By Milan Simonich
El Paso Times
Rarely do statistics tell the whole truth, but mark Juárez as an exception.
It accounts for 1 percent of Mexico's population and more than 20 percent of the country's murders.
Juárez is death city, the most dangerous place in North America, and it is getting worse by the year. It has had more than 3,000 murders in 2010, an average of almost nine a day. Sixty-four of its police officers were among those killed.
El Paso, by contrast, saw its number of homicides drop to five this year from 13 in 2009. Both totals were uncommonly low for a city of more than 620,000.
New York City probably will finish 2010 with fewer than 600 homicides, and it has six times the population of Juárez. The Mexican city is home to 1.3 million people.
With a week still left in the year, Juárez has exceeded its 2009 murder toll by 400, an increase of more than 15 percent. The city has almost doubled the 1,608 murders it had in 2008, when the first explosion of violence occurred.
Worse, there is little or no chance that the killings will be solved. Juárez police, who number about 3,000, and investigators from Chihuahua state simply cannot keep pace with the carnage, much of it attributed to gangs and warring drug cartels.
Even if the government in Juárez were 100 percent honest, something no one believes to be true, police could not begin to arrest all the killers in their midst. In an imperfect or corrupt system, criminals have the upper hand.
"One of the things lacking over there is a commitment to law enforcement," said Greg Allen, police chief of El Paso.
Allen said a murder in El Paso brings an immediate show of force and dispersal of vast resources. He and his command staff assign up to 16 detectives and officers to every homicide.
Allen empathizes with those trying to maintain law and order in Juárez, where kidnapping, extortion and murder are so common that even a day of double-digit killings may not make the front page in El Paso. He said his own department, with about 1,100 officers, is overrun with calls from crime victims, though most cases are mild compared with what is happening in Juárez.
"Everything we're doing right now is a Band-Aid effect," Allen said, citing a case in which his officers did not respond to victims of car thefts for more than five hours. He said such inefficiency in El Paso - the safest large U.S. city, according to a survey by CQ Press - is his greatest frustration.
For the conscientious cop in Juárez, knowing that murderers operate with impunity is the worst part of an impossible job.
Randolph Roth, a history professor at Ohio State University who has studied murder from colonial times to the present, said the crisis in Juárez is comparable to a handful of other places.
One was the mafia wars in Sicily during various stretches of the 1900s. France's outlying provinces during its revolution and the American South during Reconstruction were equally violent, as criminal gangs asserted their power, Roth said.
"In all of those places, the central government had not been able to establish its control," he said. "What's happened in Mexico is similar. The cartels have tried to become warlord governments on their own. It is very hard, as we are finding in Afghanistan, to root these factions out."
One commonality in all the most violent places was that law-abiding people fled. This has been the case in Juárez and its environs, said Arvin West, sheriff of Hudspeth County, Texas.
His deputies patrol just across the border from the Mexican towns of Guadalupe and El Porvenir, where an exodus occurred last Easter.
"All the little villages further in evacuated," West said. "Farmers and ranchers just let their horses and cattle go free when they left."
Their fears were legitimate.
One riverside shootout left three men wounded on the U.S. side and another dead on the Mexican side. West said murders in the rural towns of Mexico subsided after springtime. Still, vigilance is his watchword.
"It ain't no safer than it was two years ago. It's a ticking time bomb," West said.
A father and son with ties to El Porvenir died in October, killed by gunmen who invaded their home in Juárez.
The victims, Rito Grado Serrano, 59, and Rigoberto Grado Villa, 37, were perforated with 22 bullets. Though Rito Grado lived in Juárez, he was a government executive of El Porvenir.
Police Chief Allen said El Paso has a sizable shadow population because of people fleeing Juárez. He puts the figure at 30,000, but said "that number is conservative."
Tony Payan, an associate professor of political science at UTEP who specializes in border issues, estimated that the number who have left Juárez for U.S. cities is 80,000 to 100,000.
"I have students who are living four or five to an apartment in El Paso," Payan said. "Even if it's just American citizens or people with dual citizenship moving across, it's a phenomenal number."
The departures, the bullets, the loss of jobs have combined to end night life in Juárez. Shuttered stores dominate shopping areas.
Juárez's massive factories, many tied to American companies, have withstood the trauma better.
"The maquilas have seen an uptick in orders, but they are not adding jobs or capacity," Payan said.
In shell-shocked Juárez, he sees worrisome new developments.
"Men 18 to 35 who were involved with the cartels are dying, dead, disabled," he said.
"More women and juveniles are involved now. The women are not killing, but they are used in drug sales at the retail level."
As for juvenile males, gangs enlist them for extortion and drug running.
So great are the number of murders in Juárez that writing and reading about them can take on an antiseptic quality. Some days the death toll is so numbing, the victims so faceless, that it is as though we are watching people die in television shows.
On Jan. 10, a story in the El Paso Times began this way: "The violence continued Friday in Juárez with at least 18 slayings. ... One man was cut into pieces, another was decapitated, one was hanged, a man in a wheelchair was shot to death and three women were killed."