A Mexican cartel enforcer's prediction about a valuable border territory appears to be coming true

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October 23, 2017 9:49 PM

Violence remains high in Ciudad Juarez and elsewhere in Chihuahua, and it appears to be related to intensifying criminal competition.

Ciudad Juarez has seen a persistent increase in deadly violence over the past two years.
The violence appears in large related to conflict between organized-crime groups.
The state government has attempted to confront criminals and weed out corruption officials, but crime remains high.

In late 2016, a Mexican cartel boss warned that despite a significant decline in violence in Ciudad Juarez after 2012, the struggle for control of drug trafficking there had never ceased.

In the months since, violence in Ciudad Juarez, which sits just over the border from El Paso, Texas, has remained elevated.

The city had 470 homicides in 2016, according to federal statistics, marking the first annual increase since 2012, when fighting between the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels eased.

Some experts said 95% of Juarez's homicides in 2016 were related to organized crime.

According to federal data, Juarez had 446 homicides through September, putting it on pace for nearly 600 homicides this year.

Federal crime data is suspected of undercounting homicides, and data compiled by local newspaper El Diario recorded 532 homicides through September, which saw 72 homicides alone.

Juarez Mayor Armando Cabada said this summer that the violence was directly related to fragmentation of and fighting between organized-crime groups.

Jorge Arnaldo Nava Lopez, prosecutor for Chihuahua's North Zone, also attributed the increase in homicides to organized crime, tying some to internal fighting among criminal groups — in particular to the elimination of people involved in the sale of crystal meth, which has become a focal point for conflict between criminal groups in the city.

The groups fighting over Juarez's local drug sales are also involved in the competition for control of major trafficking routes into the US.

"You need to buy helicopters, bulletproof vests, heavy vehicles to traverse the Sierra de Chihuahua, the hiring of more personnel" to confront heavily armed criminal groups, Cantu said.

"I would also have to contribute a lot of [criminality] to the fact that the local authorities in Juarez have always been and continue to be enormously corrupt," Vigil told Business Insider. "They take sides with the different cartels. They take money from the different cartels, so they do nothing to try to stem the violence that's taking place there ... and my personal opinion is that it's gotten worse than what it was."

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