Execution-style deaths, shootings surge in Juarez

EL PASO — Juárez saw a surge in homicides last month, a spike experts say may be due to turnover in the government and the breakup of major crime organizations that followed the arrest of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

The homicide count reached 51 in July — a number not seen since May 2014 — after an average of 30 a month this year. August had already topped 36, according to unofficial numbers from authorities.

Most of the killings have been execution-style deaths and drive-by shootings. Killings happened in front of the Mexican federal court house, in the parking lot of a popular restaurant and near an international bridge.

Anthropologist Howard Campbell, a national security expert at the University of Texas at El Paso and author of the book, “Drug War Zone,” said it’s too early to consider the spike of murders as an emergence of another bloody drug war in Juárez. The turf war between the Sinaloa and Juárez drug cartels left a toll of more than 10,000 deaths between 2008 and 2012.

“It is clear that with the change of government, there also comes a struggle for control among criminal rackets, especially in Juárez and Chihuahua City,” he said.

The PRI, Mexico’s ruling party, was booted of power in the Juárez and Chihuahua state governments dur- ing elections in June. Juárez elected an independent mayor who will take office in October, while Chihuahua state elected PAN-party affiliated governor.

Mexican authorities have attributed the increase in killings to disputes over small-scale drug dealing of crystal methamphetamine.

Last week alone, the Juárez police seized 9.5 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine, valued at $100,000. The drug was hidden inside an empty steel cylinder of butane gas in an abandoned house in southeast Juárez.

“There is a strong link that a vast majority of them had to do with drug trafficking,” said Chihuahua state prosecutor in Juárez Enrique Villarreal in an interview late July.