Juarez residents challenge Mexican government’s claim that cartel violence spares law-abiding citizens
Editor’s note: This is the first part of a three-part series examining how transnational criminal organizations are sowing terror in Juarez, Mexico, and extending their tentacles into West Texas and Southern New Mexico, and challenging the Mexican government’s discourse that 90 percent of the violence is gang-on-gang and does not touch ordinary citizens.
The images are graphic, but that is exactly what the residents of working-class “colonias” and their children are exposed to every day south of the border.
North of the border, the docket in U.S. District Court in West Texas and Southern New Mexico reveals hundreds of cases involving migrant smuggling, migrant kidnapping and extortion, arrests in connection to stash houses, drug couriers and weapons smugglers, and almost daily seizures of narcotics as U.S. ports of entry.
El Paso is a city that prides itself on being one of the safest in America but is being infiltrated by a clever and silent enemy: drug cartels.
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JUAREZ, Mexico (Border Report) — In a neighborhood less than a mile south of the Rio Grande, Griselda Casillas holds a photo of her 19-year-old son, Christian.
The young man went missing as he walked home after work at a lumber yard a few months ago.
“He disappeared on a Tuesday and on Saturday they dumped a body three, four blocks from my house. I went to see if it was my son, but it wasn’t him,” Casillas, known to her friends as “Gris,” told Border Report. “I filed a report on Tuesday, Sept. 5. On Wednesday, the next day, they began finding graves two to three blocks from my house.”
https://www.borderreport.com/immigration/border-crime/cartels-death-denial-in-a-region-under-siege-part-one/?ipid=promo-link-block1
