Downtown Juárez: Underworlds of Violence and Abuse

By Howard Campbell

At least 200,000 people have died in Mexico’s so-called drug war, and the worst suffering has been in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. How did it get so bad? After three decades studying that question, Howard Campbell doesn’t believe there is any one answer. Misguided policies, corruption, criminality, and the borderland economy are all factors. But none of these reasons explain how violence in downtown Juárez has become heartbreakingly “normal.”

A rigorous yet moving account, Downtown Juárez is informed by the sex workers, addicts, hustlers, bar owners, human smugglers, migrants, and down-and-out workers struggling to survive in an underworld where horrifying abuses have come to seem like the natural way of things. Even as Juárez’s elite northeast section thrives on the profits of multinational corporations, and law-abiding citizens across the city mobilize against crime and official malfeasance, downtown’s cantinas, barrios, and brothels are tyrannized by misery.

Campbell’s is a chilling perspective, suggesting that, over time, violent acts feed off each other, losing their connection to any specific cause. Downtown Juárez documents this banality of evil—and confronts it—with the stories of those most affected.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Nov 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781477323915

Book preview

Downtown Juárez

Underworlds of Violence and Abuse

HOWARD CAMPBELL

University of Texas Press

Austin

The writing of this book was made possible by the Professorship for Western Hemispheric Trade Policy Studies provided by the Texas A&M Research Foundation, the University of Texas System, and UTEP’s College of Liberal Arts.

Copyright © 2021 by the University of Texas Press

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First edition, 2021

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Campbell, Howard, 1957– author.

Title: Downtown Juárez : underworlds of violence and abuse / Howard Campbell.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020049977 (print) | LCCN 2020049978 (ebook)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2388-5 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2389-2 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2390-8 (lib ebook)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2391-5 (non-lib ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Violence—Mexico—Ciudad Juárez. | Drug traffic—Social aspects—Mexico—Ciudad Juárez. | Street life—Mexico—Ciudad Juárez. | Bars (Drinking establishments)—Social aspects—Mexico—Ciudad Juárez. | Brothels—Social aspects—Mexico—Ciudad Juárez. | Violence—Mexico—Ciudad Juárez—History. | Ciudad Juárez (Mexico)—Social conditions.

Classification: LCC HN120.C48 C36 2021 (print) | LCC HN120.C48 (ebook) | DDC 303.60972/16—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049977

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049978

doi:10.7560/323885

Contents

Introduction: Borders of the Mind—Violence in Ciudad

Juárez, Mexico

1. Synergistic Violence and the Normalization of Abuse in a Border Context

2. The Bridge: Concentrations of Power, Economic Exchange, and Transnational Humanity

3. The Historical Roots of Violence, Crime, and Abuse in Downtown Juárez and Colonia Bellavista

4. Colonia Bellavista Today

5. Avenida Juárez Today

6. Prostitution and Sex Workers in the Downtown Street Scene

7. Contemporary Gay Pick-Up Scenes and Danger in Downtown Juárez

8. Border Bar Life: The General Scene and Ambience

9. A Place without Limits: Inebriation and Dehumanization at The Club

10. Conviviality, Drug Deals, Sexual Abuse, and a Juárez-Based Philosophy of Masculine Nihilism

11. Bars as Sites and Languid Staging Areas for Petty Crimes: Hanging Out in the 69 Lounge, Waiting for Something to Happen

12. Downtown Bars as Locations of Both Pleasure and Victimization: Sex, Drugs, and Extortion at El Antro

13. Bars and Criminality: Human Smugglers and Cross-Border Drug Smugglers in Central Juárez

14. Everyday Drug Dealers in Downtown Juárez

15. Human Perseverance amidst Recurring Drug Wars

16. The Naturalization of Drug Violence: Hit Men and Drug Killings

17. Paloma Makes a Life in the Downtown Bars: Survival amidst Crime, Violence, Drugs, and Sexual Abuse

Conclusion: Synergistic Violence and the Cycle of Victimization on the Border

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Photographs appear

Downtown Juárez, the site of the research. Courtesy of Stephanie Morales.

Introduction: Borders of the Mind—Violence in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

Ciudad Juárez es número uno

Ciudad Juárez es the number one

y la frontera más fabulosa y bella del mundo.

JUÁREZ ES EL NÚMERO UNO, JUAN GABRIEL¹

Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, is world-renowned as a violent city and as the Mexican community most affected by the so-called Mexican drug war. The drug war was never the kind of war that is officially declared but rather an ongoing fifteen-year series of massacres, gun battles, assassinations, murders, and various and sundry crimes that has claimed over two hundred thousand lives and left seventy thousand missing (Zavala 2019). The main participants in the conflict include drug cartels, street gangs, the Mexican military, local and national police forces, and common criminals. Videos of gruesome torture and images of decapitated bodies, dismembered bodies strewn across city streets, and corpses left dangling from highway overpasses are disseminated worldwide (Valencia 2018). There is no real indication that this ongoing near-civil war has tapered off either nationally or in Juárez.

This book consists of ethnographic descriptions of downtown Ciudad Juárez and its environs, primarily its underworld bars, shadowy side streets, ramshackle hotels, and gritty barrios in which drug dealing, prostitution, and violence are widespread. It seeks to explain how the circumstances of the US-Mexico border have normalized and naturalized particular types of violent and abusive behavior. Unfortunately, out-of-control violence is now generalized across large swaths of Mexico, where more than thirty-five thousand recorded homicides occurred in 2020 alone and where thousands more were kidnapped or disappeared,² most presumably murdered. This book examines the conditions that lead to violence in central Juárez.³

The primary data derive from my fieldwork on the US-Mexico border, especially in downtown Juárez, over a thirty-year period. During the course of research work in the streets and bars of central neighborhoods, I met many people who have been deeply impacted by the violence, as well as some of those who have committed violent acts. Most of my informants are the poor who live and work downtown. They include sex workers, addicts, drug dealers, barflies, bar owners, bartenders, human smugglers, unemployed or underemployed workers, American expatriates, street vendors, and others who make their living hustling in the streets along the borderline.

Borders are challenging sites for ethnographic research for many reasons. In multiple publications, Josiah Heyman has explained how one of the most distinguishing features of the US-Mexico border is the combined yet uneven development, that is, the enduring and sharp social and economic inequalities (Vélez-Ibañez and Heyman 2017; Herrera Robles 2016). When people who are entwined, but incommensurate, interact with each other, their encounters, especially along borders, are often freighted with a bittersweet element of tragedy or farce (Kearney 1991). Intercultural communication and interaction are always problematical, but especially so across the hotly contested borderlands of international, ethnic, and class divisions (Ortiz, Contreras Montellano, and Del Castillo, 2011). The border contact zones I studied, such as the Bellavista neighborhood and the downtown Juárez streets in which these different groups collide, are fraught with conflict and danger. My goal is to overcome these obstacles and to present fresh insights into the ongoing causes of violence in Juárez and, by extension, the ongoing causes of violence in Mexico as a whole.

We have heard and know much about the physical borders—the walls, the fences, the barricades, and the checkpoints that divide us along ethnic and national lines (Jusionyte 2018), but most of us know little and understand less about the scarcely tangible borders of language, culture, custom, and local circumstance, which all contribute to objectification, dehumanization, and violence. An ethnographic approach can help probe more deeply into what really happens in the streets and back alleys of Juárez. Who really killed all those men, women, and children? And why? And how? What is it like to live in a place so tyrannized by violence, injustice, and misery? What other stories can we tell about such a city? What other explanations can we offer?⁴

Juárez in the Academic and Popular Imagination

Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, is a vast industrial city located at the northern border of Mexico immediately adjacent to the Rio Grande/Río Bravo and El Paso, Texas (Martínez 2018). It also abuts southern New Mexico. From the tourist vista on Scenic Drive, on the stark face of the desert mountain high above downtown El Paso, Juárez sprawls away to the south, east, and west as far as the eye can see, with the Juárez Mountains serving as a jagged backdrop. From the Pan-American Highway south of Juárez, looking north toward the border, Juárez similarly looms on the horizon, a vast City of the Plain, to paraphrase the title of one of Cormac McCarthy’s border novels. No one knows the exact population of Juárez, but it is likely about 1.5 million.

There are many parallel Juárezes, but at bare minimum one can identify first the modern and wealthier northeastern side of the city with its broad, well-paved streets and highways, American chain restaurants, luxury car dealerships, large hotels, shopping malls, mansions, middle-class suburbs, and generally US style and appearance, and second the enormous western half of the city, large parts of which are formed by irregular settlements (colonias populares), their do-it-yourself architecture populated by hundreds of thousands of residents, mostly poor. In the hills of the far west side there are few parks, public services, stores, or civic amenities among the hundreds of neighborhoods and barrios whose rutted, potholed lanes lack even streetlights. Poverty only increases as one proceeds further south and west. Some of these neighborhoods are so far disconnected from the municipal government that even though they have piped water and so are at least theoretically connected to the city water utility system, residents receive no monthly bill. Each of these neighborhoods is controlled, to a greater or lesser extent, by a gang usually associated with the Aztecas, the Mexicas, or the Artistas Asesinos.⁵ The third area, the eastern and southeastern parts of the city, built more recently on the flat farmlands formerly devoted to the cultivation of irrigated agriculture, also include huge tracts of vacant rocky ground that comprise a kind of no-man’s-land where women are often attacked and dead bodies dumped. Here, along with the usual patchwork of board-and-cinderblock homes of the countless poor, are also colonias with more recently constructed government-financed housing projects of the shabbiest kind, which have speedily fallen into decay due to corruption, crime, and neglect. Poverty is rampant in these areas, as is crime and violence, although the hundreds of international maquiladora factories known as twin plants are, for the most part, located in this area of the city.

These factories, however, are in segregated industrial parks, securely fenced in and walled off from the surrounding neighborhoods. The maquiladora industrial parks are also found in other locations such as the older industrial zone closer to the center of the city. The maquilas exist, essentially, as neocolonial foreign enclaves within the vastness of the desert city. They often feature bright-green manicured lawns, ultramodern glass-box office complexes, and tidy well-striped parking lots, for all intents and purposes presenting the appearance of an American factory uprooted from Anywhere, USA, although nearly all the production-line employees are poor Mexicans. Perhaps the most common feature of the maquilas is the fortress-like walls and fences, the razor wire, the electronically controlled gates, the private army of armed security guards, and the phalanx of security cameras and surveillance equipment designed to keep the general public out and far away, while maintaining close control over the workers. Fourth, and finally, there is the tired and faded old downtown area, the former central business district, the historic heart, the oldest and best-known part of the city, and the part most closely connected to international pedestrian foot traffic across the border.

Starting in 2018 and continuing to the present, central Juárez suddenly began to overflow with Central American, South American, Cuban, African, and Asian refugees, as well as many others from southern Mexico, all of whom sought asylum in the United States. Thousands of poverty-stricken and victimized immigrants crossed the Rio Grande and turned themselves in to US authorities en masse in a weary procession as heart-wrenching and tragic as that of the millions of refugees from Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and African nations who at the same time attempted to enter Europe. As a result of the Trump administration’s cruel decrees, thousands of Central American families with small children found themselves separated from one another, caged in brutal detention camps in the United States, and/or deported to Mexico via the Remain in Mexico program, which kept those claiming political asylum languishing, stateless, in Mexico as their asylum cases slowly wended their way through US courts, usually ending in rejection. As many as twenty thousand of these refugees reside in Juárez, often in poor, violent inner-city neighborhoods where, without a work permit, they attempt to eke out a hand-to-mouth existence in or around the dilapidated downtown-area hotels, bars, and restaurants.⁶ This refugee influx has emphatically impacted the local culture, contributing to the development of Cuban restaurants and adding a distinct and vibrant Caribbean cultural presence that contributes to the city’s already cosmopolitan flavor. At the same time, most of the international refugees remain desperately poor, like the majority of recent escapees from the drug-related violence of Michoacán, Zacatecas, and other Mexican states far to the south. The presence of so many thousands of refugees in Juárez only adds to the sense of desperation and to the precariousness of life that is evident in the city’s urban core.

Nevertheless, Juárez is, in fact, one of the wealthiest cities per capita in Mexico, although most of this wealth is controlled by a small number of elites such as the Zaragoza, Fuentes, and De la Vega families, while many of the major industries are controlled by American companies. Like Tijuana, Juárez is a quintessential border city in which cultural hybridity becomes its own form of authenticity (Kun and Montezemolo 2012), alongside myriad variations of Mexican national and immigrant cultures. Indeed, about 30 percent of the Juárez population was born outside Chihuahua state (IMIP 2019). But a facile comparison to Tijuana, which benefits considerably from the vast wealth of California, would be misleading, because Juárez is not nearly as trendsetting in terms of art, music, pop culture, and style. It is actually a lot more old-fashioned and isolated, and its central urban core, rather than being the hub of a vibrant cultural renaissance, remains deteriorated and depressed to a much greater extent.⁷ However, Juárez has a large state university, federal, state, and municipal government offices, first-rate hospitals, excellent galleries and museums, a dynamic business community, progressive churches, humanitarian migrant shelters, a symphony orchestra, craft breweries, fine restaurants, a toney golf course and country club, a popular pro soccer team, and countless shopping malls, centers, and stores. It also has a lively art, literary, and music scene, dozens of activist, pro-democracy, and philanthropy groups, and a hardworking population of law-abiding, ambitious, upwardly mobile people who attempt to combat the endemic poverty, inequality, and violence of the city (Staudt 2008; Staudt and Méndez 2015; Powell 2013).

However, this brighter side of Juárez, one which seemed to indicate progress in the aftermath of the horrible violence of the 2008–2012 drug war before the violence came roaring back in 2018, is not the subject of this book. Rather, our focus is on the everyday violence that has beset the city over the last thirty years and on the social milieus,⁸ people, and circumstances from which the violence emerged. To be clear, the vast majority of Juarenses are not the problem; indeed, they are part of the solution. But the focus of the book is a Juárez underworld that is quite undeniably dark.

Consequently, much of the recent academic and popular representations of Juárez emphasize the negative, violent aspects of local life.⁹ The main interpretations of the violence in Juárez are well established and are discussed in detail later in this book. There are many accounts, many of them ably told by both academics and journalists (Bowden 2010; Ainslie 2013; Fregoso and Bejarano 2010; Rodríguez 2010; Rodríguez Nieto 2015). My intent is neither to disparage nor caricature these views, as is so often done with academic colleagues and competitors, but to build on them in such a way that this ethnography may contribute to furthering their explanatory power, as appropriate, and deliver fresh insights regarding Juárez, the border, and the drug war. Nonetheless, it is my contention that many of the more popular theories explaining violence in Juárez suffer from a kind of tunnel vision, thus creating borders of the mind that limit a more holistic understanding. The most popular theories and their limitations will be discussed, as well as the synergistic alternative I propose.

NarcoLand—The Most Dangerous City in the World

Occupying about a quarter of Colombia’s third city, Aguablanca (Whitewater) consists of about 130 barrios; each barrio has two or three gangs, and all the gangs are theoretically at war with all the others. What do they fight about? They don’t fight about drugs (ecstasy and dope are popular, but the cocaine trade is an elite activity). They fight about turf (a corner, a side street); they fight about anything at all to do with disrespect (what might be called eyebrow murders); and they fight about the fight that went before (venganza operates like a series of chain letters). Yet the main fuel of the murder figures, here as elsewhere, is the fantastic plenitude of weaponry.

MARTIN AMIS, THE CRIPPLED MURDERERS OF CALI, SUNDAY TIMES (LONDON), FEBRUARY 6, 2005.

Amis dramatically evokes the essence of gang violence in Cali, Colombia, a description that also aptly applies to Ciudad Juárez, although levels of violence and weaponry are, if anything, even worse in Juárez. Between 1985 and 2010, according to one report, homicides in Juárez increased at an exponential rate (Jennings 2019). In 2010, Ciudad Juárez had the highest rate of homicides in the world (Ainslie 2013; Voeten 2018; Powell 2013; Campbell 2010). Most victims are young and male, though people of all ages and genders fall victim. The numbers of murders are chilling: 2008 (1,623), 2009 (2,754), 2010 (3,622), 2011 (2,086), 2018 (1,245), 2019 (1500), 2020 (1644).¹⁰ In fact, one of Juárez’s labels is the City of Death (Caputo 2007). Similar characterizations are made by those with only a fleeting knowledge of the city. Nevertheless, in Juárez, gangs and cartels do not just kill and peddle drugs as they do in Amis’s description of Cali; they also engage in sex trafficking, rape, kidnapping, extortion, arson, and many other violent crimes (Wolff 2018). In 2018, at the height of my fieldwork, a new wave of crime hit Juárez entailing about six murders a day. The bodies of tortured men, some dressed in women’s clothes (a gesture of symbolic emasculation and misogyny) and dumped in the public streets, were accompanied by the murder of many women and children.

Important research has recently been published on the evolution of transnational drug trafficking organizations-cum-corporations, and on the changes in the Mexican political system that affect rates of violence, as well as on emergent forms of hybrid warfare and insecurity (Correa-Cabrera 2017; Astorga 2005; Escalante Gonzalbo 2015; Voeten 2018; Kenny, Serrano, and Sotomayor 2013; Paley 2014; Durán-Martínez 2018; Shirk and Wallman 2015; Albarracín and Barnes 2020). Yet none of these approaches fully accounts for the eruption of so many different and varied forms of violence in Juárez and elsewhere. Author Charles Bowden depicted the bloody streets of Juárez in numerous colorful volumes with titles such as Murder City. Bowden’s writing is extremely vivid, poetic, and profound, and sets the bar for capturing the horror of recent events in Juárez. Yet he often dips into purple prose or over-the-top, totalistic, and apocalyptic imagery similar to that of Charlie Leduff’s exposé of Detroit in Detroit: An American Autopsy (Leduff 2014). Though convincing on a superficial level, too much of Bowden’s writing, such as his oft-quoted observations that in Juárez, a city of perhaps 1.5 million, there is no one left to kill or I learned that in this country killing is good (2010: xii) can leave one enervated and with the feeling that the city is located in one of the lower circles of hell. In times of extreme violence, and certainly to the victims or relatives of those touched by criminal violence, such depictions may seem entirely justifiable, but they are insufficient as global, general, or academic interpretations of the events in Juárez. Moreover, an exclusive focus on bloody cartel and gang massacres tends to obscure the complex mechanisms that produce the killing and reduce our vision of border life to a mere ongoing series of acts of violence, vice, and corruption. To change the existing conditions in Juárez, we must seek and find a deeper, more meaningful explanation of what is happening (Misra 2018).

The American/Mexican Militarized War on Drugs

A large literature explains the rampant violence in Mexico as a result of the failed American and Mexican governmental wars on drugs (Paley 2014; Mercille 2011; Campbell 2010; Escalante Gonzalbo 2015; Grillo 2012; Meade 2017). When wielded by conservative critics, this position sometimes ignores US complicity in the arms trade into Mexico and hypocritically blames Mexico for what is, in fact, a joint problem. However, the progressive, critical perspective on official policy, which emphasizes militarization and securitization, is undoubtedly valid because the American campaign against particular drugs has had the clear effect of criminalizing certain pleasures, punishing and stigmatizing ethnic minorities, nonconformists, and the poor, creating moral panic, establishing predatory bureaucracies (e.g., the Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA]), reinforcing US power abroad, and actually fomenting violence in the form of military and police crackdowns (Dunn 1995, 2009; Hart 2014; Alexander 2012). It is by now a truism that former Mexican president Felipe Calderón’s decision to send troops and federal police to combat drug cartels in the states of Michoacán, Tamaulipas, Chihuahua, and elsewhere contributed to the deaths of thousands, including many innocents (Grillo 2012). In Juárez, the Operativo Conjunto Chihuahua was a marked failure and is blamed by local people for creating even higher levels of violence in the city (Campbell 2012). Moreover, those killed or arrested by the Mexican military and police are almost always the poor, not the kingpins, and many of those caught in the dragnet are innocent or, at worst, petty drug dealers, not cartel members. Additionally, the Juárez Centro de Rehabilitación Social prison, better known by the acronym CERESO, is notorious as a cauldron of drug abuse and violence, as well as an incubator, a veritable college of crime (Rodríguez Nieto 2015). Military or carceral solutions to drug problems have never worked (Alexander 2012). Instead, they demonize victimless crimes as well as whole categories of the public. As such, we must continue to criticize such deleterious policies and their devastating effects. Likewise, Mexican government corruption and collusion with the illegal drug trade is evident to the point of no longer being debatable. As Escalante Gonzalbo (2015: 236) notes, the historical role of the Mexican police is to regulate illegal markets, not investigate crimes. El Paso lawyer Carlos Spector astutely refers to this set-up as authorized crime (crimen autorizado). Furthermore, the levels of impunity in Mexico are such that, as is well known, only 2 percent of all reported crimes are successfully solved and the offender prosecuted.

Yet when accepted as the sole explanation of every act of violence in a particular place or during a specific time, this blame-the-federal-government argument becomes mechanical and reductionist. People continue to be murdered in large numbers in Mexico;¹¹ deconstruction of official discourse is only one of the necessary tasks of analysts (Paley 2014). It is a starting point for empirical research, not the end of debate. Indeed, such a narrow view cannot help to penetrate the fog of circumstances and complexity that surround individual instances of violence. Nor should criticism of War on Drugs policy and its criminalizing praxis lead to a Manichean view in which those who oppose the drug war are de facto good, since the policy is by definition bad. Criminal groups such as the Sinaloa Cartel, the Zetas, the New Generation Jalisco Cartel, Los Aztecas,¹² and many others are a major and legitimate problem for Mexican society even if they originate partially as a result of governmental anti-drug policies and are enabled and sustained by ongoing government corruption. The cartels and criminal gangs are not merely a discursive construction or an exaggeration of governments, police forces, and intellectual think tanks (see, for example, Escalante Gonzalbo 2015; Zavala 2018). Furthermore, Chapo Guzmán and Amado Carrillo Fuentes are not romantic freedom fighters or the moral equivalents of Pancho Villa or Emiliano Zapata. For that matter, the hit men and petty thugs who serve in such criminal groups are nothing like the Zapatistas or Villa’s bravos del norte. In this respect, a critique of drug war policy can take us only so far in explaining street-level violence in Juárez.

US Immigration Policy

America’s xenophobic discriminatory immigration policy has had a devastating impact on generations of Mexicans, even as it has provided economic betterment for millions in the United States and billions of dollars in remittances to la patria (Slack et al. 2018; Slack 2019; De Leon 2015; Horton and Heyman 2020). The trauma inflicted on undocumented migrants by Border Patrol agents, the suffering and death often entailed in harsh desert border crossings, the many hardships of long indeterminate sentences in immigration detention camps, and the dislocations of deportation are all well documented (De Leon 2015; Slack 2019). After field research was completed for this book, El Paso/Juárez became the epicenter of a so-called migrant crisis in which tens of thousands of Central Americans, Cubans, and others who crossed or attempted to cross the border experienced mistreatment, and even death, at the hands of Mexican soldiers or criminals and even by US border security forces (King and Uribe 2019). This is the most recent chapter in the long and troubled history of US immigration policies.

Especially pertinent to the issue of long-term violence and suffering in Juárez are the ways in which US immigration policies criminalize would-be workers and channel migrants into the hands of exploitative narco-coyotes ¹³ (Slack and Campbell 2016; Slack 2019). Furthermore, by hardening the border, limiting legal immigration, and restricting economic opportunities for the rural and urban poor in Mexico, US immigration policy aggravates the economic and social tensions afflicting the most impoverished Mexicans (Rosas 2012). Crossing the border, finding wage work in the United States, and sending money back to families is no longer the effective safety valve that kept millions of working-class Mexican families afloat financially. That leaves the poor with few employment options other than underpaid agricultural or industrial labor or work in the informal economy, particularly in street-hawking and the drug business, sex trade, and various criminal rackets. This process, as Slack and Whiteford (2011: 45–49) argue, produces a kind of poststructural violence and a decision-making process in which the victims of structural violence, through the pressures and limitations of their predicament, often become victimizers, such as hit men or low-level enforcers in the drug trade (Rosas 2012). In that sense, US immigration policy has strongly contributed to drug violence in Juárez, although it certainly is not the sole cause.

Neoliberalism

The perils of neoliberalism are also frequently invoked as a one-size-fits-all explanation of Mexico’s spiraling violence (Paley 2014). Neoliberalism is a system of government and economics in which the state attempts to minimize interference in the private sector of the economy and reduce spending on social welfare programs (Carrier 2018). This idea of limited government, spurred by the Chicago School of Economics, became popular in late 1970s Britain under Margaret Thatcher and in the United States under Ronald Reagan. Such ideas spread to Latin America and elsewhere and eventually led to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, the expansion of the global factory system, and an acceleration of inequality between city and countryside as well as between social classes (Martínez 2018). On the US-Mexico border, the result of neoliberal polices such as NAFTA was a rise in foreign investment manifested in twin plant maquilas, vast movements of people from impoverished villages in the hinterlands to work in the factories of border cities, increased legal and illegal immigration into the United States, an expanded trade in all manner of goods, and the intensification of poverty among the have-nots on the fringes and in the inner cities of border metropolises. This process was especially acute in Juárez, an extreme case of the application of neoliberal political, economic, and social policies, made especially potent by Juárez’s location exactly abutting El Paso and the United States.

As with many other explanations, this one also has its limits as a stand-alone theory.¹⁴ Moreover, placing theory ahead of empirical research tends to create a circular confirmation bias of that theory and closes off other richer interpretations. Nonetheless, the rise of privatization as well as so-called free trade, along with monopolization, capitalist globalization, and the dismantling of the Mexican welfare state and social safety nets only served to accelerate immiseration and illicit activity such as cross-border drug trafficking (Herrera 2019). This has had a devastating impact on the country. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, or are entirely dispossessed, and then often enter into organized crime or become its victims. These facts are unquestionably true; clearly, neoliberalism is a primary cause of such problems and the violence connected with them in Juárez and elsewhere.¹⁵ In Juárez, neoliberal economic development has led to land speculation, uneven development, and the despoilment and social abandonment of entire neighborhoods and sections of the city and their impoverished inhabitants. Furthermore, as Carrier (2018) and the contributors to his volume have cogently argued, neoliberal economic policies, in addition to the social inequalities and dislocations they create, actually foster the commission of moral wrongs, engendering new forms of deviance and illegality of the kinds promulgated by contemporary Mexican drug cartels and gangs. By extension, this includes new forms or magnitudes of violence and greater exposure to criminal violence (Carrier 2018).

However, there is a danger of the neoliberal concept becoming merely a quick-and-dirty explanation of the situation that erases all others. Such theoretical conformism has quite a history in anthropology, as I experienced in reviewing grant proposals for PhD projects for the Mellon Foundation over the course of six years. During my tenure as a reviewer, I saw many proposals transmogrify from an obsession with Foucault—regardless of whether the proposed fieldwork was to take place in Argentina, China, or Timbuktu—to a new and almost ritualized invocation of Agamben and states of exception. The problem was not that these theorists had no relevance to the individual research topics and projects; it was that the popular theorists were asked to do too much work and to provide totalistic explanations of all manner of phenomena in ways that elided local specificity and idiosyncrasy. The same can be said for neoliberalism if treated as a catchall explanation of violence in Mexico or, for that matter, anywhere. Although neoliberal policies undoubtedly set the stage and shaped the violence in cities such as Juárez, they did not determine its every expression or define the form violence took in particular times and places. Furthermore, with the ubiquity of neoliberal policies at the national and even subnational levels, why then has the character of violence itself varied significantly between regions, even in those regions similarly situated along the US-Mexico border? In that sense, a simplistic neoliberalism did it explanation flattens the social landscape and makes particularistic ethnographic inquiry unnecessary, that is, it becomes a bloodless, prepackaged theory immune to the vagaries and contingencies of history.

For example, in Melissa Wright’s otherwise devastating critique of neoliberal capitalist gentrification and state violence as drug war in downtown Juárez, there is an assumption that violence emanates from the state and that narcos (read: terrorists) are primarily a discursive creation of an oppressive regime (Wright 2014; see also Zavala 2019). The Mexican government has definitely manipulated and distorted the facts behind many acts of violence, frequently attributing them without proof to drug cartels, and disseminated invented or unverifiable homicide, arrest, and drug seizure statistics or explanations. Moreover, the government has itself been complicit in actions of social cleansing and the abuse of the population that it has blamed on drug traffickers (Escalante Gonzalbo 2015). However, reducing the notion of narco to a mere social construction of a repressive government is more than problematic in Juárez, where drug trafficking is indeed a modus vivendi for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people. In Wright’s analysis, the victims of violence are the hard-working poor, mostly women, children, and youth, who inhabit Colonia Bellavista.¹⁶ While young males are especially vulnerable to violent crime in Juárez, what this perspective tends to pay scant attention to is that very violent criminals in the form of the mostly teenage and young adult male Azteca gang members and drug dealers/sicarios for La Línea, the Juárez Cartel, have also occupied downtown for decades and wreaked havoc on the area.¹⁷ The Aztecas, a gang that initially formed among El Pasoans and Juarenses imprisoned in the United States in the 1980s, is now the largest gang in Juárez and has subsumed many of the smaller gangs (Wolff 2018; Gundur 2019). They have also become quasi-independent of the US Aztecas, who are known as Barrio Azteca,