Fleeing Juarez: 420,000 residents

Fleeing Juárez: 420,000 residents, slew of businesses seek refuge from gunfire
By Adriana Gómez Licón / El Paso Times
Posted: 02/23/2010 12:00:00 AM MST


Click photo to enlargeThe former location of the Maria Chuchena... (Jesus Alcazar / Special to the El Paso Times)«12345»›› Photo gallery: Fleeing Juarez

EL PASO -- Hundreds of thousands of people from violence-torn Juárez are abandoning their homes, closing their businesses and moving elsewhere.

Although reliable numbers are hard to come by, El Paso police and real estate agents, and Juárez demographers, detect an increase in refugees from Mexico living in El Paso.

The city of Juárez's planning department said 110,000 houses have been abandoned from 2005 to the beginning of 2009. Which means that, based on average family size, about 420,000 people, or 30 percent of the city's residents, have moved out of Juárez, either to other parts of Mexico or to the United States.

In addition to the violence, more than 75,000 people have lost their jobs since December of 2007 in Juárez, according to numbers from the Instituto Mexicano Seguro Social. Most of the jobs have been lost in the maquiladora industry.

Restaurants, hairdressing salons, clinics and bakeries have closed. About 40 percent, or 10,678 businesses, were forced to close in Juárez because of the fear of extortions and assaults for not paying fees, or "cuotas," to criminal organizations, according to the Mexican chamber of commerce.

"Let people here tell how scared we are of even answering the phone," said Julia Monarrez Fragoso, professor at the Colegio de la Frontera in Juárez,


to Mexican President Felipe Calderón during his first visit to the city Feb. 11.
Many people in Juárez want to leave the city, where more than 4,600 people have been killed since 2008. María del Socorro Velázquez Vargas, a professor at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez, UACJ, said the results of a survey conducted with 1,800 people last December showed that about 47 percent of Juárenses want to move to the United States because of the violence.

Even though brutal attacks have scared away many residents, the weak state of the maquiladora industry also has increased the migration.

"It is the first time that population will increase less than 1 percent," Velázquez Vargas said. "It's historic."

During World War II, the Bracero Program allowed farmworkers from Mexico to temporarily work in the United States. During those days, Juárez had huge growth because immigrants arrived in the area to work in the program. The population grew from 49,000 to 123,000 people.

When the program ended in the 1960s, the maquiladora industry skyrocketed and attracted Mexicans from different parts of the country. The growth in the sector continued throughout the 1990s. It peaked after 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement was implemented.

Just like the automotive industry, maquiladoras began to face competition from low-cost offshore plants in Central America and Asia. Many have shut down or laid off workers since 2000.

Maquiladoras offered jobs to 250,000 workers in Juárez at the beginning of 2008. The number dropped to 176,700 as 2009 concluded.

"It's always recurrent that every time there is a recession in the United States, we feel the impact," Velázquez Vargas said.

The growth from 2000 to 2008 was slow compared to the decades after 1940. The Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, the counterpart of the U.S. Census, reported 1.2 million living in Juárez in 2000, and 1.3 million in 2005. Estimates by UACJ demographers calculated that Juárez grew by 55,000 people in 2008, mostly led by births.

The natural growth, which is the difference between the number of people who are born and die, is still what drives population growth in El Paso's sister city. More couples are giving birth than the number of people who die.

On the other side of the border, El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen said that, in the past two years, 30,000 people have moved to El Paso after fleeing Juárez. The county's population is about 750,000.

Allen was attempting to justify the purchase of 1,100 M4 rifles by saying his department needed to be ready for a possible spillover of violence from Juárez. He said he arrived at the 30,000 figure through comments he heard at intelligence brief-ings.

Sergio Ramirez, a real estate agent in El Paso, deals with clients who have come to Juárez in the past few years. He said most Mexicans fleeing Juárez are looking for rental homes and apartments.

"They are all renting because they cannot afford the expenses," he said. "For every 50 (people) who are renting, two or three are buying."

Century 21 APD reports the latest rental vacancy rate at 2 percent. The U.S. Census Bureau said the rate was 9.2 percent in 2008, and 10.5 in 2007.

Meanwhile, some southwest neighborhoods in Juárez are virtually deserted.

"That is a problem that is going off like a red light ... These are a lot of homes," Velázquez Vargas said.

Adriana Gómez Licón may be reached at agomez@elpasotimes.com; 546-6129.