Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's Onetime Murder Capital, Makes Unthinkable Comeback Dudley Althaus - GlobalPost
go to original November 2, 2013

After fleeing to Texas, chef Oscar Herrera talks about finding the courage to return to his hometown of Juarez, Mexico, and reclaim his family’s restaurant from the criminals and thugs who once burned it down. (GlobalPost)

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Young daughter in hand, Isabel Aguilera recounts the mayhem that stalked these streets.

Here they dragged a father from the breakfast table, shooting him dead outside in front of his family. There they came for a shopkeeper, gunning him down behind the counter. Yonder they snuffed two brothers after pulling them from their beds before sunrise.

“They were people from outside,” Aguilera, 38, said of the killings that recently swept like cholera through Riveras del Bravo, a teeming sprawl of Mexico’s working poor. “They wanted to inject power, fear.”

These thousands of matchbox houses once ranked among Earth's deadliest patches through years of criminal war in Ciudad Juarez, an industrial and narcotics corridor bordering America’s safest large city El Paso, Texas.

More than 10,000 people were murdered across the Mexican city of 1.3 million in less than five years. Many were young men gunned down on streets like these.

But the fever has broken. At fewer than two a day, murders citywide likely will finish the year at about a seventh (14 percent) of those three years ago.

Read the rest at GlobalPost

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