Frontera NorteSur

Editor’s Note

The Mexican History and Geography Gap

Mexico and the border are once again big news. Stories fill the press about Michele Obama and Hilary Clinton traveling south of the border to show their support for an embattled government. Report after report comes in about the latest atrocities in the so-called narco-war. Journalists rush to the border to check on the “spill-over” violence which, contrary to the assertions of Arizona Senator John McCain and others who contend the US’ southern border is “out of control,” has yet to materialize in a systematic way.

If my 6th grade geography lessons serve me, it would appear the violence McCain refers to is on the other side of the border line in a country called Mexico. Indeed, given the level of violence in places like Ciudad Juarez and Reynosa, it is quite noteworthy how El Paso and other places on the US side of the border are actually far less violent than many communities in the interior of the US. Is anyone proposing to send troops to Albuquerque or Oakland?

For the scary border, though, narratives are constructed, framed and then massaged into the popular consciousness. In this way, policies are shaped, sold to the public and charged to the deficit-wracked public till.

Lately, a story which has received wide exposure is the Associated Press’ piece about Chapo Guzman gaining the upper-hand over the Juarez Cartel in the battle over Ciudad Juarez. Although the story was based on an anonymous source, it was picked up by numerous news outlets and repeated as fact in recent days.

Since the story is shrouded in secrecy, it is almost impossible to judge whether or not it is accurate. How many times have Mexican and US authorities proclaimed the death of the Tijuana cartel?

Like Tijuana, however, events on the ground strongly suggest the violence in Ciudad Juarez is from over. Scores of people have been killed in the city this month alone, including 14 just yesterday, and nobody really knows when or if the slaughter will subside.

Last week, NPR correspondent Ted Robbins reported on the US Border Patrol training Mexican police in Nogales. The report covered a vital issue and raised key questions, but it lacked historical depth. Robbins did not mention how US military, FBI, state and local police departments and other law enforcement agencies have long trained Mexican cops- in the thousands. This has been going on for decades.

The specific skills imparted include interview/interrogation techniques, hostage taking negotiations, crime scene investigations and counterterrorism.

A good follow-up piece might examine how many of the nearly 3400 complaints filed against Mexican soldiers with Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission since 2007 involve personnel trained by the US. A new story might look out how many of the 15,000 ex-soldiers detained during the so-called drug war, according to Mexican Defense Minister Guillermo Galvan, were trained by the US.

Will the latest round of training produce better behaved graduates?

All over the US airwaves and press these days, Tucson author Charles Bowden is a big source for Ciudad Juarez and Mexico news. Bowden provides valuable insights to a largely oblivious US public about the systemic roots and socio-economic context of the crisis raging south of the border, but he also makes some curious statements that deserve further scrutiny and comment.

For example, while speaking on Pacifica Radio this month, Bowden claimed it was difficult to find cocaine in Juarez in 1995, “because the cartels kept a lid on it.” Really? Anyone who knows the city might conclude that Bowden had arrived during a particularly bad dry spell. Cocaine has been readily available in Ciudad Juarez for decades, drug war notwithstanding.

Bowden is also quoted as saying that when he arrived in Ciudad Juarez back in the 1990s he thought he had landed in hell, but later realized it was the border city’s “Golden Age,” considering today’s slaughterhouse. Given Bowden’s experience, one must assume he was being facetious.

For scores of young women who were systematically kidnapped, raped and murdered during the 1990s, the era was anything but the Golden Age. Nor was it the Golden Age for hundreds of families which, to this day, do not know what happened to relatives, both men and women, whisked away by armed commandos only never to be seen again.

Such episodes and the government failure to curb them helped set the stage for the current mayhem.

Prone to the melodramatic, Bowden keeps repeating that “Ciudad Juarez is dying.” His declaration grabs the attention of radio listeners or television viewers, but is it true?

While observers will agree that Ciudad Juarez has been battered, bludgeoned and bloodied, it is quite another thing to say the city is dying. Juarenses are a tough lot, and many people are hunkering down and doing all they can to survive in and improve a place call they home.

I am thinking of the residents of Villas de Salvarcar, scene of the gruesome youth massacre last January, who are organizing a new community library, kitchen and music center for children. I am thinking of the annual Christmas Posada for the children of Lomas de Poleo. I am thinking of the young people who stood on the streets on a recent day collecting for the Red Cross. I am thinking of the young actor with the “Love Juarez” t-shirt who told director Miguel Sabido he wanted his city back.

From the numerous Juarenses who have fled to neighboring El Paso but are sticking close to home, one can observe how many people are making a long-term wager on the home base. And despite the exodus, more than one million people remain in the city.

This is not to pick on Bowden, whose contributions are duly noted, or other reporters for that matter. It’s just a reminder that is imperative for all journalists, the writer included, to scratch beyond the surface, dig into history and thoroughly probe the underbelly of the beast, so to speak.

-Kent Paterson

The Youth Bomb Blows Up

Flashed around the world, the image of Luisa Maria Davila, mother of two of the Ciudad Juarez youths murdered in the now-infamous Villas de Salvarcar massacre last month, scolding Mexican President Felipe Calderon for long-running official indifference photographically captured the reality of a city now nearly destroyed by criminal violence.

While Villas de Salvarcar undoubtedly ranks high among the more notorious episodes of Mexico’s so-called narco war, the bloodshed registered that unforgettable night is far from exceptional in terms of the ages of the victims and their victimizers. Less covered by the international press, for example, was the killing of eight young people at a Torreon nightclub the same weekend as the Villas de Salvarcar slaughter.

According to Riva Palacio, the overwhelming majority were males, “and practically all of them died by guns.”

In Mexico, narco and other forms of criminal violence disproportionately involve the young, and the victims and victimizers are getting younger and younger. The violence affects certain regions of the country more than others, with two of the hardest-hit areas being Ciudad Juarez and the state of Chihuahua in the north and the state of Guerrero in the south, which encompasses the internationally-known resorts of Acapulco and Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo. The link is not accidental.

From Guerrero, marijuana, cocaine and opium for heroin flows north to Ciudad Juarez, where a local drug market of perhaps more than 100,000 users assures a thriving black market economy.

A sampling of events in Guerrero during the past few weeks is illustrative of the nature of the violence claiming many Mexican youths. As the Guerrero State Congress prepared to celebrate a historic anniversary in Iguala late last month, the bodies of seven men estimated to range from 20 to 25 years of age, were found tossed around the city. The victims had been bound, tortured and probably suffocated. All bore cryptic messages labeling them as kidnappers, money lenders and thieves with degrees. The daily El Sur newspaper later reported that one of the victims, Fernando Delgado Torres, was a minor.

Young faces, especially those of men, etch the portraits plastered on the posters of the disappeared. In Zihuatanejo, tourists who snap out of their margarita dazes might notice the huge banner draped on the fence of City Hall pleading for information on the whereabouts of Alberto Acosta Apreza, missing since September 2009. Attentive pedestrians might also see one of the small posters placed around town for Eduardo Hernandez Santacruz, reported disappeared since January 26 of this year.

On February 1, “collateral damage,” in the vocabulary of war planners, claimed the life of five-year-old Yoselin Guadalupe Padilla Corona, who was riding a truck that was ambushed by gunmen in Quecheltanango.

In Acapulco, meanwhile Julieta Fernandez, president of the local DIF family shelter, told the press street children as young as five years of age were addicted to drugs and being used to sell illicit substances.

On Mexico’s Gulf Coast, developments are as alarming as those on Guerrero's Pacific Coast In February, young offenders rioted at a Tabasco “correctional center,” perhaps in a dress rehearsal for the frequent adult prison riots which have turned Mexican penitentiaries, in the judgment of prominent journalist and commentator Miguel Angel Granados Chapa, into de-facto execution chambers. In another news item, Tabasco authorities announced the detention of a 13-year-old girl allegedly trained as a hired assassin.

Smug and racist North Americans are prone to dismiss the violence described above as additional examples of Mexico’s failed state or as inevitable outcomes of an inherently violent culture. Can’t happen in the Good Old USA? Think again. Immediately, the inner-city crack wars of the 1980s come to mind.

Lately, it’s been fashionable in some quarters to explain away Villas de Salvarcar and similar atrocities as the inevitable consequences of the loss of family values and moral turpitude. But there is much more to an explanation.

Writing in Mexico’s Proceso newsweekly last month, columnist Axel Didriksson commented on a recent study by Jack Goldstone on the world’s new “population bomb.”

In Mexico’s case, Didriksson noted, 40 percent of young people aged 16-18 do not study. According to Didrikkson, 10 million young people are not enrolled in school. “Almost one million-and-half youths do not have stable work, and more than two million who obtained higher education do not have adequate work,” he added.

In Ciudad Juarez, academic researchers have coined a term for the idle youth population-Ninis, which translates into no work or no study. Quoted in Proceso, Professor Maria Teresa Marrufo of the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez said another 7,000 local children have lost one or both parents to the drug violence during the past two years.

Viewed through Didrikkson’s demographic lens, it is safe to predict that an almost endless stream exists of future drug consumers, dope dealers, hired killers and other illegal professionals. Unless, of course, economic, social and political conditions undergo radical changes.

“Really, we are facing a time bomb,” Didrikkson concluded.

For Marrufo, the situation in her city is a "social catastrophe."

The youth crisis is not exclusive to Mexico. Citing the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, the Washington, D.C.-based Center for American Progress (CAP) reported this month that the number of young people aged 20-24 who attend school in the US dropped by 10 percent during the last two years. For those in school, skyrocketing tuition in many states promises many a post-graduate, job-thin future of debt servitude.

Young people are being denied gainful employment in massive numbers. And as always, communities of color are disproportionately affected by the unemployment crisis. According to the CAP, at least 14 percent of African-American adolescents and 23 percent of low-income Latinos in the same age range are unable to find a job. Shirley Sagawa, CAP visiting fellow, noted that many youths “could wind up permanently marginalized economically.”

What shreds will the youth bomb leave if it blows up north of the border?

-Kent Paterson

Swine Flu, Border Security and Public Priorities

It couldn’t have struck at a worse moment. Reeling from economic crisis and public insecurity, Mexico was now faced with a public health emergency of unknown proportions. Across the country, from Tijuana in the north to Tapachula in the south, schools were closed, masses canceled, restaurants and nightclubs shuttered, museums and libraries shut down, and workplaces put on reduced hours.

Slammed with travel warnings and restrictions from abroad, Mexico’s important tourist industry, already teetering on the brink, was threatened with a coup de grace from the deadly hand of the swine flu.

Aguascalientes’ beloved San Marcos National Fair, the country’s largest spring festival, was canceled in the middle of festivities. Ironically, it was the controversial pop star Gloria Trevi (locked up for several years in a Chihuahua prison accused of corrupting minors before being acquitted) who delivered the final performance. The loss of an annual spring rite replete with love, wine, song and dance was added to the heartbreak of dying or sick relatives and friends.

In Mexico, the spring flowers withered and died this year.

In almost surrealistic fashion, an April 27 earthquake reportedly killed two people in the state of Guerrero and rattled Mexico City. Interviewed in a city which suffered major water shortages prior to the swine flu outbreak, a young woman described the feeling in the Mexican capital as apocalyptic.

It is still too identify the origin of the Mexican swine flu epidemic, but news reports link the possible start of the health crisis to a huge, runaway US pig farm located in the Veracruz-Puebla borderlands. The farm in question is owned in part by US-based Smithfield Foods, the largest hog and pork producer in the world and a company with a record for environmental violations on this side of the border.

Residents of the community of La Gloria have long protested unsanitary conditions, thick clouds of flies, unrelenting odors, and groundwater contamination allegedly coming from the factory farm. In response, the state governments of Veracruz and Puebla have slapped protestors with legal charges and sent in the police to arrest them.

Early this week, Smithfield Foods said tests found no evidence of swine flu in its employees or animals. Mexican Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova said it was “adventurist” to blame the Veracruz countryside for the health epidemic and, in a comment sure to surprise many US health officials, added that swine flu was present in California and Texas before it was in Mexico.

Another high Mexican health official, Miguel Angel Lezana, expounded on the theme. Dissociating the pig farm from the killer virus sweeping the country, Lezana said it was difficult to determine where swine flu originated and may have in fact come from Asia or the United States.

Whatever true story of the swine flu outbreak finally emerges, it is almost certain the public health emergency, which could last for weeks, will have major political, social and economic ramifications for Mexico and its relations with the US and other nations.

Which brings us to the real meaning of border security. In recent months, both Washington and Mexico City have placed heavy emphasis on increasing border law enforcement. Coming from multiple branches of government, proposals are on the table to station more National Guard troops on the border, beef up local law enforcement agencies, set up additional border checkpoints and crack down on allegedly rampant gun running, to name a just a few.

Although the sheer volume of official, security-related statements (frequently contradictory) flowing from corridors of power on both sides of the border is challenging for even a news editor to follow and decipher, it is clear billions of new dollars are in the pipeline to government agencies and private contractors charged with implementing a cross-border security strategy.

Yet new border walls or state-of-the-art cameras didn't stop swine flu from crossing the border, south to north or north to south.

All this is not to say that Mexico and the US are totally unprepared to handle health emergencies like the swine flu. A healthy degree of cooperation exists among health professionals of the two neighboring countries, though much more remains to be done.

But serious questions about the ability of either country to handle a pandemic are the talk of the press. An individual connected to a major New Mexico hospital acknowledged to a media colleague that the institution would be rapidly overwhelmed if large numbers of people fell ill with swine flu.

The insider’s revelation is not surprising to journalists who probe the vast underbelly of New Mexico outside celebrity-haunted Santa Fe. Despite undergoing much-trumpeted economic growth in recent years, New Mexico has many trappings of the Third World-underdeveloped colonias, mounting water shortages, lousy wages, high prices, rural doctor shortages, few dentists anywhere, and hundreds of thousands of people without health insurance. In numerous ways, New Mexico is not all that far removed from the Mexican reality.

A state that was once considered best suited for atomic bomb tests or treated as a quaint stop-over for Indian curios on the Chicago-LA highway, now ironically stands as the model of development for growing sections of the United States, where the Third World is settling in, too.

Like the financial meltdown of 2008, the swine flu is a wake-up call furiously ringing on both sides of the border. Will protecting public health make it up the list of political priorities for the respective governments?

-Kent Paterson

Editor’s Note-January 2009

The arrival of Barack Obama to the White House has unleashed an avalancheof hopes, expectations and demands for change. On the US-Mexico border,many elected officials, citizen activists, church leaders, and ordinaryresidents seek fundamental reforms in everything from immigration policyto an existing border-crossing infrastructure that leaves a lot to bedesired.

Still unresolved are numerous environmental issues from previousdecades, such as a thorough clean-up of the old Asarco smelter in El Paso.Fast on the heels of the departure of the Bush administration, a freshround of activism is spreading with each passing day.

Publicdemonstrations, letter-writing campaigns, Capitol Hill lobbying and moreexamples of citizen involvement characterize the first days of the Obamaera. In San Antonio, Texas, the Southwest Workers Union and its allies areorganizing a border activists’ assembly between March 27-29 of this year.The event could give birth to a new movement.It seems people are taking seriously the notion, advanced by PresidentObama himself, that real change comes from below and not from above.

Yet it remains to be seen if the basic parameters of the US-Mexicorelationship, shaped by free trade on the one hand and by a US emphasis onborder security on the other, will be tempered in the coming months andyears by action on labor, human rights, environmental and social problemsthat have festered for years.Grassroots activism is also on the upswing south of the border.

FromMexico City to Ciudad Juarez and from Reynosa to Culiacan, farmer, laborand popular organizations are spending the last few days of Januaryprotesting in the streets, occupying government offices and blockadinghighways and border bridges.Their grievances range from the high cost of importing used automobiles tothe seemingly never-ending crisis in the agricultural sector.

A commonthread weaving the protests together is a swelling demand to change the direction of Mexico’s economic policy and even renegotiate the NorthAmerican Free Trade Agreement.The historic election of Barack Obama is also sending ripples of changeinto Mexico’s political system.

The young US president is extremelypopular in Mexico; many eyes were glued to the tube January 20 south ofthe border as well as north of it.Some Mexican political analysts even wonder who will be Mexico’s Obama in2012, speculating that a young, dynamic candidate with an image of comingfrom outside the traditional political establishment will have the bestchance of becoming the next Mexican president three years from now.Of course, predicting the future is always risky business for journalists.Nonetheless, the year 2009 promises to be an extremely interesting ride.

-Kent Paterson

A Year of War, Recession and Repression

Many people in the borderlands will say good riddance to 2008. On both sides of the border, war, recession and repression were words that will almost certainly stand out in the writings of future historians recapturing a tumultuous year.

Undoubtedly, the narco war in Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana and other regions of Mexico ranked high among the top stories of the year. A staid German think tank, the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research, even put Mexican narco-violence in the same category as conflicts in Colombia and the Middle East.

In Ciudad Juarez alone, approximately 1,600 people were slain. Since December 1, 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderon came to office, more than 8,000 people have perished in narco-violence nationwide, according to the latest press accounts.

Although Ciudad Juarez has long been a violent place, several trends made this year’s violence particularly gruesome. Decapitations, public massacres and the gunning down of innocent bystanders shocked even a public accustomed to violence. As warring gangs roamed the streets, reports of kidnappings, bank robberies, arson attacks, and extortions shot through the roof.

The year also stood out for its record toll of women’s homicides. Eighty one women were reported slain by the first half of December, though some accounts put the number far higher. Like their male counterparts, most female victims were linked to gangland violence, but sex-related crimes continued to appear and young women disappear.

Few recall that the first homicide victim discovered in 2008, 20-year-old Joanna Radilla Lucero, was reportedly raped and stabbed to death.

Rolled out as the official response to narco-violence, the Mexican army’s Operation Chihuahua Together was a spectacular failure. Violence actually increased after the army entered the conflict, and some soldiers were implicated in human rights violations.

In short, what little semblance to law and order that existed in Ciudad Juarez went up in a bloody haze of smoke during the War of 2008. Not surprisingly, those with the wherewithal hightailed it of Dodge as fast as they could cross the border; perhaps thousands of Juarenses fled to the United States this year.

While the press dutifully reported the daily body counts, little discussion took place about the wider implications of the carnage. In Ciudad Juarez, for instance, thousands of families are now traumatized from experiencing the loss of loved ones or from simply the threat of becoming the next victim. Some schools have found it difficult to even function. A generation of orphans is being created, and in the case of the long-running femicides, a second generation of survivors is left with persistent emotional and psychological scars.

Across the scooped up, channeled strip of land that sometimes passes as the Big River and which provides a neat division between Mexico and the US, many people like to pretend that they are safely removed from the disaster underway on the other side of the border.

This denial ignores the myriad family, cultural and commercial bonds that tie the borderlands together. What happens on one side inevitably reverberates on the other.

Another, little-examined development could greatly complicate the picture. El Paso will soon host a dramatic expansion of Fort Bliss. The city’s good fathers and citizens welcome the infusion of new money that thousands of soldiers and their families will inject into an always struggling economy But many of the newcomers, returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will struggle with demons of their own as they attempt to cope with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Ironically, they will have plenty of company in the thousands of Juarenses, adults and children alike, who suffer PTSD from a war underway in their homeland, according to Mexican psychologists recently quoted in the press.

Is the Paso del Norte prepared to handle a massive, multi-generational PTSD problem stemming from wars both close to home and in distant foreign lands? What preparations are the schools taking to address the needs of children who suffer from the loss of a relative or the memories of seeing a human being slaughtered before their very eyes? Are governments adequately budgeting for this emergency? Are they even aware of its existence? Will the Paso del Norte one day become known as PTSD Border?

Often, what is not said in the press is just as important as what is said. Many of the international press stories about Ciudad Juarez glossed over or completely ignored the other disaster, the economic one, that also wreaked havoc on the border city in 2008.

Export manufacturing, the city’ s largest legal industry, was hit hard by the US economic collapse, with more than 25,000 workers losing their jobs in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua state this year.

Price increases pummeled workers who were offered a minimum wage increase of roughly 16 cents a day as the year drew to an end. In such a landscape, perhaps it is not surprising that some choose to ease their pain with poppy dreams or cocaine highs.

Ten or fifteen years ago, a popular press narrative framed Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and Monterrey as glittering examples of the free-trade driven future of a Mexico firmly irrevocably bound to the United States and Canada. The successes of the dynamic northern Mexican cities were contrasted to the impoverished, backward regions of a southern Mexico relatively isolated from the world economy.

The norteno trio was trumpeted as the vanguard of an economic modernization that would shake Mexico out of its “cultural stupor” and begin Mexican workers on the wondrous path to the consumer middle class. In 2008, harmonization was indeed reached for workers on both sides of the border. Long part of the diet south of the border, an economic stew of declining wages, exaggerated price hikes for food and other basic necessities, credit crises, and collapsing banks became the order of the day north of the border too.

Meanwhile, NAFTA’s Three Cities of Gold, the promised Dorados of the 21st Century, were awash in violence, crime, drugs, and corruption. Is this mere coincidence?

Which brings another issue to mind: immigration. Excluded from the North American Free Trade Agreement, the migrant question refused to go away as millions of people, uprooted by adverse economic forces and lacking legal walking papers, desperately sought refuge in the American Dream. Thousands died trying to cross the border north.

In 2008, news stories stressed how the economic crisis and tighter US border controls, including a controversial wall, slowed the passage of undocumented people.

But the year ended with a solution to the fates of nearly 12 million undocumented people in the US still blowing in the wind. As politicians largely avoided the issue, the Bush Administration stepped up incarcerations and deportations of undocumented migrants.

It remains to be seen if a new administration in Washington, led by an African-American elected to office with overwhelming support from Latino and other communities of color, will achieve a new immigration reform or simply put off the issue for another day.

On the border, many are already asking President-elect Obama and his incoming administration to address not only the immigration dilemma, but tackle long-neglected infrastructure needs, environmental crises, economic inequalities and educational deficits as well.

In both the US and Mexico,labor, farm and culture activists demand the renegotiation of NAFTA, but in Mexico City the issue is off the table. Whether the new US president will act on an early campaign pledge to take a second look at the treaty is another burning question awaiting an answer in the new year.

-Kent Paterson

Fear of Rain, Love of Money 

In a region defined by drought, you might consider it odd that many people cringe with fear when rain clouds hover overhead. But that’s a common reaction in
the Paso del Norte borderlands during the summer rainy reason. And for good reason.

On the morning of July 28, Mexican authorities evacuated hundreds of families from the El Barreal section of Ciudad Juarez . It was the second time this month El Barreal’s residents watched their homes get flooded.

A collection of subdivisions, El Barreal was settled by maquiladora industry workers, many of whom uprooted their lives in southern Mexico in the perpetual search for a better life on the border. Now, some have lost practically everything.

El Barreal was not a natural disaster, per se. Incredibly, its houses were built on a depressed piece of land, known locally as “Duck Lake,” that indeed turns into a lake when the rain clouds explode in fury, as they dutifully did when the “remnants” of Hurricane Dolly swept through the region last weekend.  

Even before Dolly’s dastardly encore, the local press abounded with stories about alleged improprieties between housing developers and state and local officials, inadequate storm water controls and substandard construction. In the bigger scheme of things, El Barreal, was part of a national housing boom that put low-income working families into tract-style housing built by private developers. Credit, available for the first time to many, underwrote the boom. It was Mexico’s version of the Homeownership Society.  

Quoted in the Norte daily, Jose Luis Rodriguez, a former Ciudad Juarez municipal official, explained the system:  

“This all has a political background, aside from the real estate profiting, the pay-offs to political campaigns. There are landowners who invest heavily in candidates for governor and municipal president and later cash in, putting their own people in key government positions, where they become operators for the benefit of individuals…”

Outraged by their losses and crying fraud, a group of El Barreal’s residents has filed a complaint with the official Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission, which will probe possible influence trafficking and turn over its findings to the state attorney general’s office for legally possible but politically tricky prosecutions against culpable officials. No charges have been announced so far.

Commenting on the controversy, Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza was quoted as saying responsible parties should pay for their “broken dishes” but it was more important to address the immediate needs of flood victims.

El Barreal is not unique. Across Ciudad Juarez, scores of neighborhoods suffer flooding every year, even though a plan is on file with the municipal planning department to properly channel the waters that frequently turn a landlocked desert city into a raging, debris-filled river. As news stories report, the city’s archaic storm and waste water drainage system is in a state of virtual collapse. Perhaps symbolically, the historic San Jose Mission, built in the 1700s, collapsed in the most recent storm.

Mexico’s federal government has declared Ciudad Juarez a disaster zone eligible for emergency assistance. But another quick fix begs an important question: What happened to the billions of dollars promised for improving border infrastructure when the North American Free Trade Agreement was negotiated?  

Fifteen years later, Ciudad Juarez’s crumbling basic infrastructure and washed-out neighborhoods stand in contrast with the state-of-the art maquiladora plants, upscale stores and ritzy new hotels that decorate a city pushing two million inhabitants; another reminder that economic growth is not always synonymous with social development.

The US side of the border is vulnerable too, as Dolly’s devilish tail demonstrated.Located northeast of Ciudad Juarez-El Paso, the New Mexico mountain resort of Ruidoso attracts many visitors from the borderlands. A July 26 weekend getaway, though, became a nightmare as fierce rains pounded the town, pushed the Ruidoso River over its banks, washed out bridges, trapped vacationers and killed one man. Preliminary property damages were conservatively estimated in the $15 million range.

More rain fell in Ruidoso in a 24-hour period than during any comparable time frame since 1963, according to press accounts.  Flooding was also reported around El Paso and Las Cruces, New Mexico, where the city received twice as much rain in one day than it had during the entire year. Similar events punctuated 2006, the year of “Little Katrina.”

Northern Mexico and the US Southwest are in a strange environmental predicament. Climate change scientists and other researchers predict long-term drought on the one hand and more violent weather disturbances on the other. In a cruelly ironic future, the region’s inhabitants could see months go by without any rain only to suffer super-flash floods caused by abnormal amounts of rainfall.

Are El Barreal and Ruidoso harbingers of more climatic destruction yet to come? Are governments on either side of the border seriously planning or budgeting for all the possible consequences?

-Kent Paterson