By early Sunday, 11 more residents of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, had been slain in a 20-hour period, including the sixth police officer killed this year in growing drug cartel violence. More than 65 police officers have been murdered in the border city of 1.4 million in the past year. Too often, U.S. and Mexican media have been AWOL from coverage.
As if by accident, I learned today that even the Juarez Mayor is living not in Mexico, but across the fence here in the United States and commuting to his office in Chihuahua State.
I hadn't intended in doing a follow up to my Juarez narco crime spree story of three days ago, since the killings, mutilated bodies, taunting death notes, and random street crime is not only ignored on the USA side of the border for the most part, but since my syndicated outrage here and my personal blog garnered a grand total of one reader response.
After reading a litany of new crimes, police helicopter assaults, city hall epithets, and carjackings in the local Spanish-language daily El Diario, and relating the stories - all buried inside the hefty Saturday edition (in contrast to dwindling U.S. dailies) - my wife egged me on. She said, "You have to tell it again. Maybe something written by an outsider to this area for whom these events are still shocking, will shake some sense into some authorities, somewhere." Since she was a darned good police reporter and feature writer in her day, I'll try again.
The overall decline in traditional journalistic coverage of Juarez events makes me wonder if the entire city, or the entire "Borderland" region is locked up by chamber of commerce interests. It's as if when you don't report it, it never happened.
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