Over 200,000 People Leave Mexican Border City Due to Violence; 20,000 Homes Abandoned

Some 230,000 people have left Ciudad Juarez, a border city that has become Mexico’s murder capital, in the past three years as the death toll from a gang war topped 7,000, a non-governmental organization said in a new report. About 124,000 people, or 53.9 percent of the total, have sought safe haven in El Paso, Texas, which is just across the border, the Ciudad Juarez Citizens Security and Coexistence Observatory said. The rest have returned to their hometowns, mainly in Durango, Coahuila and Veracruz states, to get away from the drug-related violence. The two Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez, or UACJ, professors used National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics, or INEGI, figures, as well as interviews with emigrants’ families, to come up with the population trend figures for the border city. Ciudad Juarez is the scene of a war for control of smuggling routes between the Juarez and Sinaloa drug cartels. The border city, where more than 2,000 people have been murdered this year, has been plagued by drug-related violence for years. More than 20,000 houses have been abandoned in the border city by people who feared they might become murder, extortion or kidnapping victims, Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said...more