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.
Tourism is dead in the once-popular Mexican border town of Juárez.
That’s the pronouncement of a story put together by the Las Cruces Sun-News and Associated Press summarizing the uncontrolled violence that has killed more than 1,100 people this year, including 37 last weekend alone. The piece says:
Mexican officials are trying to persuade Americans to visit Juárez, touting the city in a new billboard campaign as a “land of encounters.” But on this side of the border, that sounds like a cruel joke.
More than 1,100 people have been killed this year in Juárez, 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.
The story says:
Juárez, 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 Juárez.
Juárez has always been a rough town, but one where many Americans felt safe enough to play, shop and work. Violence began to mount early this year after Mexico’s president launched a national offensive against drug lords.
The U.S. State Department issued a travel advisory on Tuesday, warning Americans of daylight shootings at shopping centers in Juárez and suggesting applicants for U.S. visas at the consulate in Juárez not pay in cash to avoid getting mugged while in line.
The dispatch recounts the story of an auto industry consultant who has traveled to the border city every week for 18 years, but after having his Cadillac Escalade SUV seized in a carjacking last month, said he won’t cross the border again. “I had a gun to my face. There’s no law over there,” he said.
New Mexico State University has advised students not to cross the border to celebrate and socialize, virtually eliminating what was once an NMSU student rite of passage. “I would go for the dentist, but not to party,” one NMSU junior told reporters.
Ft. Bliss has flat out told soldiers they’re not allowed to visit Juárez nightclubs any more. The result, the story points out, is that businesses are shutting down or cutting hours of operation:
Mexican Consul General Roberto Rodriguez Hernandez said the number of visitors crossing into Juárez from El Paso this year is down about 20 percent. “Business has been off because we lost the students on weekends, and the soldiers,” Rodriguez said.
The violence is statewide in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, where Juárez is located. Just last week, gunmen rushed into a bar in the capital city of Chihuahua, south of Juárez, and shot 11 people in what is also considered part of the feud between drug lords, Reuters reported last week. It was the third drug-related massacre in that city since July. The report, carried by the New York Times, said:
A few hours later, federal police officers had a gun battle with a group they suspected of being hit men on the highway from Ciudad Juárez to Chihuahua.
The online intelligence Web site Stratfor reported this week that one of those killed in the Chihuahua bar was a journalist:
This past week also saw a spike in killings in Chihuahua state, where 24 people died in drug-related violence in less than 36 hours. In one case, armed men entered a bar in the capital city of Chihuahua and shot 11 people dead, including a journalist. Many witnesses considered this to be an act of indiscriminate killing, though the presence of a journalist — reporters are popular cartel targets — may simply mean this was a case of unrestrained or undisciplined force being used against a particular target.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that two men were arrested Thursday, accused of killing 24 men whose bodies were found last month in a rural area outside Mexico City:
One of the suspects, Antonio Ramírez Cervantes, is a police commander in Huixquilucan, a suburb of Mexico City where many of the dead men lived, the attorney general’s office said.
The other suspect, Raúl Villa Ortega, has confessed he is a member of the Sinaloa drug cartel, one of the largest and most active crime organizations in the country, the Times said.
The Las Cruces Sun-News article says the violence hasn’t spilled over to the American side in El Paso yet, but that taxpayers in the city of 600,000 have spent more than $1 million treating dozens of shooting victims, several of them U.S. citizens or legal residents, at Thomason Hospital, the only facility for 250 miles equipped to handle such patients. The Sun-News continues:
The hospital has had several lockdowns because of fears that hit men would realize a victim was still alive and cross the border to finish the job — something that has happened in hospitals on the Mexican side.
“The government isn’t in control, and that makes for a very dangerous situation,” said Tony Payan, an expert on border crime at the University of Texas-El Paso. “Anyone at any time can commit a crime and anyone at any time can become a victim.”
