This weekend marks the first anniversary of the massacre of 15 young students in the neighborhood of Villas de Salvarcar.
The night of Jan. 30, a group of armed men burst into a private party shooting at the attendants, most of them middle and high school students.
The massacre was widely covered by the national and international press and prompted the federal government to take actions against the increasing violence in Ciudad Juárez.
Twelve days after the killings, president Felipe Calderón visited Juárez and held several meetings with political leaders, businessmen and civil organizations, among others. A plan aimed to restore Cd. Juarez’s social fabric and to reduce the criminality was born as a result of those meetings. It was called “Todos Somos Juárez”.
The strategy included 160 actions aimed to attack structural problems in the areas of housing, education, employment opportunities, health, culture and recreation, to mention a few.
Some of the concrete actions were the rehabilitation of public spaces such as parks, community centers, and soccer fields as well as the construction and rehabilitation of schools. The total budget for the 160 actions was $282.1 million.
According to the Todos Somos Juárez’s webpage, 82 of those actions have been completed as October 2010, when the last revision of the plan was posted. With a dozen of exceptions, the majority of the rest of the commitments had a completion dateline for December 2010.
It would means that, at least in paper, Cd. Juárez is in the track of restoring its social fabric: Children are getting economic support to stay at school, adults are getting training for new jobs, most people are getting access to health care, public spaces are getting safe, there is continuing patrolling and more opportunities for housing and education.
Some of the actions are visible and easy to measure, but what it is difficult to evaluate is how these actions have helped to restore the social fabric. Ironically, just last Sunday seven people, among them a minor– were killed in one of the new soccer fields, and according with figures of the local press, between Friday and Monday 40 people were killed in the city.
It would be naïve to think that the social fabric of a city so deteriorated by years of negligence could be restored in one year, but it is discouraging to see that nothing, absolutely nothing seems to stop Juarez’s painful agony.
A year has passed since the tragedy of Villas de Salvarcar, but massacres in Juárez are becoming just part of the statistics of the violence. They are not prompting the government to do anything additional. They have become “normal” in a society devoured by crime.
Most likely the government –at the state and federal level– truly believe they have enough plans to recover peace in Juarez; probably they really think their plans are giving results. Most likely in their world –where the violence is just statistics and not vivid human dramas– there are significant advances in the fight against organized crime.
But that is their world. In the streets and neighborhoods of Ciudad Juárez, the reality speaks by itself.
Comments