attempted to give citizens more say in reforms and promoted urban rehabilitation schemes in which the key themes were transparency of public administration and the refurbishment of public amenities, from education to sport and culture.35 As well as top-down initiatives, there were coalitions of civic groups such as Ciudadanos por una Mejor Administración Publica (Citizens for a Better Public Administration) and the Alta La Voz (Raise Your Voice) campaign, which produced two thousand proposals for policy changes.
The most ambitious rehabilitation scheme was Todos Somos Juárez (TSJ), or “We Are All Juárez,” which targeted social problems with a holistic approach to addressing diverse aspects of insecurity. Actions focused on economic development, employment, education, health, and public security, as well as coordination among federal, state, and municipal authorities. For each policy area a civic council was created, and TSJ was promoted as a forum by which the city’s inhabitants could speak against the violence. The program led to hundreds of individual policy actions and programs and over $400 million in federal spending in 2010 and 2011. Around three quarters of the budget was directed to investments in health, education, culture, sports, and recreation. The government also emphasized that improving the business climate was a key element in improving life in the city.36
TSJ was a novel approach for the Mexican authorities: it acknowledged that violence had deep social roots, and it sought to regenerate a sense of civic solidarity, despite a legacy of fear; citizens were still afraid to gather publicly and suspicious that their neighbors might be affiliated with gangs or cartels. Ex-President Calderón, initiator of the war on drugs, was the architect of TSJ. “We have achieved positive results, because we not only listened to the people of Juárez but also got them on board to solve this problem with us.”37
To critics, TSJ was little more than a few government slogans. Civil society groups described it as an exclusive program to improve a few districts of the city. Some regarded it as social cleansing. Among the business community, there was a new engagement with civic authorities. Business leaders were determined to play a dominant role in coordinating public and private initiatives. However, the private sector was also prepared to challenge the agenda of public agencies, and it persisted in promoting its vision of manufacturing strength as a force for security and social change, claiming its aim was to raise living standards on both sides of the border. Acknowledging that “in 60 percent of meetings [with foreign investors], security was top of their concerns,” business also continued to play down the extent of the violence and argued that it was somehow uncivic to dwell on the murder rate and drug killings. In the neoliberal narrative, the so-called real Ciudad Juárez was a city of endless economic possibilities—a global powerhouse, not a local killing ground.
Companies also demanded changes in education and public services to secure a more reliable and effective workforce, and they increased pressure on U.S. and Mexican government officials to ease border controls. The frontier now became a contested space in the rescue of Juárez. “Wait times are the challenge for 2015. The longer a vehicle waits, the more revenue is lost. We are not saying don’t secure the border, but don’t do it in a way that impedes traffic.”38
New alliances were formed—for example, programs such as Sister Cities and Resilient Cities—to leverage the influence of companies on both sides of the border and to connect Juárez with not only other business communities but also centers of art and culture. In trying to minimize the significance of the border as a physical barrier, businesses also sought increased internationalization of the city, in the words of one executive, “to put us on the global map.”39 The Borderplex alliance is one example: formed in 2012, it includes forty to fifty leading companies in Juárez and El Paso. Privately funded, the Borderplex alliance undertakes initiatives in education, arts, public affairs, and management training. It framed drug violence as a regional and global concern and attempted to create practices of security that could reach beyond municipal, state, and federal agendas to international and transnational levels.
Business-funded campaigns such as Orgulloso Ser Juarense (Proud To Be from Juárez) and Adelante Juárez (Forward Juárez) used development consultants, public opinion polling, and public relations firms to refurbish Juárez’s image as a turnaround city.
The public security culture responded to the drop in the murder rate by citizens reclaiming public spaces, occupying deserted houses, and returning to restaurants and bars, while maintaining pressure on civic authorities to keep their promises of urban regeneration. Consumers rediscovered the al fresco, spontaneous sociability that had been the city’s hallmark. “There was a clear shift…. people started sticking together. Once the security forces left we had a clear change in our sense of commonness. We are a lot less trusting, but we have learned to watch for ourselves and for each other.”40 In 2016, Pope Francis visited Ciudad Juárez, preaching solidarity across the frontier. His visit inspired a campaign to attract tourists. When I entered the Web site “Visit Juárez,” it was an empty page.
There is a recurring pattern in Juárez. Despite reform attempts, security remains partial, sectional, and individual rather than a shared public concern. Businesses see new problems arising from poor coordination between public and private initiatives and confusion from the proliferation of rehabilitation programs. Civil society sees continued marginalization and exclusion of groups such as migrants as well as women and young people. Security culture—whether based on the border, business, or the citizenry—shares a common assumption, though: that of the “relatively absent state.”41
Shake the kaleidoscope, and new patterns begin to emerge. The crisis for Ciudad Juárez has abated, in the sense that murder rates have continued to fall until recently. The downtown area once again is lively with restaurants, bars, and local businesses. Some residents even talk of the city’s “renaissance.”42 Yet Trump’s insistence on a border wall, coupled with his rejection of the terms of the NAFTA treaty, once again challenges the delicate relationship between these two interdependent cities, Juárez and El Paso. These actions also undermine the neoliberal security narrative that is at the heart of what connects the cities. Although murder rates have started to climb again, as all over Mexico, Juárez residents are less fearful that the violence will overwhelm their city, because today it is between drug gangs rather than an epidemic of killing and lawlessness that targeted ordinary citizens and daily life. There is perhaps more to fear from the anti-immigration security rhetoric coming from the White House, which seeks to rupture what holds these two historic cross-border neighbors together.
Perhaps the greatest ambiguity to be resolved is how to view the frontier that has shaped so much of Juárez’s history and culture. For over a hundred years, decisions about the city have been based on the border “as an unending resource and eternal comparative advantage.”43 This perception was entrenched with the growth of Juárez as a global manufacturing hub. Since 2001, the “border as resource” has been challenged by a counternarrative that presents it as a threat to U.S. and global security, overlooking the economic benefits from proximity to cheap labor on the Mexican side of the frontier and from migrations that have boosted the population resource on the American side.44
Trump has rejected both premises and staked his presidency on the counternarrative of threat and harm. Juaresenses who sometimes spend hours queuing to pass customs and immigration controls, or who are denied transit altogether, view the border as both an asset and a curse. It is also a reminder of the gulf in welfare between one side of the Rio Grande and the other, which has widened since 2007.
Juárez is a continuously impermanent city. Nowhere better represents this shifting nature than El Chamizal, the park at the border. Once part of Texas, it was fought over as a symbol of territorial sovereignty by both countries. In the worst days of the drug violence, it became notorious as a dumping ground for corpses by the cartels, a reminder of the struggle between organized crime and citizens for control of public space. After 2012, Juaresenses began returning to picnic under its trees and to play baseball. When the pope held an open-air mass at the frontier, he was formally greeted by a student chosen by local churches because he lives in Juárez but goes to school in El Paso.
The binomial metropolis might have been fractured and fragmented, riven by inequalities of power and prospects, wealth and security. But its citizens will continue to find ways—illegal and legal—of crossing its divides.
Notes
1. Christopher Power, “U.S. Companies Are Still Rushing to Juárez,” Bloomberg Business June 10, 2010, bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-06-10/u-dot-s-dot-companies-are-still-rushing-to-ju-rez; Nathaniel Parish Flannery, “Big Businesses Boom in an Unlikely Mexican City,” Global Post, August 23, 2012, http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/mexico/120822/mexican-economy-Juárez-exports-outsourcing-multinationals-business?page=0,0.
4. E. Edmonds-Poli and David Shirk, Contemporary Mexican Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 388.
6. K. Staudt and Z. Y. Mendez, Courage, Resistance and Women in Ciudad Juarez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 99.
7. The militarization of public security has a long history in Mexico. Presidents before Calderón not only turned to the armed forces as a more effective and credible means of combating the drug cartels but also responded to pressure from the United States to stem illegal flows of narcotics across the U.S.–Mexico border. See Jesús A. Lopez-Gonzalez, Presidencialismo y Fuerzas Armadas en México 1876–2012. Una relación de contrastes (Puerto Vallarta, México: Gernika, 2012).
8. The arrests failed to detain the criminal leaders. Failure to prosecute narco traffickers has been another symptom of government weakness and complicity with the cartels. The saga of El Chapo, Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquin Guzman, who twice escaped from custody following arrest, reinforced the widespread perception that the government’s strategy for addressing organized crime was either incompetent or corrupted. See Ed Vulliamy, “Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman: The Truth About the Jailbreak of the Milennium,” Guardian, July 13, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/13/joachin-el-chapo-guzman-jailbreak-mexican-drug-lord-escape-prison.
9. Tony Payan, “Ciudad Juárez: A Perfect Storm on the US–Mexico Border,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 29, no. 4 (2014): 435–47.
11. G. Correa-Cabrera, “Seguridad y Migración en las Fronteras de México: Diagnóstico y Recomendaciones de Política y Cooperación Regional,” Migracion y Desarrollo 12, no. 22 (2014): 154.
12. Interview with U.S. Border Patrol staff, February 18, 2015.
13. Interview with anonymous employee, El Paso, February 19, 2015.
14. Anonymous interview with an Intelligence Group officer, El Paso, February 19, 2015.
16. Clare Ribando Seelke and Kristin Finklea, “U.S.–Mexican Security Cooperation: The Mérida Initiative and Beyond,” Congressional Research Service Report, May 7, 2015, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R41349.pdf.
17. Ribando Seelke and Finklean, “U.S. –Mexican Security Co-operation, 2; U.S. Department of State, Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations FY 2010–FY 2016. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State.
18. Citizen’s Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, 2017 report.
19. Wright, “National Security Versus Public Safety,” 293.
20. Víctor M. Quintana S., op-ed, La Jornada, March 1, 2013.
21. Telephone interview with a Ciudad Juárez resident, March 1, 2015.
23. Telephone interview in March 2015.
24. Interview with Red Mesa de Mujeres, Ciudad Juárez, February 19, 2015.
25. Interview with volunteers from DHIA, a human rights organisztion, Ciudad Juárez, February 19, 2015.
26. Interview with Irma Casas, Casa Amiga director, Ciudad Juárez, February 20, 2015.
27. A. Ong, Neoliberalilsm as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Eisenhammer, “Bare Life in Ciudad Juárez.”
28. Payan, “Ciudad Juárez: A Perfect Storm on the U.S.–Mexico Border.”
29. Compared with its prime economic competitor, China, Juárez has seen salary growth of 65 percent in ten years rather than the 250 percent increase in China. Paso del Norte Economic Indicator Review April 1, 2015; INEGI. See also Abraham Medina, “2015 Ciudad Juárez Labor Market Is Well-Positioned due to Last Year’s Gains,” Tecma Trust, January 18, 2015.
30. Interview in El Paso, February 18, 2015.
32. A. Bermudez, quoted in M. Rodriguez and H. Rivero, “ProNaF, Ciudad Juarez: Planning and Urban Transformation,” A/Z, ITU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture 8, no. 1:196–207.
37. F. Calderón, “Todos Somos Juárez: An Innovative Strategy to Tackle Violence and Crime,” Latin America Journal (February 19, 2013).
38. Interview with Marcus Delgado, Borderplex El Paso, February 18, 2015.
39. Interview with Marcos Delgado.
40. Interview with Carola Chavez.
41. Staudt et al. 2010. See also Sassen 2007, 213–14.
44. Correa-Cabrera et al. 2015.
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