Juarez

Molly Molloy is one of the most trusted and respected people keeping track of the horrible violence wracking Mexico. The following is from an email from her today:


If it weren't so tragic, all this death, it would be kind of funny that the SUV apparently used in these killings is burned on the street in Juarez, right under the noses of the Mexican Attorney General, the US Consulate, the Mexican Army and a host of DEA and FBI investigators.

I am also kind of touched by the movers and shakers in the business community and Juarez are exhorting the President to build a "safe route" into and out of the city—for them. What very little of the press coverage of these consulate killings (in either the US or Mexico) actually says is that the huge majority of the people killed (at least 4,800 in Juarez alone since January 2008 and more than 18,000 in Mexico since Calderon took office in Dec 2006) are ordinary people, most of them poor and struggling to find some measure of economic survival in a place with few options.

In Juarez, these are the majority of the people in the city who must travel day in and day out from and to the dangerous areas where they live, with no schools and no city services, to their maquila jobs that are sometimes 2 hours away from where they live--if they still have maquila jobs...at least 200,000 of those jobs have disappeared since 2008. These are also the people who have no resources that will allow them to leave Juarez for El Paso or other places where they would have a chance to live without the constant violence surrounding them....

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