New America Media

CULIACAN, Sinaloa, Mex. — It isn’t the best of times. It is so far the worst of times. Instead of wisdom, there is violence. The age of foolishness has been replaced by official stubbornness; belief has gone all the way south to incredulity. Instead of light, there is death and darkness.

    There was no hope this past spring, and for many civilians, there is despair for this winter.

    As Charles Dickens wrote, “We had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

    Little would Dickens have believed that the opening paragraph of published in 1868, would perfectly describe the situation of a country 5,556 miles away and 142 years in the future.

    The country, of course, is Mexico, and the two cities are Culiacan and Ciudad Juarez. One is a border city to the north, the other sits on the Pacific coast in the state of Sinaloa, almost 1,000 miles to the southwest.

    Both cities share the legacy of the war on drugs launched four years ago by President Felipe Calderon. Culiacan has been known for decades as the center of one of the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in Mexico: the Sinaloa cartel. Juarez is known for the drug-related violence that makes it among the most dangerous places in the world.

    Yet in many ways, the two cities are like night and day. The differences stem from an ugly truth: the generals and commandantes from the drug cartels do their best to fight their wars outside of their own territory. Places that are far away from the narcos’ home turf, thus may be far more damaged and dangerous that their own backyards.

    The differences are most apparent at night. On Friday evenings, plazuela Obregon—the main plaza of Culiacan—is vibrant. Early on, young girls and boys carrying their musical instruments invade the kiosk to delight passers-by with the so-called classicals (Bach, Listz, Mozart) as well as the music of the national composers: Julian Carrillo, Carlos Chavez, and Pablo Moncayo, to name a few.

    Then, as if on cue, as the young players finish their concert, the plaza is invaded by low-riders on their old Harleys; rock bands begin playing songs from the Rolling Stones, The Doors, and even some Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. The main streets turn into vignettes of public carnivals like something out of surrealist comic books.

    Evening in Juarez is very different.

    As soon as the sun sets, people hurry home. You could lie down on Main Street for three minutes without fear of being run over—except by the federal police trucks as they hurry from one crime scene to the next.

    Aside from the killings, numerous middle-class and even poor neighborhoods report receiving phone calls demanding ransom money in exchange for protection: so-called “quotas” ranging from $50 to $100 per household per week. Instead of paying, many residents have opted to replace their old phones with ones that offer caller ID and to ignore any calls from people they don’t know.

    “I just told the commandante that he was welcome to come to the house and take the furniture in the living room because we didn’t have the 500 pesos he was demanding for protection,’’ said Veronica, a housewife in a lower middle-class neighborhood.

    Ciudad Juarez used to be a lively city with great restaurants and nightclubs frequented by Americans, looking for a good time at one-third the cost they would pay at home. People from all over Mexico would travel north in hopes of crossing illegally into the United States, always knowing that if they failed, they could find work at the border.

    According to Federico Ziga Martinez, president of the local business council, in the last three years more than two-thirds of the restaurants and bars in Juarez have closed—some 1,500 to 2,000 businesses. Rather than face constant harassment from organized crime, many have opted to move to nearby El Paso—ironically, one of the safest cities in the United States.

    The devastation to Juarez’s economy is equally visible during the daytime. Most small businesses owners are facing a “triple whammy”—not only a loss of customers and harassment from criminals, but government demands that they pay taxes on capital investments they have not been able to recoup.

    Official figures from the Mexican Institute of Social Security, put unemployment in the city at 17 percent. Many local economists believe the actual figure could be twice as high.

    Even the maquila industry, which at one point provided almost 60 percent of Juarez’s jobs and seemed to be insulated from the economic problems caused by violence, is suffering. Case in point: Manufacturas Avanzadas de Juarez, a company that used to employ 15,000 workers to build high-definition televisions, has reduced its work force to only 200 employees.

    Overall, according to the Mexican Social Security Institute, the maquila work force has shrunk 25 percent from 2007. Many maquila factories implemented programs to help key employees to relocate with their families to El Paso.

    “We carpool everyday from El Paso to Juarez and back for safety,” said Felipe S., an electronic engineer in a Juarez maquila.

    This, of course, has had a domino effect in the local economy, from cleaners to stores selling office supplies and tools. Barely one-third of the 200 construction companies that used to operate in the area now have contracts. The casualties include government projects canceled due to the high cost of public security programs.

    At the rate things are going, business organizations recently declared, the city’s economy will survive for barely another six months.

    In Culiacan, as in Juarez, death is always present. Every day, the newspapers run lists of executions during the previous 24 hours that resemble football scores—for the Sinaloa Cartel or the Zetas. A couple of weekends ago, 14 people were executed in Sinaloa, eight of them in Culiacan.

    But people hardly pay attention, other than reading the stories to assure themselves that friends or relatives are still alive. At least in Culiacan things are better than in 2008, when the violence reached its peak and 1,182 people were executed, 147 in the month of July alone. Somehow, now, residents are able to enjoy life even surrounded by narcos.

    In Juarez, it is impossible not to pay attention. There is no joy. Far from Culiacan and its cartels, yet under their control, the city itself is dying, no matter what the Mexican government says.

José Luis Sierra is a correspondent for NAM. Gustavo Lizárraga is a Mexican journalist and an editor of Culiacan’s newspaper, El Debate.