Juarez Safe Corridors Aren't

Ciudad Juarez

Las Cruces Sun-News JUAREZ - A highly touted project to bring a little peace back to this violence-wracked border city with "safe corridors" along main streets has largely collapsed with a change in policing, residents and officials said. Crime initially plummeted along the two boulevards in Ciudad Juarez after federal troops began intensive patrols there in February 2010 as part of the "We are All Juarez" program, aimed at improving living conditions in what has become one of the world's most murderous cities. But federal police handed the duty off to state police, which in November turned the job over to the city. Residents say patrols have almost vanished. Shootouts, killings and kidnappings have returned. "Crime is up fivefold in those zones," said Gustavo de la Rosa, head of the Ciudad Juarez office of Mexico's National Commission on Human Rights, on Saturday. "We are, for the moment, abandoned." The "safe corridor" designation - along the boulevards Gomez Morin and Tomas Fernandez - was meant to revive business in these important commercial zones lined with local businesses, nightclubs and chains including Starbucks and Chili's. On Friday, a professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University was briefly kidnapped along one of the corridors, Gomez Morin, and was forced to withdraw money from automatic teller machines. A man was shot do death in his car the same day. Witnesses told local reporters police were slow to appear. Read full story here: News New Mexico

Juarez Safe Corridors Aren't