Big Businesses Boom in an Unlikely Mexican City Nathaniel Parish Flannery - Global Post
go to original August 26, 2012

A worker builds a mannequin in a factory in Ciudad Juarez. Drug war violence made Juarez a deadly city but multinationals are still booming there. (Jesus Alcazar/AFP/Getty Images)

CUIDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Martha Messina, an economic development specialist, waits at the security gate of an India-style call center in this city across the border from Texas.

She says that the company, Genpact, and others like it are thriving in northern Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez. That’s right, Juarez — the same place that at one time seemed to be ground zero for Mexico’s brutal cartel war.

“There’s a lot of life in the businesses here, but people only talk about the negative,” Messina says.

More than 10,500 killings since 2008 in Juarez — a city of about 1.3 million people — made it one of the deadliest cities in the world. The murder rate has fallen substantially since 2010, according to Chihuahua state figures, but the bad reputation is not likely to fade fast.

Juarez, however, is not an economic ghost town.

Multinationals Johnson & Johnson, Delphi, Siemens and Foxconn all have major manufacturing operations here. McDonald’s, Chili’s, Arby’s and other chains have opened up restaurants, catering to the working population.

Even as Mexico’s cartels smuggle drugs across the US border and local turf-battling gangs prey on small business owners, big companies and factories continue to expand their operations. Major businesses, including multinationals and outsourcing offices, appear unthreatened by the drug war violence. It’s an uncomfortable coexistence. Now as the killings have slowed in recent months, local executives hope the city’s economy will have a chance to flourish.

That’s part of a complex story in Mexico, Latin America’s second-largest economy, after Brazil. Some 60,000 people have been killed in Mexico in cartel-related violence since late 2006, according to local media reports. Despite the frequent news of dismembered bodies dumped roadside, Mexico’s economy continues to grow. It might even nab that No. 1 spot from Brazil by 2022, the bank Nomura predicts.

“It’s the Mexican paradox,” says Claudio X. Gonzalez, chairman of the Mexico City office of Kimberly Clark, maker of Kleenex tissues and Huggies diapers.

In 2010, a peak year in Juarez’s violence, more than 3,000 people were killed here — but the city’s export sector increased jobs and output. In 2011, trade between Juarez and El Paso, its sister city on the Texas side of the river, totaled more than $80 billion, up by more than $10 billion from the previous year.

Read more at The Global Post

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!