Borders, drugs and wars: Entrepreneurship in the face of violence and corruption

By Naomi Conrad

Dusty, violent, heaving Ciudad Juarez sprawls along the Rio Grande, the heavily guarded, natural border sepearting Mexico from its Northern Neighbour. It is one of the world’s fastest growing cities, yet it is also, outside any declared war zones, one of the world’s most violent ones.

Almost daily, Ciudad Juarez continues to make the headlines with gruesome stories of its spiralling levels of violence: abducted and beheaded journalists, murdered teenagers, death-threats against human rights defenders. Some 2,700 people died in 2009 in the border city in drug-related violence. - After his narrowly fought and won election in 2006, Mexican President Calderon declared a ‘war on drugs’ and sent the army into the dusty Mexican hinterland and northern border states long controlled by the allpowerful drug cartels. And the narco-traffickers, equipped with whatever newst state-of-the-art technology and weapons their staches of drug dollars can buy, are fighting back, ruthlessly and relentlessly.

The Mexican govenrmet is desperate to emphasise the war’s victories, and several leading cartel members have been caught or eliminated. Yet others are quick to take their place, turf wars have broken out between the cartels and the drug traffickers are targetting journalists, human rights defenders and anyone else who stands in their path. 

Despite the violence, Ciudad Juarez, a major manufacturing centre for exports to the United States, is growing rapidly. The city has an ever expanding industrial center, hundreds of foreign-owned assembly plants, or maquildoras, cluster in and around the city. In these maquiladoras Mexicans, in their majority women, many of whom are working under-age with forged documents, assemble goods and textiles on minimum wages. The finished goods are then shipped back across the border into the US, tax- and duty-free. Tens of thousands of people cross the Juarez-El Paso border every day, making Ciudad Juarez a major point of entry and transportation hub for northern Mexico.

Yet not only assembled goods for the retail business are shipped across the border. Small enterprises have mushroomed in the border region, making a living off the steady flow of US tourists in search of cheap souvenirs, petrol and other goods.

Porous, corrupt border crossings tend to spur small entrepreneurship. - A hot, noisy, bustling border crossing in Central America, endless queues of old, rusty US lorries, many painted in bright colours, pictures of the Virgin Mary taped to the windscreen next to tatooed boxers and football players, their drivers lounging in the sun, patiently waiting to be waved past. Pulling up in a friend’s sturdy, medium-sized car, a man in a shabby suit shuffled up to the two foreigners and the Central American. He offered to take our passports Senores, speed things up a bit in the scorching mid-day sun, just in case we might want to refill on petrol in the meantime or use the grimy facilities. Passports and several twenty-dollar notes were handed over; ten minutes later we pulled out past the waiting lorries and continued on our way, stamped passports securely back in our bags.

Yet in Ciudad Juarez both tiny and bigger businesses are suffering, from the explosion of violence, but also the effects of the global economic crisis. Faced with the spiralling levels of violence and increasing instability, some US companies have held off increasing their investments. The local chamber of commerce has gone as far as to demand the deployment of UN Blue Helmets to the violence-stricken city.

The increased levels of violence only add a further layer of fear to an already existing environment of extortion and kidnapping: Drug barons and cartels in Ciudad Juarez routinely demand ‘protection’ money, whoever refuses may find his buisness burnt down, visited by local gangs of thugs or a relative kidnapped. According to a Mexican journalist, businesses most affected are construction companies, bars and restaurants, the heavy presence of the federal army is of little to no avail. Many complain that police officers and soldiers are involved in the extortion.

Add to the nefarious effects triggered by the violence, that of the international economic crisis: 55 percent of the factories in Ciudad Juarez supply for the car industry, which is one of the sectors the most badly hit by the finanical crisis. Some companies have lost over fifty percent of their business with the downturn in the US and many Mexicans formerly employed in the construction industry in the US have been made redundant and have returned to the other side of the border, in search for jobs which simply do not exist.

Furthermore, with more Mexicans making their way south, less US citizens are crossing the border: Since 2008 US citizens returning from Mexico need to be in possession of a valid passport. This has depresed the flourishing trans-border tourism trade. Hundreds of small enterprises that previously made a living from the steady flow of tourists and the differences in prices across the border have been forced to close.

So mix corruption and violence to the economic downturn and decline, send in the army in a declared ‘war on drugs’, and you will end up with a dangerous, explosive social cocktail in Mexico’s dusty North.