The streets of Juárez abound with life again.
The “Cartel War” is over.
The war for justice and integrity in government, the war to develop a country that doesn’t need a drug transporting business as it’s second most important economy (after petroleum), is not over and won’t be for the foreseeable future.
On the streets of Juárez, there is a strange mix: Old people who couldn’t get out, the poor that couldn’t get out, the young that didn’t know there was anywhere to go to and babies!
There are a lot of babies in their teenage parents’ arms these days. In the streets in from of the Mercado Reforma there is this strange blend of young parents weighing babies in their arms, interspersed with the very old, interspersed with prostitutes, interspersed with an economy that is not longer threatened by the incursion of “the franchises.” Franchises bailed out of Juárez years ago, when the war began, in 2011.
This isn’t the Juárez of the glamour 1950s or the boom boom 1960s and their international factories, or of the up and down 1970s and 1980s with the rise of the licenciado middle class, nor of the “we are almost first world” Juárez of the 1990s and beyond.
This is a Juárez of who has been left behind.
This is the new Juárez and it is young, it is robust and it has no history other than recent memories of 2795 murders a year and of being locked away after darkness fell.
Explains where all the babies came from?
And of an economy that reverted to street level entrepreneur capitalism.
This is a Juárez that is starting again.
This is a Juárez I am happy to be working in again.
In the 2010-2012 era my main job was to chase murders.
Apparently, my new job is to chase babies.
It doesn’t take a Tarot card reader to tell me things are getting better.
