On the face of one of the most emblematic mountainsides in Ciudad Juárez, onlookers can read the enormous text of a Bible verse that evangelical Christians inscribed a quarter-century ago: “The Bible is the Truth.”
But starting in 2008, at the base of these mountains near the US-Mexico border, a primary school teacher named Lourdes* started to see young people killing each other daily without caring about religion, love for their neighbor, or the presence of the students attending school nearby.
Fifteen years later, while the total number of killings has decreased, Juárez remains one of the most homicidal cities in Mexico. Today, young people are still murdering each other at an alarming rate. Just prior to the end of 2023, the city accounted for more than half of the homicides recorded in the northern state of Chihuahua.
Surrounded on all sides by mountains and desert, Juárez is one part of a massive “international border metroplex” comprised of three international ports of entry that connect it to El Paso, Texas, long one of the safest US cities, on the other side of the border. The sister cities form a hugely important economic corridor for manufacturing and international trade between the United States and Mexico.
Many of the killings in the city are connected to the dozens of rival criminal groups battling to control several lucrative criminal economies, including drug trafficking. Death is all around Lourdes’ students. It has robbed many of their youth and forced them to either leave school and partake in the violence themselves, turn to drugs and alcohol to try and cope with the bloodshed, or a mixture of both.
“It’s left a hole in my soul,” she told InSight Crime.
Lourdes runs a school in the Anáhuac neighborhood, a working-class area not far from downtown Juárez that has remained a focal point for violence since the peak of the bloodshed between 2008 and 2012. As in other parts of the city disproportionately affected by violence, alcohol and drug use are regularly involved in the killings and disappearances of young men and women.
The environment has had irreparable effects on the futures of the 135 students who attend her primary school. At least half of the students have lost a parent to death or prison, while other children have been victims of abuse, according to Lourdes.
“We’re talking about boys and girls who have been severely affected emotionally and mentally, who can hardly learn anything in the classrooms because of how they are impacted by the tremendous context in which they live,” she said.
Routine violence is occasionally punctuated by particularly gruesome incidents. In May, a drug rehabilitation center operating near Lourdes’ school became the scene of a shocking episode in which two staff members beat a patient and suffocated her to death. They dissected the body to remove the skin and muscles until the bones were free, then removed the intestines, placed them in buckets with acid, and proceeded to grind everything in a blender.
“We just try to give them some hope,” Lourdes said, referring to her students. “The authorities don’t realize that these children need a lot of support, so that’s what we try to do with the little we have.”
More Residents, Less Graduates
Providing a solid foundation for youth in Juárez is a daunting challenge. Beyond simply keeping them safe, the city’s violence has other, less obvious impacts educators must be mindful of, which affect family life and child development.
Lourdes remembered one particularly difficult day in May, when about 20 students closely followed instructions given by their dance teacher as they prepared a performance for Mother’s Day.
However, more than half of the girls and boys eventually decided not to take part. Some because their mothers had been killed, others because they knew their mothers would not come due to being jailed or addicted to drugs.
Some children do not make it to school at all. Between 2010 and 2020, the population of Juárez grew from about 1.3 million to 1.5 million. But the number of students who finished primary school during that time dropped more than 50%, from 174,366 in 2010 to just 77,832 in 2020, according to a report by Ciudad Juárez Strategic Plan, a non-government organization working to improve living conditions in the city.
The report analyzed the city’s education system using data from Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics, Geography, and Information (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía y Informática – INEGI) and focused on the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
While the health crisis affected enrollment, experts said more than a decade of violence has had a deeper impact. Declining education rates are closely related to the extreme violence seen in recent years, not so much as a direct effect, but as a consequence of institutional abandonment, according to Hugo Almada, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez.
“Juárez is a city that has never had social policies,” he told InSight Crime. “The conditions that mark this growing deterioration are many years old and cannot be explained without reviewing the recent past.”
This new generation of Juarenses, as locals are known, isn’t the first to experience endemic violence. Their parents were deeply impacted by the bloodshed that gripped the city between 2008 and 2012 following the so-called “war on drugs” launched by former President Felipe Calderón at the end of 2006. During that time, the city saw more than 2,000 murders per year.
While growing up, those parents lived in neighborhoods captured by violent gangs made up of children born from the first wave of newcomers that arrived to Juárez from elsewhere in Mexico amid the boom of the manufacturing industry in the 1970s.
To a large extent, crime in Juárez has always had its origin in drug trafficking and consumption, given the state’s role in production and the city’s location on the border. But since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, the scale of both grew significantly.
By 1998, Rubén Garduño, then the local police chief, spoke of 300 warring gangs involved in drug trafficking. And by the early 2000s, the city would count about 2,000 picaderos, the word locals use to refer to the small, informal stores selling cocaine, heroin, and, more recently, methamphetamine and fentanyl.
The street-level impact of these changes was clear during the first year of the joint operation launched by the federal government in 2008 in Chihuahua. The force’s primary criminal targets were cross-border traffickers — young, middle class youth familiar with the customs system — as well as local police chiefs and members of the hundreds of gangs operating at that time.
But the violence soon spread to areas where the city’s urban sprawl was growing alongside the manufacturing industry in the context of NAFTA.
That same year, Lourdes saw the parents of the students in her care become more unstable. The violence they carried out themselves, or the violence they were victims of, contaminated the lives of their children. Many of the boys and girls she taught went on to become members of the myriad criminal groups that now surround the city’s primary schools.
“This is a generation that was born with the consequences of the crisis of violence that we experienced between 2008 and 2012,” said Almada, the researcher.
Crime and Violence or Drugs and Alcohol
Due to a lack of institutional support, there were — and still are — primarily two paths for the young people Lourdes taught and teaches today: join the ranks of warring criminal groups, fall into alcohol and drug addiction, or both.
Across Mexico, Juárez has long had one of the highest rates of drug addiction, according to data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). This is due in part to the city’s geographic proximity to the United States, the primary destination for drugs trafficked from Mexico.
The lasting effects of addiction are present in the decaying bodies of those that come looking for support, but also in the growing number of drug overdose deaths and murders of consumers, which have risen to unprecedented levels.
Mexico’s last national addiction survey was carried out in 2016. Though it faced criticism for a lack of rigor, it served as a baseline to measure the problem, which was much greater than what had been portrayed by official statistics. Today, one drug that was barely present in that 2016 survey is ravaging the city: methamphetamine.
It wasn’t always like this. Since the 1920s and 1930s, heroin had been the most readily available and consumed drug in Juárez. The southern region of Chihuahua forms part of the so-called “Golden Triangle,” which for many years was Mexico’s epicenter for cultivating opium poppy, the raw ingredient used to produce heroin, until plant-based drugs were replaced by powerful synthetic drugs.
This included methamphetamine, which local activists and community leaders say first surfaced around 2010 and is now the second-most consumed drug in Juárez behind marijuana. The synthetic drug is particularly destructive, both for its lethality and the level of violence it generates among users and the crime groups trafficking it. Nine out of every 10 murders are now linked in some way to the drug, according to reports from the local prosecutor’s office and the Secretary of Public Security.
Much of the alcohol and drug addiction in Juárez stems from a desire to escape the psychological pressure of daily life, Verónica Corchado, the former director of the Municipal Institute for Women in Juárez, told InSight Crime.
In ‘Postwar’ Ciudad Juarez, Children are Still in Serious Danger
“I’m not justifying it, I’m just thinking how these people might think. When you hear it in therapy, when you hear it in talks in self-help groups, you see a deep exhaustion that does not allow you to see a future,” Corchado said.
Young people are forced to think only about surviving. At a summer camp Corchado was invited to last year, for example, she asked a group of young women and men, as well as teenagers, to list the things that make them afraid and then imagine what an ideal environment would look like.
“They knew how to perfectly structure their fears and explain them. But no one could say how it could be different,” she said. “They were unable to visualize an environment with parks, clean streets, and lighting. That thought no longer exists, and that, for me, is a terrible setback.”
*For security reasons, InSight Crime changed the name of the interviewee.