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.”
Police in Juarez over the next two days pulled eight bodies from the ground in the Portal del Valle neighborhood. Griselda’s son was not among them. But it was just the latest gruesome find in a city where many ordinary citizens are experiencing the terror of the drug cartels.
Severed heads have been left inside coolers in neighborhood parks. Dismembered bodies were abandoned in tubs in apartment building parking lots. Individuals have been killed; their bodies stuffed in storm drains. And bodies wrapped in blankets have been placed in front of elementary schools.
City leaders insist 90 percent of the violence in this city — where two drug cartels and several smaller organized criminal groups operate — is gang-on-gang and rarely affects ordinary citizens.
“The important part is they don’t mess with civilians. These are problems among gangs. There are one or two (people) affected for whom we grieve, but the violence is among the gangs,” said Juarez Chamber of Commerce President Rogelio Rodriguez.
But in interviews in the past two months in Juarez’s working-class neighborhoods, known colloquially as “colonias,” Border Report ran into numerous instances of ordinary citizens victimized and law-abiding residents routinely witnessing bloodshed.
“One of the worst things I have seen is a shooting where two children were murdered. People came, shot the father dead and there were two children in the car. They also killed the children,” said Roxanna Gallegos, who works in the Riberas del Bravo neighborhood near the Rio Grande.
A survey released last month by the Mexican government shows that 40% of adults in Juarez witnessed a shooting or heard shots in the previous three months. Seventy percent told researchers from the National Institute of Information, Statistics and Geography they don’t feel safe in their city.
“It is rough. It is ugly here. I have seen assaults, and, on this corner, I once found a guy, dismembered. In the last few years, Colonia Azteca has become a disaster. It is ugly,” said an elderly resident of one of the largest working-class neighborhoods in Juarez.
States like Guanajuato and Baja California recorded more homicides than Chihuahua — where Juarez is located — through the end of August. But Chihuahua was leading Mexico in the number of “atrocities.”
Crime experts say intimidation tactics between rival gangs become acts of terror when the bodies or body parts are left in public spaces to make residents afraid as well. These tactics expose everyone in the neighborhood, including children, to carnage and trauma.
Oscar Maynez is a former Chihuahua police criminalistics expert. He now runs a nonprofit for victims of crime that is guarded by private security and an iron gate.
He says the drug gangs have been killing people with impunity in Juarez for so long that people have no choice but to live with it.
“People need to continue living. People tend to avoid going out if they see extreme violence, but (eventually) they need to get food, go to work, take their kids to school, so they adapt,” Maynez told Border Report. “Unfortunately, when we adapt, we stop putting pressure on the authorities to deal with the issue.”
That’s why it’s so easy for politicians and police officials to say, “OK, this is a fight among criminals,” and leave it at that, Maynez said. The lack of consequences fosters more violence, he said. Triggermen are caught sometimes, but the drug lords, the “intellectual authors,” seldom are brought to justice.
Maynez encourages residents who witness crimes to seek help for themselves and their children and to cooperate with the authorities.
That is easier said than done. Relatives of crime victims say authorities are quick to label murders as drug-related — as if saying the victims got whatever they had coming. But the drug scene in Juarez — and most of urban Mexico — has changed in the past few years.
A drug trade that primarily consisted of producing drugs for export to the U.S. is quickly expanding into a domestic retail industry. Young men and women are being enticed to consume drugs and later recruited to sell drugs to their friends, drug experts say. In Juarez, it is mostly drug users and pushers, not drug traffickers, that are being killed.
Karla Valenzuela’s son went missing in September. He left work at a fast-food restaurant to hang out with a friend to wait for his girlfriend to finish her shift at a jewelry store.
Mexico in 2021 legalized recreational marijuana and the mom and her son, Jesus Alejandro, 20, had an argument because he started smoking. Previously, they had argued about tattoos and the young man dying his hair blond — typical disagreements between a protective mom and a son expressing an identity.
“I am not blind. I cannot say he was perfect. He smoked marijuana. What I can assure you of is that he only consumed. I know because he lived with me. He did not sell drugs. You can tell. That is obvious,” Valenzuela told Border Report.
The problem with Mexico’s marijuana laws is that the rules for lawful sales are still pending. That means people like Jesus Alejandro are still buying “baggies” from street dealers.
Karla believes her son and his friend, Donovan, ventured into Downtown Juarez — known as El Centro — at night. She suspects they were abducted by gang members who thought they were going to re-sell the drugs, or who tried to sell them hard drugs that they refused to buy. The cartels in Juarez for the past four years have been pushing sales of methamphetamine.
Valenzuela said she located her son’s cellphone in a second-hand store, but the police refused to seize it. She said other family members learned of a home in El Centro where several people were being held against their will. She wanted to check that lead but was afraid of being abducted herself.
“We know authorities are involved. I felt fear just putting up posters in Downtown. I felt watched the whole time,” Valenzuela told Border Report. “I don’t know if it’s the hawks (lookouts) or police. Everyone knows the police are aware of who sells drugs. They can’t say anything, either, because it is something beyond them. It is a big mafia. If one complains to the wrong person, who knows what will happen.”
Days after the interview, Juarez police pulled what was initially reported as four bodies from a shallow grave in the back of a house in El Centro. Jesus Alejandro Valenzuela and his friend Donovan, 19, were among the dead.
A forensic examination later revealed it was only three bodies, and that Jesus Alejandro and Donovan were strangled. Crime experts and police officials have told Border Report strangulation is a method typically used when someone is already subdued and being questioned violently.
In this case, at least two of the victims were young men just trying to buy some marijuana.
