Cd. juarez

Ciudad Juárez, also known as just Juárez and formerly known as Paso del Norte, is a city and seat of the municipality of Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Juárez has an estimated populationof 1.5 million people.[1] It stands on the Rio Grande (Río Bravo del Norte), across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas. El Paso and Ciudad Juárez comprise one of the largest binational metropolitanareas in the world with a combined population of 2.5 million people. In fact, Ciudad Juárez is one of the fastest growing cities in the world. For instance, a few years ago, the Federal Reserve Bank ofDallas published that in Ciudad Juárez “the average annual growth over the 10-year period 1990-2000 was 5.3 percent. Juárez experienced much higher population growth than the state of Chihuahua andthan Mexico as a whole.”[2]
More than 60,000 people[citation needed] cross the Juárez-El Paso border every day, which makes it a major point of entry and transportation for all of central northernMexico. The city has a growing industrial center which is made up in large part by the more than 300 maquiladoras (assembly plants) located in and around the city. According to a 2007 The New York Timesarticle, Ciudad Juárez “is now absorbing more new industrial real estate space than any other North American city.”[1] In 2008, Ciudad Juárez was designated as “The City of the Future” by theprestigious magazine “Foreign Direct Investment” published by the influential “Financial Times group.”[3]. However, the city is also a site of widespread poverty and violence, including an infamous series ofunsolved murders of female factory workers. The violence generated by the war of the drug cartels for control of drug routes translated into some 6,000 killings in 2008. More than 1,600 of themoccurred in Juarez, three times more than the most murderous city in the United States. As of July 14, 2009, the body count in Juarez surpassed 1000, which is an acceleration over the year 2008. This mark...