Politics of Terror, Armed Men, and the Abandonment of Ciudad Juarez

For my cultural outing, I attended Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba's talk on Politics of Terror, Armed Men and the Abandonment of Ciudad Juarez at the Buffet Center. In addition to presenting some photos and video, Ruvalcaba presented the research of Daniel Roldán, a student at la Universidad de Ciudad Juarez on the core issues currently plaguing Ciudad Juarez and its people.

Ruvalcaba opened the talk with a series of pictures. "I'm not going to make any comments," he said "I just want to give you a visual image of what Ciudad Juarez is like today." Although we might have expected the images to feature extreme violence, terror and criminality, the photos displayed a completely opposite scene: complete vacancy. A series of data presented after the slideshow revealed that almost 300,000 people fled the city between 2007 and 2010 due to violence, leaving almost 20% of homes in Ciudad Juarez abandoned.

December 2006 marks the beginning of Mexican President Calderon's war on drugs, and simultaneously, a horrific rash of homicides, kidnappings and disappearances. Women are particularly vulnerable, and are often mass-raped and injured as a part of mafia celebrations. "Every time a shipment of drugs crosses the border, the mafia organizes an orgy," Ruvalcaba described, "They kidnap a couple of young women to rape. We know the police are involved because there have been incidents in which we could see marks from the handcuffs."

Criminal involvement of the police and military in Ciudad Juarez was a major theme of Ruvalcaba's talk. Not only are the police directly and indiscreetly involved in criminal operations such as assassinations, rapes, and extortion in Ciudad Juarez, but because the police have aligned with the Juarez Cartel and the military with the Sinaloa Cartel, the two official bodies of armed men have essentially declared war on each other, and left Mexican citizens completely without protection. "You would think that the people would be scared of the criminals," Ruvalcaba stated, "but they're more afraid of the police. To them, the police are the real criminals." Indeed, he continued to note that the police are the largest employer of sicarios in Ciudad Juarez.

But the saddest part of the whole talk was Ruvalcaba's description of the utter desperation and despair in the city. He described an event that had been chronicled in Ciudad Juarez's Diario last year in which a boy was shot while sitting in the passenger seat of his father's car. "He was killed because he was laughing," Ruvalcaba explained, "the guy killed him just because he was happy."