I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
In case you haven’t heard, July was the deadliest month on record in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez.
There were 248 homicides – or eight on average each day of the month – in the city of nearly two million, just beyond and Texas and New Mexico state lines.
Not since the days of legendary revolutionary Pancho Villa nearly a century ago has border violence so gripped our attention. While today’s raging war over lucrative drug trafficking routes into el Norte has largely been contained on the southern side of the border, that wasn’t the case in Villa’s daring and deadly cross-border raid in 1916.
Back then, the Mexican revolution was still being fought as Villa lashed out in murderous anger over President Woodrow Wilson’s backing of his archrival, Venustiano Carranza.
The annual reenactment of the early morning raid that claimed nearly 20 American lives 93 years ago is the subject of my most recent video collaboration with videographer Kate Nash.
Back in March, Nash and I traveled to Columbus, New Mexico, and the tiny border town’s Camp Furlong, site of the raid, with the modern variety of border violence very much on our minds. We also spent several hours across the border in Palomas, Mexico, a town that still lives in the shadow cast by the much larger Juárez 70 miles away.
The sum total is an examination of border violence, past and present, and the range of political and economic roots of this particular stripe of death and destruction.
(The six minute video, which you can watch above, was broadcast on KNME this past weekend.)
Since our visit, Palomas has remained calm. But not Juárez. Still, that didn’t stop Mexican Interior Secretary Fernando Gómez Mont from putting a happy face on the city’s recent surge of homicides during a visit last week.
According to a Sunday story in the Dallas Morning News, Gómez Mont – backed up by thousands of federal soldiers charged with keeping the peace — isn’t exactly wallowing in pessimism.
“This is not the moment for being complacent or for anticipating defeat,” Gómez Mont said. “The operation is going well, and it’s constantly being evaluated to make it more efficient. The operation will continue.”
Many others quoted in the story aren’t nearly as confident despite several high-profile recent arrests of drug cartel leaders elsewhere in Mexico. Meanwhile, the Mexican economy is losing ground. According to a story posted by Reuters today:
Mexico’s economy will probably shrink 6.9 percent this year in the country’s worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, analysts told the central bank in a poll released on Monday.
While the story notes that the “U.S. recession has led Americans to buy fewer goods made south of the border, slamming Mexican factories and fueling a surge in unemployment,” it doesn’t even mention the impact of the escalating drug violence.
Surely, tourism is taking a hit, certainly in a border city like Juárez that, like Palomas, offers many discount dentists and pharmacies among other attractions.
That’s the impression you’re left with at the end of the above video, courtesy of Eleanor Copeland, an El Paso social worker. Nash and I caught up with her during our trip in a Palomas restaurant. She was adamant that she wouldn’t go to Juárez. And that was months ago.
I have a strong feeling that a rising death toll has done nothing to change her mind since then.
