Beautiful, Gruesome, and True by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Author:Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports

Dreams of the Living, Ciudad Juárez

Before it was known as the world’s deadliest city, Ciudad Juárez was a Spanish colonial settlement built around a tall cathedral and a pretty seventeenth-century plaza. Located at the edge of a desert plateau in a rich fertile valley, which was home to indigenous communities dating back twelve thousand years, Juárez is the oldest urban center on the border between Mexico and the United States. Ever since the late nineteenth century and the extension of railways into the area, Juárez, previously known as Paso del Norte (Pass of the North) and named for the former president Benito Juárez, has experienced dramatic cycles of boom and bust.

For a time, Juárez was considered the Las Vegas of Mexico. Local businesses were thriving thanks to an active nightlife sector and whole districts of popular casinos and jostling clubs. But the city grew too fast. International drug traffickers moved in and dramatically grew their business in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan disastrously expanded Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs,” and have been taking advantage of the chaos and dysfunction of Juárez ever since.

The signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, in 1994, allowed for a huge increase in the amount of trade moving back and forth across the border. On the Mexican side, NAFTA had the effect of forcing peasant farmers, manufacturers, and small business owners out of their jobs, which disappeared in the flood of cheap imports and the obliteration of communal farmland, and into the employment of the cartels—as drug smugglers, security guards, and assassins. Later, the security forces that evolved out of the cartels and into self-sustaining militias complicated the situation even further by adding to the list of increasingly theatrical crimes—including decapitation and the hanging of headless bodies from trees, highway signs, and bridges—the killing and kidnapping of migrants, who usually had nothing to do with drug trafficking at all but were merely passing through Mexico from Central and South America along some of the same trade routes heading into the US. A dispiriting number of men formerly employed by the Mexican military, police forces, and elite anti-narcotics units now staffed the upper ranks of the cartels and their offshoot militias.

NAFTA had made it possible for a rush of new foreign-owned factories and processing plants to open just over the Mexican border in cities like Ciudad Juárez. These factories, known as maquiladoras, allowed US and multinational corporations to assemble goods ever-more-cheaply by moving the disparate parts of a given product back and forth across the border at virtually no cost, paying very little for labor. The maquiladoras were vast, charmless, and quickly built in the middle of nowhere, often at the end of long access roads that ran only one way at a time, taking workers into the factory by bus for the start of a shift, and out of it at the end.

Women made up more than half of the maquiladora workforce. Factory owners were said to prefer them to men because they were more likely to accept low wages and less likely to unionize.

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