Towards an understanding of community organization against crime: The case of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico

C 2013 Towards an understanding of community organization stability Vilalta, against crime: The case of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Stability, 2(1): 5, pp. 1-15, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/sta.ao Article Towards an understanding of community organization against crime: The case of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico Carlos J. Vilalta* Ciudad Juarez1 is the second largest Mexican border city and one of most violent cities worldwide. Over the past five years, it has suffered from a dramatic wave of homicidal violence related to organized crime. Residents have reacted in different ways to such violence: some have migrated whereas others have decided to stay and organize against it. This is an empirical study of community organization for crime prevention. This study found some of the factors that facilitate and impede community organization against crime. The results constitute a first step in the empirical study of community organization for crime prevention in Mexico. Introduction According to recent results of the National Victimization and Public Security Perception Survey of 2011, many urban dwellers in Mexico show a genuine interest in organizing against crime. Likewise, Mexican media give wide coverage to often thrilling political speeches in favour of citizen participation against violence. As such, from a policy-oriented point of view, one basic research question would be the following: what makes people, in many cases unknown to each other, collaborate with each other in the implementation of crime prevention solutions? In this study I tried to answer this question by examining the correlates of community organization for crime prevention. This study focuses on Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, for two reasons. One is that in contrast * Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) to other cities in Mexico, Ciudad Juarez has suffered tremendously from extreme levels of criminal violence in the last six years. Most of this violence is related to organized crime. Another reason is that in comparison to other Mexican cities, community organization against crime in Ciudad Juarez has been very active2 and federal government support has been strong as well.3 In this sense, the choice of Ciudad Juarez can help us to better understand the effects of extreme violence on community organization. This study followed several steps. The reader will first find a brief description of Ciudad Juarez. Afterwards, a (very) preliminary and descriptive model for community organization in crime prevention is proposed. After that, I analyzed what was being done in 2010 in terms of crime prevention nationwide and in Ciudad Juarez particularly. Here I followed a comparative approach searching for probabilistic differences. The aim here was to get a detailed breakdown of what people were actually Art. 5, page 2 of 15 Vilalta: Towards an understanding of community organization against crime doing to protect themselves from crime. Then I closely examined what citizens were doing with regards to collective crime prevention. Finally, I tested the model of community organization. As a result, a profile of the civic collaborator for crime prevention was detected. One note of caution must be made in this introduction: one undesirable side effect of Juarez´s extremely violent nature is that many distractions often arise in its study. Here I have tried to avoid two of the typical mistakes that hold up the development of community solutions to violent crime, namely:4 a. b. The why-o-why distraction, that is engaging in nonstop discussions about why criminals are violent towards their victims. The who-is-who distraction, that is spending way too much time discussing which drug dealer, drug lord or which drug cartel is responsible for most of the violence. Of course the previous issues are necessary for crime investigation purposes. But these are not the most important for crime prevention. From a policy perspective, this study investigated the correlates of community organization in a practical attempt to influence the likelihood of future policy debates and actions. 1. Case study: Ciudad Juarez Ciudad Juarez was founded in 1659 under the name of Misión de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de Mansos del Paso del Río del Norte in what is today the city of El Paso, Texas, United States. It is located within the Mexican state of Chihuahua now in the northern international border with El Paso, Texas. In the 2010 census it had a population of about 1.3 million. It is the second most populated border city after Tijuana in Baja California and the eighth most populated metropolitan area in the country. Together with El Paso, Texas, the total number of inhabitants in the region amounts to near 2.5 million. The city is in the desertic climate zone and has a very hot season ranging from April to October with quite cold winters in the months of January and February. Precipitation is low. With a high population density and desertic dry climate, the city has to tap groundwater for its domestic and industrial use. As most Mexican border cities with the United States (US), Ciudad Juarez has somewhat of a ‘social dichotomy’ character. It is a city of rich entrepreneurs and poor workers. It is an industrial city with high productivity levels, yet workers´ salaries are low. It has a large manufacturing base, particularly of maquiladoras. This is the name given to factories that make products solely for foreign markets, yet do not pay for the import of the raw materials. These factories tend to hire unskilled workers with low wages. Homicidal violence exploded in 2008 (Figure 1) when the Mexican military entered the city in order to control the rising level of drug cartel confrontation. Ciudad Juarez became one of the most hotly disputed cities between drug cartels. This wave of homicidal violence is not a random event or merely the effect of social disruption, but it derived also from the decision of the Cartel de Sinaloa (i.e. El Chapo Guzman) to take control of the city over the Cartel de Juarez. This strategic move was not only made for the purpose of trafficking drugs into the US, but for the control of a growing local market for marihuana and cocaine (Vilalta and Muggah 2012). 2. A preliminary theoretical framework of community organization for the provision of collective security To protect from crime, individuals have the choice to organize in community, rely on individual solutions, or try a combination of both. Collective security is any crime solution provided for an open or closed society beyond the individual. Put another way, collective security can be provided in two ways: officially (open) or unofficially (closed). Official collective security (OCS) can be any means or solution against crime provided Vilalta: Towards an understanding of community organization against crime Art. 5, page 3 of 15 Figure 1: Total number of homicides in Ciudad Juarez, 1996–2010. Source: Author´s reconstruction based on INEGI data (...truncated)