I'd be interested to see a sociological study on why people keep joining gangs in Juárez. Let's say that 4 percent of the Juárez are members of or regularly do illegal business with criminal gangs, and that 90 percent of the murdered come from that population. That means that we are talking about 2,500 dead from a population of about 60,000. Which means that if you run around with gangs for three years, you have a better than 10 percent chance of being killed. And those odds are only on their way up thus far in 2010.
(Four percent is, of course, a rough estimate, and the extent to which I'm off determines how valid the point I'm making is. I'm not sure how I arrived at 4 percent, but for comparison, the LAPD homepage says that the city has roughly 41,000 gang members of a population of 3.8 million, which is a rate of just over 1 percent.)
So what do the kids who join the gangs get out of it? I always figure that most adolescent boys who join gangs are looking for a combination of belonging and power and easy money, and suffering lack of alternative ways to spend their time, and that whatever added danger exists is a price they are willing to pay, in large part because the danger of dying is so remote. But in Juárez, the danger isn't so remote, but more and more like a game of Russian roulette.
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The population estimates seem to be based on the permanent residents, while your guess is as good as mine as to Juarez' actual population on any given day. While there is a stable community, it's also -- literally -- a frontier town with a huge floating population of generally young adults without family connections. I've always thought maybe Juarez might be thought of as a 21st century version of Deadwood or other wild-west communities, making it hard to get a handle on what is "normal" as far as things like crime rates and actuarial tables.
The population estimates seem to be based on the permanent residents, while your guess is as good as mine as to Juarez' actual population on any given day.
Yeah that inflation is another problem to the figures, both in terms of the overall population and the criminal population. Nonetheless, a study of what is motivating kids who join gangs there and what appreciation they have for their likelihood of being killed would be worth a read.
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