CIUDAD JUAREZ MAKES NEW ORLEANS LOOK LIKE A BOY SCOUT CAMP

And we think that the murder rates in New Orleans, Chicago, Baltimore. St. Louis, Houston and other American cities are high.
　
OCTOBER WAS YEAR’S BLOODIEST MONTH IN CIUDAD JUAREZ
By Beat Reporter Buggs
　
Borderland Beat
November 2, 2010
　
A total of 350 murders were registered in Ciudad Juarez last month, making October the bloodiest month of the year in the Mexican border city, prosecutors said.

There were 227 homicides in January, 163 in February, 240 in March, 203 in April, 262 in May, 313 in June, 291 in July, 338 in August, 289 in September and 350 in October in the border city, the Chihuahua state Attorney General’s Office said.

A total of 10 homicides were reported on the last day of October in Ciudad Juarez, a gritty border metropolis that has become Mexico’s murder capital.

Six people were murdered across Juarez in the early hours of Sunday, while two men were gunned down in the afternoon on the front porch of a house.

A man was shot and tossed out of a moving vehicle an hour later, while a 25-year-old man was shot dead later in the day.

Police found a bullet-riddled body in another part of Ciudad Juarez, located across the border from El Paso, Texas, while a person was murdered on the east side of the city on Sunday night.

A total of 2,666 murders, according to a press tally compiled using Chihuahua AG’s office figures, have been committed in Ciudad Juarez this year.

The Juarez and Sinaloa cartels, backed by hitmen from local street gangs, have been fighting for control of the border city.

Ciudad Juarez, where more than 6,000 people have been murdered since 2008, has been plagued by drug-related violence for years.

The murder rate took off in the border city of 1.5 million people in 2007, when 310 people were killed, then it more than tripled to 1,607 in 2008, according to state Attorney General’s office figures, with the number of killings climbing to 2,754 last year.

Juarez first gained notoriety in the early 1990s when young women began to disappear in the area.

More than 500 women have been killed in Juarez since 1993, with the majority of the cases going unsolved.

Ciudad Juarez, with 191 homicides per 100,000 residents, was the most violent city in the world in 2009, registering a higher murder rate than San Pedro Sula, San Salvador, Caracas and Guatemala, two Mexican non-governmental organizations said in a report released earlier this year.

Some 28,000 people have died in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon declared war on Mexico’s cartels shortly after taking office in December 2006.

More than 7,000 gangland killings have occurred so far this year in Mexico, Attorney General Arturo Chavez Chavez said last month.

The death toll for all of 2009 was 7,724.