Can makeover help Ciudad Juárez mend?
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — A brightly painted mural, colorful park benches and a new cultural center anchor one side of a rehabilitated downtown square that was once a notorious red-light district. Abandoned buildings and empty lots flank the other.
The government of former Mayor Enrique Serrano made lots of promises to recover the city’s nightlife and tourism, and this downtown square offers a metaphor for the administration’s successes and its limitations after three years.
On a late September afternoon, artist Elel Parra and his team were putting the finishing touches on a four-block mural featuring classic elements of Mexican culture — the lucha libre wrestler Blue Demon, the beloved comic actor known as Tin-Tan and calavera skeleton characters. The city hired Parra’s collective, Taller 8, to imagine and paint the concept.
A new cultural center dedicated to Tin-Tan on one side of the square is slated to open this fall. A large
gazebo rises in the square’s center. Dozens of amateur local artists painted the park benches. Smiling clown faces top the trash cans — all efforts to make the district into a family-friendly space.
Ciudad Juárez has struggled to shake its violent image since the cartel wars abated. After three years of relative calm, and many cosmetic and some structural changes, the city has turned a corner. But longtime observers of the city’s crime trends also warn that homicides are on the rise.
The city pulled off the visit of Pope Francis without incident back in February — and the good publicity reverberated locally and in the U.S.
Restaurants and nightclubs throughout the city are bustling. Locals from both sides of the border packed an October fair at the Plaza X explanada near the border and downtown’s new pedestrian avenue and whitewashed “Strip” of bars, pharmacies and small stores draw crowds each weekend.
The city government invested about 120 million pesos, or $6.4 million, over the past six years to make over downtown, according to José Eleno Villalva Salas, the city’s former secretary of urban development.
Recently, just before the new mayoral administration took over, Villalva Salas was tying up loose ends inside the Tin-Tan cultural center.
Saying that he doesn’t plan to serve under new Mayor Armando Cabada Alvídrez, Villalva Salas reflected on what he views as his accomplishments downtown: the decision to paint white all the storefronts on the Strip, make the city’s 16th of September thoroughfare a pedestrian zone, pepper downtown with new sculptures and sponsor the rehabilitation of the Mariscal red-light district. Also: lots more lighting and police presence.
“When I walk around, I see an impressive number of American citizens, both Anglos and Hispanics,” he said. “They don’t just come from El Paso, Las Cruces and Deming, but also from the interior of the country.”
“We increased security,” he said. “We increased cleanup in the urban zone.”
But the shadow of the city’s dark years of drug violence hasn’t entirely disappeared, and the far side of the newly rehabilitated square still bears the scars.
Villalva Salas said he ordered several buildings to be boarded up after he discovered a man had been stabbed to death in an empty building on one corner and, soon after, a woman was found strangled to death on the second floor.
El Diario reported this month that homicides have risen to levels not seen since 2013, when the city of 1.3 million people registered 50 to 60 murders each month. There have been 52 murders in the first 17 days of October, the newspaper said, quoting a state prosecutor who blamed the rise on growing methamphetamine consumption.
That brings total homicides so far this year to 408, according to New Mexico State University librarian Molly Molloy, who has catalogued violence in Ciudad Juárez for many years.
The spate of bad news hasn’t deterred Parra, the mural artist.
“I think that opening spaces, especially touristic spaces, begins to give the city a new face,” Parra said. “It also grows the idea that art can sensitize, it can connect people.”