Analysis of the First One Hundred Days of Todos Somos Juárez

From Jorge Buendía Hegewisch:

Although the local business class were the ones who demanded the presence of the army since 2007, the operation has been carried out without clearly defining the command, without a precise strategy, and without knowing who was being confronted. With poorly prepared public forces police agencies infiltrated by drug traffickers.

The lack of coordination between the police and military commands has further devolved into a state of distrust between both groups that look at the other with the suspicion that they could be working with organized crime.

But one of the foremost criticisms is that the inclusion of social policy in the strategy against criminality arrived late in Juárez, when the murder rate, for example, was already more than 750 percent greater than the national average. For years this border city was abandoned by municipal, state, and federal governments, despite the rapid growth that it experienced in recent decades. The wealth did not translate into the construction of schools or parks and large swaths of the city aren't even paved. If the rapid economic growth was a detonator of violence for the enormous migration that it attracted, now the economic depression and unemployment are a factor that adds to the decomposition of the social fabric and the security crisis caused by the confrontation of drug cartels for control of the city.

The bolded part goes with what I was saying yesterday about the incapacity of local governments to effectively administer to their cities, which is most clearly manifested in reliance on the federal government for local spending. In terms of the long-term sort of planning that was needed in Juárez and other border towns with the onset of the maquiladora economic model, this inability is compounded by the prohibition on reelection.