Juárez streets teemed with people carrying on with life — fearful or not — as the pressure to resume work or school outweighed worries about a resurgence of brutal violence in the border city.
Bank customers lined up Monday on payday to retrieve their quincena. Factory workers left their first-shift jobs in droves at 3 p.m. to board old school buses to their neighborhoods. Major streets were packed with traffic, with street performers at their usual corners hawking entertainment for a few coins. College students returned to classes after school went virtual over the weekend in response to a series of arsons and homicides last Thursday that left 11 people dead and sowed chaos in the city.
If things seemed fine on the surface, they weren’t. The generalized violence that some here called “narcoterrorism” called up memories of a bloody drug war a decade ago. Last week's violence forced businesses to close and damaged a nascent campaign to welcome tourism back to the city, an important cultural connection between El Paso and Juárez.
“No one is going to forget this,” said Juan Acereto, a former Mexican diplomat who serves as liaison to the U.S. for the Juárez municipal government. “You can see it in social media: ‘Don’t go to Juárez. There are problems.’"
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An organization representing business interests in Juárez, CANACINTRA, said economic activity plummeted by half over the weekend.
“What we saw Friday, Saturday and Sunday after Thursday’s attacks wasn’t a calm city but one in a state of terror in which economic activity was partially paralyzed,” the association said in an open letter to local, state and federal government officials. “We demand strategies that will guarantee security enough to keep our businesses open.”
A restaurant owner in Juárez shuttered his locale early Thursday, on a street popular for its nightlife. As news rolled in of one after another seemingly random attacks on people and businesses, and panicked family members began texting him, he instructed his staff to print clients' checks and request they clear out — a drastic decision, he said.
“When we started to see the disorder in the city, we decided to close at 8 p.m.,” said the owner, who requested anonymity for security reasons. “It wasn’t violence. It was acts of narcoterrorism.”
He and other bar and restaurant owners in the area came to a mutual decision, in conversation with one another: They wouldn't open at all on Friday and would close down early on Saturday. In any case, few people were out after dark.
"The night comes here in Ciudad Juárez," he said, y no se puede fiar. "You can't trust it."
Attorney General Roberto Fierro Duarte said in a statement over the weekend that his office was working "without interruption" to investigate Thursday's violence. But of six people detained by state authorities Thursday in connection with the violence, none faced homicide charges, according to the state prosecutor's office.
Two people were killed Aug. 11 inside a state prison known as CERESO No. 3 after fighting broke out between rival gangs. In the street attacks that followed, nine people were killed, including a 13-year-old child. Convenience stores and buses were burned, and four employees of Mega Radio's Switch 105.9 FM were gunned down, including radio host Allan Gonzalez.
Gonzalez hosted an afternoon radio show and played 80s and 90s music, always with the tagline "para los chavorucos como tú" — a phrase without an easy translation directed at older listeners with a taste for those decades of pop and rock.
On Saturday, the radio station played recordings of him offering ticket giveaways to a Chavorucos show in El Paso at the County Coliseum that was canceled after the murders. Gonzalez and the other employees were killed during the tickets giveaway at a Little Caesar's pizza on busy Ejército Nacional avenue.
There have been 591 homicides in Juárez in 2022, according to a count published by FICOSEC, a Chihuahua business association focused on matters of public security, citing figures from the attorney general's office. Sometimes there are multiple homicides per day, including horrendous murders with the mark of drug-related retribution; yet it was the seemingly random chaos of Thursday's violence that left many Juarenses in shock and panic.
The Mexican government said it would send as many as 600 soldiers to Juárez. On Friday, the newspaper El Diario reported 300 soldiers would arrive at midday, and local reporters confirmed soldiers disembarked at the airport. But by Monday, there was no sign of troops patrolling the city's streets.
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Acereto, the U.S. liaison, said the city lives through "curves of normalcy."
“A crisis happens," he said. "The authorities combat the crisis, and people start walking again in the streets. Time passes, and then another disastrous event happens.”
He and others in the municipal government and Mexican Consulate in El Paso had been working together for months to reignite the tourism sector in Juárez when Thursday's violence forced the cancelation of cultural projects meant to draw visitors to the beleaguered city.
"Events like what happened on Thursday destroy us," he said. "They make us go backwards in all the good work we've done. It's horrendous."
Students at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez returned to classes Monday, backpacks slung over their shoulders. On the street outside the campus near the border, Nirob Hernández put up an umbrella to block the sun over his small stand. He was selling Italian-style pepperoni calzones to hungry college students.
Hernández, 21, can't remember a time when his hometown wasn't plagued by drug violence. He is a U.S. citizen but hasn't saved up the money he needs yet to attend community college in El Paso, his dream.
"I'm not saying it's normal, but many people have normalized the violence," he said. "Anyway, I have to work and the world can't stop."
