By The Editors, RealClearInvestigations
May 13, 2018
Investigative Classics is a weekly feature on noteworthy past examples of the reporting craft.
Immigrants still slip across America’s border illegally, seeking economic opportunity they can’t find at home.
But many people, especially from Central America, claim that they are coming here in pursuit of protection from the violence ravaging their homelands.
Michelle Garcia addressed this issue with a surprising twist in her 2013 article for Al Jazeera America about Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, the border town known as the “murder capital of the world.”
She told this story of human degradation through the experience of man’s best friend:
In better times – and there were better times in Ciudad Juárez – even the mangiest street dog could count on kindness for its survival. Unwashed and unkempt, the streets were his home, the neighborhood his master. Scraps, the stray bone, a bowl of water – he got by.
Imagine, then, the upheaval that upended this imperfect but functioning system when a manageable 20,000 street dogs morphed into a teeming population of 200,000 mutts, German Shepherds, Labs, and the favored dog of city dwellers for years – the Poodle.
The bond between man and his best friend was corrupted. One man nailed a dog to his fence. A gang of 10 children lassoed a cat, hurling it up onto the street cables high above, leaving it to dangle there.
On the surface, this breakdown in the relationship between man and beast could be attributed to the brutal violence that tore at the social fabric in Ciudad Juárez between 2008 and 2011.
Often described in overly simplistic terms as a "drug war" among "drug cartels," the disaster that erupted in this city resulted in the deaths of an estimated 10,000 people, 100,000 abandoned houses and 2,000 businesses shuttered or destroyed in fires—within four years. But no single occurrence in this border city across from El Paso explains the roughly 700 dogs found dead on city streets every month, victims of hunger, car tires or execution.
Dogs had always served two purposes for the people of Juarez. They were beloved family pets that “symbolized home and humanity for the families.” But they also provided some protection against the inhumanity of others in a city “where violence raged on their doorstep.”
Then, a series of developments upended that uneasy peace. The drug wars were a big part of the growing problem, made all the worse by the Great Recession in the United States and growing competition from China which took away many factory jobs.
“Before long,” Garcia reported, “nearly a quarter of the population — some 250,000 people — had fled. Houses emptied out seemingly overnight; entire blocks lay quiet. Meanwhile, every six months, the dogs produced a new brood, a new gang, and the dog population reached crisis levels.”
She then traces the decline of the city by chronicling the collapsing fate of dogs:
The entire world of dog maintenance began to collapse, pulled down by the destruction of the people in Ciudad Juárez. Pet adoptions dropped to zero. Sterilization campaigns ended after mobile clinics came under attack. Dr. Martínez remembers the time a group of men arrived at a mobile clinic, and shot their victim in front of other people and pets.
Veterinarians across the city became targets of kidnappings and extortions. After one clinic refused to hand over a payment to a criminal group, says Montelongo Ponce, armed men began firing and drenched the building — still filled with people and animals — with gasoline. Fortunately, for some inexplicable reason, the building did not ignite.
Volunteers and government workers persisted in their efforts to rein in the dogs. In a city where everyone was suspect, dog catchers arrived in neighborhoods where shootouts occurred, where tanks rolled through and whatever authority existed was viewed suspiciously. Martínez says every member of his team has encountered a pistol or knife while in pursuit of homeless animals.
It was in these years of upheaval, animal advocates say, that cases of abuse and mutilation began to appear.
